At the beginning of this month, J. Allard (Gaming Vice President, Microsoft), Bing Gordon (Chief Creative Officer, EA), James Korris (USC Institute for Creative Technologies) and Will Wright (Designer of Spore, Maxis/EA) held a speech at the Entertainment Gathering. The topic was Interactivity & Gaming, and the main message probably was that games are gearing more towards an open community style. Comparable with Wikipedia, it'll be the players, the audience of old, that create the game as they play it. Spore is an example of a game that works this way. Wright said that the player should be able to create something that looks as if it could be done by a Pixar animator. Rather than putting the player in the role of Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker, the player should have the role of George Lucas when playing a game - developing a story rather than following a preset one. Games should move away from being "the new movie," which they have been considered to be for a long time.

More details about the speech, in which Wright also showed Spore to the audience, can be found at CNet News, Shacknews, J. Miller's blog, the Washington Post and a somewhat smaller article at Business2Blog. Thanks to SnootySpore for the latter two links, and Spore.es for the Shacknews and J. Miller link. The picture below was posted on J. Miller's site, and shows a city as it can be made in Spore.