He had pulled up the highest level of Spore - where the player gets to create and colonize a new planet - to demonstrate the way in which the game simulates the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs. He was trying to explain how some players will be able to create entire galaxies populated by artificial life forms when the game is introduced sometime late next year. For the first few minutes of our meeting, Wright was having trouble with the atmosphere of the game, which is called Spore. When I visited with Wright recently, he was sitting in a greenhouselike office on the roof of an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif., a few miles west of Oakland, where his studio is based. The designer of the game happens to be both the most famous and most critically acclaimed designer in the young medium’s history: Will Wright, the 46-year-old creator of the blockbuster hits SimCity and the Sims. But a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences, starting with Charles and Ray Eames's proto-long-zoom “Powers of Ten” documentary of the 70’s, which took the viewer from the outer cosmos to the atoms spinning in the hand of a man lying by the lake in Chicago. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in. It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics - and back again. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s.
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