The German magazine Spiegel has done an article on Spore that gives an overview of how Spore works and why it will allow for practically limitless gaming.

When the day comes for the descendants of the original single-cell organism to start building cities, players find editors for all kinds of vehicles and structures. In the last phase of the game, the player’s creations can start exploring space. What they find are countless planets designed by other players. Foreign life forms have built their cities there, and a player’s characters can attack or peacefully do business with them.

In describing the way user’s creatures and objects are created, the article likens Spore to the “demo” animations created by programming artists in the 1980′s:

For example, when a player uses the editor to lengthen the legs of a three-headed sheep, the program simply inserts, in the background, new values into the formula that was used to create animals in the first place. The result is a viable creature that requires a surprisingly small amount of memory.

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