> >From Cringely's latest blog
> (http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/09/when_worlds_
> and.html):
> 
> "On a related note, some religious zealot is trying to organize a boycott
> of Will Wright's Spore because she thinks the game teaches kids to believe
> in evolution. And that, as we all know, is tantamount to eating apples and
> talking to serpents.

Wright was expecting this but back in August he reported:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=211296

Wright told Eurogamer: "I think our bigger fear was that we didn't want to
offend any religious people; but looking at the discussion that unfolded
from this thing, what we had was a good, sizeable group of players that we
might call militant atheists, and the rest of the players seemed very
tolerant, including all of the religious players."

Life in Spore is created according to the theory of panspermia - which
hypothesises that it has been seeded on Earth from elsewhere in the
universe. But it's the mere presence of religion in the game's civilisation
stage that has raised hackles amongst some in the gaming community.

"I didn't expect to hit hot buttons on the atheist side as much; I expected
it on the religious side," Wright revealed. "But so far I've had no critical
feedback at all from anybody who is religious feeling that we were
misrepresenting religion or it was bad to represent religion in the game. It
was really the atheists."

He added that early objections from team members enabled the studio to iron
out any potential areas of conflict early on.

"We have a number of team members that are pretty religious," he continued.
"And so in design, on the team, in our small, little microcosm of players
out there, we tried our best to make sure we weren't overtly offending any
religious people, but yet we wanted to include the idea, the concept of
religion in the game."

Wright, however, who described himself as an "atheist", insisted that with
Spore he was not trying to pronounce on the issue one way or the other:

"We didn't want to go too far down that path: we leave the whole creation of
the universe question open," he said. "Obviously as the player you're coming
in and playing something like a god, directing the evolution of a species,
but we never really state who you the player are."

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