1UP has a story about Will Wright's keynote address at GDC today, which he used to show off his latest game: Spore. In this sim you start as an amoeba, which slowly grows and evolves. Once you are an actual being the game becomes a Sim City like strategy game until at one point your civilization is advanced enough that you get into planet exploration and inter-stellar travel. Sounds ambitious, but then you wouldn't expect anything less from Will Wright. GameSpot also has a writeup of the demonstration and there's a writeup by a Shacker right here.

His demonstration of Spore was framed through a design lens, as is the custom at GDC. The "hub" of the game, he asserted, was its compression. Since all the creature meshes, textures, animations, and behaviors are procedural (based on a set of algorithmic rules), this allows for an enormous quantity of player-created content, which he emphasized as another key element of the game's design that he has always fought for--the encouragement (in Spore's case, perhaps the necessity) of player creativity. More so than in other games, he explained, he wanted to create a sense of both ownership (of the unique creatures and civilizations the player creates) as well as mastery (over the interface, which becomes more complex as the game's scale increases). The goal is to give the player simple tools to make them feel like they have tremendous leverage on the nature of the game itself. The game, then, becomes what he called "a creative amplifier for what the player has done."