It is a massivly single-player online game. You are connected to th server, and anything you make is automatically uploaded and distributed to other people's games, whilest you are continually encountering other people's content which has been automatically downloaded.

But, in clarification, you cannot directly interact with any characters controlled by someone else.

No. Not in its current and announced form.

Boohoo. So you can't play your friends. I give up. It's almost as bad as Creatures-in fact, it's the same idea.

Except with Creatures (assuming it’s that bunkum rip‐off of Petz I think it is) you only control individual creatures. In Spore you control the biological, social and technical evolution of an entire species.

And then you can do it all over again for another species.

In creatures you did that for an entire species but it was only one species without that much variation. Not such an interesting world, really.

And if you don't want to lose yer patent for the Constipated Spanner-Snake you made, you can turn off the uploading program and build alone.

There is a filter-system to keep out pornographic and copyrighted content. That way we won't get walking phalluses and fifty kinds of Rancor.

But what i really want to know is:

Can i be Neo?

Yeah, like that's gonna stop me taking screenshots.
EDIT: I meant the Oddworld (copyrighted) creatures. I don't plan to make an army of wangs.

The idea is to stop it from entering the server and other games. If you want creatures made to resemble human gentalia in your game, you can, but don't let them be uploaded.

Is there a set release date yet?

The popular opinion is that any further delays are welcome if it prevents Maxis from screwing it up. "Sometime" 2007 seems to be the most specific announcement. The game is pretty much finished, it's just debugging now. And for a game with as much flexibility as this, that's alot of debugging.

So you can't make anything that's copyrighted? How does that work? I mean, if I make a reptile with four arms and oversized breasts, how does it know that that is copied off Champions of Kamigawa?

They have a combination of screening systems looking for iconic characters (such as pikachu, marked by many as eligable for discriminatory annihalation), moderatorsmaking checks of specific sources, and a flagging system by the users who send downloaded creatures back and mark them for checking.

I mean, what if somebody invented something that they created themselves, but that is similar to copyrighted content.

Can McDonalds sue Burger King?

I see your point.