Featured Topic 11/08: Spore Review

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This month's topic involves a video game that, as many of you probably know, came out in September and was one of the most highly-anticipated games in recent memory. For those who don't know, Spore is a computer game developed by Maxis, the same company famous for their line of Sims games. Spore is a game that is meant to simulate the evolution of organisms on a planet - the player "evolves" them from single cells, to creatures, then to tribes and civilizations and finally to space travel and exploration. The player's own population of unique organisms, built completely by the player, can interact with other creatures developed by other players as well. For me, the most anticipated part of it was that relating to physically changing and developing the creatures. And as it's rather relevant to the concept of evolution, this month's topic is:

What did you think of Spore from an evolutionary perspective? What do you think it did well, and what could it have improved? Do you think this game has the potential to influence people's perception of evolution, and if so, how?

My own opinions on the game are not terribly positive. From an evolutionary and gaming perspective, Spore was, in a word: Disappointing. From an evolutionary perspective alone, Spore was doubly so.

As most of you probably know, Spore is divided into five distinct sections, each of which is meant to emulate a different stage of "evolution." Each stage also has a very distinctly different type of gameplay. However, only the first two really deal with biological evolution: the Cell Stage and the Creature Stage.

The Cell Stage was extremely simple and easy, and took half an hour to beat. You basically just swim around in a simulation of a primordial cesspool with your little single-celled critter and gobble up bits of floating food while avoiding or attacking other cells. Once you get enough EVO points - oops, I mean DNA points - you can "evolve" your creature by "buying" new parts for it to have. Once you have eaten enough stuff, basically, you get to move on to the Creature Stage.

This is the main bulk of the game's evolution-related content. It's certainly fun and interesting in its own right, but it has little to do with actual biological evolution. You run around, attack and eat stuff (or make friend with them), and then mate and produce young. The young can differ significantly from the parents, which often has ridiculous-looking results. As in the cell stage, whenever you produce a new generation, you get to alter the appearance of the young by "purchasing" new parts with your EVO DNA points. Unfortunately, everything about this process is mind-numbingly simple and dumbs down the concept of evolution to a startling degree. There's nothing related to genetics, population dynamics (beyond the most simple imaginable), mutation, speciation, or anything, really, beyond hunting other species on the planet in order to make your own creature more powerful.

Truth is, though, that I was probably expecting far more from this game than I should have. I wanted a complex and elegant evolution simulator when what I should have been expecting was, well, The Sims but with animals. It wasn't a complete disappointment, mind you. The amount of freedom you have in creating the appearance of your animals is really impressive, and will keep you engaged for hours even if the gameplay itself is not appealing. I spent a lot of time creating realistic dinosaurs and other animals, and some of them have even become popular enough that they show up the games of people I don't even know.

The final three stages have their ups and downs as well. The Tribal stage is another that is very simple, and will almost certainly not take you long to beat. As in the Creature stage, using plain brute force is extremely easy. The Civilization stages is much more complex than the previous ones, and you get to design all of your buildings and vehicles with an impressive degree of freedom and flexibility. It still, however, suffers from the same problem that most of the others do: an overarching sense of extreme simplicity. The Civilization stage is little more than a dumbed-down RTS game, and if you want to play a good RTS game, there are a lot of better choices out there. Such is the case for each individual stage in this game, really - the unique things are that you get to design your creatures/buildings/vehicles/spaceships yourself, and that it's the only game that has this many different types of gameplay all together in the same place.

Some say it's the Space Stage where the game really shines. It's definitely the largest, longest and most complex of the stages, and also the only one where relying on brute force alone is almost completely impossible. You can do a lot of different things in this stage, from abducting and transplanting creatures from one planet to another, destroying primitive species, destroying entire planets, and establishing new colonies. From an evolutionary perspective, however, this stage isn't exactly the meat and potatoes of the game.

One thing I did like about this game was the amount of little sci-fi references it made to various things, like the little cutscene between the Creature and Tribal stage which is an obvious 2001: A Space Odyssey reference, or the usage of "spice" as the currency in the Civilization Stage (an obvious homage to Dune), or, my favorite, the "Little Doctor" weapon in the Space Stage, a reference to Ender's Game. These little clever things are what I like about Will Wright - but as an evolutionary biologist, he fails. And that's what I wanted out of this game, not another The Sims.

At least this means I'm still free to create the kind of game I wanted to see in Spore... someday.

What are your thoughts?

-EWilloughby