In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. The game’s developers, a group of graduate students who were part of the Tech Model Railroad Club, at M.I.T., an early proving ground of computer hackers, had never considered selling the game; their idea was to demonstrate the appeal of interactivity, and to take a first small step toward simulating intelligent life on a computer. Bushnell’s ambition was more worldly. He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would be inside the machine. “The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games,” he later said, “I put those sales pitches in my automated box.” From this unlikely marriage—the computer lab and the carnival—the video-game industry was born.

The first product of Bushnell’s company, Atari, was Pong, a simple, elegant game in which two players manipulated electronic paddles and sent a blip back and forth across a black-and-white screen. The game had two basic components. It was a simulation of table tennis, managing to render most of the game’s rules, structure, and logic onto the screen. And it was an animation—a moving picture designed to complete the feedback loop between the eyes, the brain, and the fingers on the game controls. The game was designed by a former All-State football player named Al Alcorn, who was Atari’s second employee. As Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby tell the story in “Smartbomb,” their recently published history of the industry, Bushnell took the handmade Pong game to Andy Capp’s Tavern, in nearby Sunnyvale, and within weeks people were lining up outside the bar in the morning, before opening time, to play it. By 1974, Pong had made it to a pizza parlor in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I played it, and for the rest of that summer my dearest desire was to go back and play it again.

The games that followed Pong—Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man, among others—were even more captivating, but the simulations remained the stuff of arcades and midways: sports, space aliens, zombies, shoot-’em-ups. In the nineteen-eighties, as the speed and storage capacity of computers and game-playing consoles grew, designers continued to improve the graphics. The simulation side of the games, however, never came close to realizing the Tech Model Railroad Club’s old ambition of reproducing real-life dynamics on the screen. The best-selling video game this year is Madden NFL, in which you get to play pro football from the perspective of star players. Madden NFL is a far more sophisticated simulation than Pong was, but the content of the game is no closer to real life.

In the late nineteen-eighties, a new type of video game quietly emerged—the God game. Computer animation is a brute-force project of converting graphic art into two-dimensional pixels, and, more recently, into three-dimensional polygons, the building blocks of digital pictures. But to create a truly absorbing simulation, one that offers some insight into the nature of real life, is a much more difficult proposition. The designer must play God, or at least the notion of God in Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy”—a god that can anticipate the outcome of the player’s actions and yet allows the player the feeling of free will.

Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. (You can help them or torture them as you wish, although your actions have consequences in the game.) Another important God-game designer, Sid Meier, has based his Civilization series, which began to appear in 1991, on historical processes, such as scientific discovery, war, and diplomacy. But the master of the genre—the god of God games—is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be. “It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations,” he has said. “Why shouldn’t games be?” To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life.

For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls “possibility space.” “Will has a reality-distortion field around him,” his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. “He comes up with the craziest idea you’ve ever heard, and when he’s finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy—he’s the only sane person in it.”

Wright’s office is in a corner of a six-story building a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, in Emeryville, California. It has a balcony where he can smoke. The walls are covered with drawings in colored markers, which bear cryptic messages like “Star Map Issues.” Wright, who is forty-six, is tall and skinny, with a long, narrow face and slender fingers. He dresses in more or less the same clothes every day—black New Balance sneakers, faded black jeans, a button-down shirt, a leather jacket, and thick aviator-style glasses. His skin is shiny and reddish-brown, in that way that a smoker’s skin can look—half tanned and half cured. He sometimes has a wispy mustache and goatee. You don’t really have a conversation with him; you mention an idea, and that triggers five or ten associations in Wright’s mind, which he delivers in quick bursts of data that are strung together with “um”s.

When I walked into his office, Wright jumped up and, after shaking my hand, said, “Here, try this, um, it’s this really cool toy I found recently,” and handed me a wireless controller for a small robotic tank that was sitting on the floor. It was facing another tank, which Wright was controlling. He started moving his tank around and shooting mine, watching me curiously, waiting to see how long it would take me to understand what was going on. I felt an odd tingling sensation in my hands, but I didn’t pay any attention to it at first. Eventually, I realized that I was getting shocked: every time Wright’s tank shot mine, an electric charge passed from the controller into my hands.