I don't right about video games much; I don't think I have ever, actually. And I don't really play them all that much, since I find most modern games boring. There's only so many variations on Wolfenstein-3D you can play before you realize that Id pretty much sucked the FPS genre dry by the mid-90s.

Anyway, so I was pretty excited by this video of Will Wright (creator of SimCity and The Sims) presenting a game called "Spore" at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. He's managed to fold together many different games into a single one - SimCity, the Sims, Civilization, Pac-man, Space Invaders, etc. But what's really neat is the introduction of what he calls "procedural" elements. E.g., much of the game involves designing creatures. In an editor you may fiddle around with creature design, add body parts, reshape skeletal structure, etc. The behavior of your creature is then computed by the game itself - that is, if you build a creature with five legs, the game will figure out how a five-legged creature will walk and build on that. This makes the game incredibly fluid in terms of what you can create - and in fact in the game is populated by creatures taken from a player-created database (it's asynchronous, not massively multiplayer, though - you just download other people's creations and the game animates and controls them), meaning that an intricate world grows out of your own (and other's) creativity and interaction with the game itself, not from armies of unimaginative animators.

Pretty cool. If you're not up for watching a 35-minute video, this Gamespy article has a good summary.