Will Wright on toys that make worlds

Via Second Life Conceptual I found yet another interesting TED talk, this time by Will Wright, creator of the Sims, talking about his new game Spore where you control everything from single celled organisms up to whole universes.

Early on in the talk he refers to the creativity that The Sims inspires in its players - a quote that could just as easily be applied to Second Life:

One of the things we noticed with the Sims, which is the game I did earlier, is that players love making stuff. When they were able to make stuff in the game they had a tremendous amount of empathy and connection to it. Even if it wasn't as pretty as what other people would make, as professional artists would make for games, it really stuck with them and they really cared about what happened to it.