Mega-otaku Will Wright’s first-ever Comic-Con speech was, as expected, a well-rehearsed and entertaining PowerPoint presentation.

For the uninitiated, otaku is a Japanese word for … well, nerd. Wright, who also created “SimCity” and the “Sims,” describes himself with the term. He explained the phrase by PowerPoint-ing up an anime still frame of a large, bespectacled young man with bad skin, long hair and a small figurine clutched in one hand.

I haven’t seen “Welcome to NHK” yet, but I’d guess the scene’s from that show. It certainly wasn’t “Genshiken.”

See? I’m the target audience for his presentation. And so were the 18-year-olds to my left, who whiled away the time before the show by playing tic-tac-toe on the DS. And so were the young couple on my right that busied themselves watching videos on a tiny device I didn’t recognize. And so were the too-serious game nerds a few rows in front of me. And so was the 40-year-old long-haired gamer a few rows back. And so was the high-minded 20-something woman just within earshot.

That’s the genius of Wright — he’s dug into the mindset of a remarkably broad and fickle audience, mined out what most of us want, and laid it out in a small package that you and I can buy. The end result? Profit. The Underpants Gnomes could learn a thing or two.

Wright’s games have always had a strong sandbox feel to them, and that open-ended nature has been emphasized as the games developed. Zoned areas became more flexible in later “SimCity” titles, for example, and more choices have been offered to players in the “Sims” to customize their little people’s lives.

“Spore” has taken this further, providing incredibly powerful tools to develop animals from the get-go.

But that wasn’t enough. Wright said that players are not only looking for highly customizable user-created content — they’re also looking to share their creations. He underlined this point by showing a seven-digit number: 2,124,343. That’s the number of creatures created and shared via the game’s free-to-download and $10 “Creature Creator” programs at the time of the presentation. For reference, there are some 1.6 million known species on Earth.

It took creators 18 days to reach the 1.6 million benchmark, leading Wright to say that the combined might of “Spore” gamers was about equal to 0.38G — that is, almost 40 percent of the creator, God. It only took Him seven days to make all those critters, after all.

Some of the creatures surprised the game’s creators with their complexity. Wright showcased a handful of robots created with the software, then some humans and finally a group of inorganic items — jets, shuttles and other machines. None of these designs were thought to be within the scope of the software, Wright said.

But Wright saw this as part of games’ march into the mainstream as an artform. Heady stuff, considering the role of games in today’s society — as strictly entertainment. (Wright joked that, at a recent pop-culture exhibit he helped put together, the comic artists wondered why the video game industry was sharing space with them. “I got to tell you,” he said, “when the comic book guys are looking on you as cultural refuse …”)

His idea of games-as-art focused on a cycle he said has been present in all media: They move from utility (writing was originally used for accounting, then for religious purposes) to entertainment (after the printing press allowed mass production, books became cheap and accessible) then to art. He sees games as moving along that second axis.

The game designer’s role in that, he said, was to provide better tools to allow the player to create better work.

As for the “Spore” preview itself? The game definitely looks fun. Wright calls it “a blend of a very simple version of ‘SimCity,’ a very simple version of ‘Civilization.’ ”

It’s got all the little details one would expect from a sim-style game: near-omnipotent control of thousands of creatures; over the placement of cities; over the development of culture and technology. Forty percent of God, indeed.

Wright showed us some “cultural warfare,” in which he indoctrinated some opposing cities on his creature’s home world with the religion of materialism. After dominating his home world with the power of raw capitalism, he then took to the stars, where he demonstrated how players can manipulate environments of other planets to make them suitable for habitation.

Or, in the case of this demo, make them erupt into fiery, uninhabitable hells with the help of volcanoes, meteors and a heat ray. Like I said, Wright knows his audience.

He also encountered a space-faring race, drawn from the millions of creatures created and stored online. After showing how he could diplomatically interact with them, he showed how wars get started. One extinguished planet later (and a moon, too, but that was accidental) he fled their space.

Destroyed planets eventually decay into asteroid fields. Other touches, like black holes causing a lens-flare effect on stars near them, really bring the galaxy to life.

And what a galaxy it is — Wright used a black hole to jump from one side to another, and the distance was staggering. There were literally hundreds of star systems between the two; it would have taken his tiny ship hours and hours of travel time to get from one to the other. Each of those systems have planets, some that could be colonized, some that housed pre-existing civilizations.

This game is truly immense, and its graphics really convey that sense of size very well. While he didn’t address what kind of play time could be expected from in-game missions, the play time in colonization at the space-travel age looks like it could easily stretch into the hundreds of hours.

More Spore on GAME ROVER:

• Spore comic book will import your creatures, share to YouTube
• Make your own ‘Spore’ comic book
• Mobile ‘Spore’ game launches — but only for AT&T users
• Spore for the Wii could happen, says one Maxis producer
• A visit with Spore’s Orange County developers at E3

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