Game Darwinism, Spore
March 2nd, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Procedural content. User generated content. Asynchronous. Emergent. Social networks. Virtual identity. My space.
No, not Web 2.0. Games. Just last week I finished Resident Evil 4 and was reminded of Alice’s comments about how easily TV can elicit emotion compared to how poorly games provoke emotional rejection. What games can do, though, is fun. Games are an indulgence. Play, no matter how essential to our learning and undersatnding of the world around us, is a luxury. Game designers know this which is why even the most basic of games won’t make you wait to have fun. No good game leaves the fun at the start either. Games are a carrot-and-stick adventure from one bit of fun to the next.
Spore, then, is an honest, clever mixture of these two features. Once Web 2.0 has gone beyond the landgrab for the core online services (email, calendars, lists, presence), it might just realise that games are an ideal canvas. Games such as World of Warcraft are full of social opportunities. Spore is a version of the Game of Life brought well up to date. If the economists loved World of Warcraft and EVE Online for its’ representation of the nature of commerce, biologists will love Spore for its’ easy, believable portrayal of ancient history. How we came to be. Or rather, how we almost came to pass.
Intriguingly, there seems to be no multiplayer component to Sport. Rather, the game uses other players to generate the other races you stumble upon during the game. Again, asynchronous multiplayer gaming really is a vastly underrated idea. I love the idea that my in-game decisions inform the makeup of my own virtual race as well as the experiences of other players.
Spore is a post-modern, introspective game of creation. It emits personality and fun by making use of a how-we-were style of gameplay that takes classic game ideas and dilutes them into consituent parts of a whole game. From what I can tell by watching this video, there is so much potential in the game, so many different paths to explore, that a self-evident streak of restraint in apparent in the fact that game is playable. It doesn’t solely exists on a whiteboard where it is swamped by the possibilties. Until the game is playable by all of us, Spore at least deserves full credit for that.