Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.

So what does all of this have to do with e-learning? Well nothing directly, but it was announced while I was working on Ecolibrium with Futurelab. Ecolibrium was always designed first and foremost as a tool to learn about evolution, the dynamics of predator–prey populations and systems thinking. When I first heard about Spore I thought that it would be great to leverage it’s undoubted popularity by making Ecolibrium a place where Spore creatures could be left to run wild.

Raph Koster is the former creative director of Sony Online who also directed the Star Wars Galaxies MMOG and was lead designer on the groundbreaking Ultima Online. For the last year or so he has been working as the founder and president of Areae producing an upcoming platform for online games called Metaplace.

But Metaplace is much more than a way to build games — it is promising to open up virtual worlds (like Second Life) and massively multiplayer online games to the Web. By providing a set of open standards and APIs it will be possible for anybody to build and host their own virtual world or game and, crucially, for people to move their characters between these worlds.

Exciting stuff!