Spore

If you enjoyed constructing urban utopias in SimCity, or elaborate familial soap operas with the Sims, then you'll love Spore, since it gives you creative control over the entire universe. Steven Johnson talks to Will Wright:

As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80's like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough "DNA points" or "evolutionary credits," you acquire the use of a feature called the "creature editor," and things start to get really interesting. You assemble a new life form to represent yourself using an almost comically intuitive tool. If you have the technical chops to assemble a Mr. Potato Head, you can build a creature in Spore. You start with a basic body type wrapped around a standard skeleton, and then you can pretty much do whatever you want to it: stretch it out, condense it, add seven asymmetrical legs and one pincer, give it eyes on both sides of its head or wrap a polka-dot skin texture around it.

Can this computer game teach kids basic facts about biology, like natural selection? After all, I learned most of what I know about economics from Railroad Tycoon, that Sid Meier masterpiece:

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. "I thought the same thing," he said. "If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry -- you can piggyback everything on it.

"But my wife made a good point when I was talking about this the other day. She says it's important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you're set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren't entertaining. So I think I'd have three days of Spore and two days of obligatory Latin."