Will Wright--the creator of the Sim City franchise--discusses the upcoming release of Spore.
This is more aligned with our vision than any other game, and it's gonna be *big*.
From the Wiki:
Wright calls the game a "massively single-player online game," and describes it also as "Asynchronous Sharing." Simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore. The content that the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database (or a peer-to-peer system), cataloged and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games.....
...players [will] receive statistics of how their creatures would be faring in other players' games, referring to this as the alternate realities of the Spore metaverse. The game would report to the player on how other players interacted with them (for example, how many times other players destroyed their planet). The personalities of user-created species are dependent on how the user played them.