Thursday, 09.11.08

A New Way To Play

Image courtesy of Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts' much-hyped evolutionary computer game, Spore, hit U.S. stores last weekend.

In the first 30 seconds of Spore, the game's creators answer the question of how life began: an asteroid crashes into a planet and cracks open to reveal a googly-eyed little microbe. The microbe is you. You guide your species through evolution, from a cell swimming in aqueous murk to a space-faring civilization. You design the creatures, and later the buildings and vehicles that they control. As you advance in the game, you can stretch and shape your creature's spine, and add arms, legs, spikes, and wings. Spore then animates your creation and gives it a gait, a voice, emotions, and enough cunning to attack rivals or ally with them. The game contains the entire history and future of a universe created by you, the player -- and because it lets you explore the cosmos forever, its limits are the player's own imagination.

Ten hours into the creation of my universe, my microbe had evolved into a band of spotted blue "Neewoks," bipedal, rhinoceros-horned, platypus-billed creatures that run around like velociraptors, only cuter. But the Lavender Tribe of giant horned gorillas once again wiped out my Neewoks -- they're herbivores, what do you expect? -- and I was ready to quit out of frustration and boredom. The rules and rewards of Spore are relatively simple: survive, reproduce, and destroy the other guys by eating them, burning their villages, or besieging their cities with tanks. (You can also play nice by entertaining your enemies and signing trade deals with them, but even my friendly tribe had to kill a few babies to make it to the Space Age.) These simple goals make the game a little too familiar to anyone who has played games like Civilization or Stratego.

The spawn of six years and an estimated $50 million of development, Spore is expected to earn serious money and pioneer a new way of playing. The Creature Creator is a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, especially insofar as it is available to everyday users, not just game designers or Pixar animators. It casts the user as the designer -- which makes the game virtually boundless. You can't yet directly play against other people (AI code, not human beings, controls the the monsters in the neighboring village), but you can download other users' creatures into your game-world. So Spore is the sum of the imaginations of everyone who plays. And as that sum expands, the game will only get better.

Will Wright (Spore's creator, and the guru behind the Sim empire) has said that in 20 years, games will be "as personal to you as your dreams." Wright's team has gone further than anyone in the quest to create this dreamland. Watching my little Neewoks dance, laugh, and cower, I had inklings of the appeal of parenting. This spirit of creation is the best part of Spore, and what makes it different from most games. You can't play Spore the way you play Monopoly or chess, plotting a winning strategy on a board with predetermined rules and frontiers. You have to play with it the way children play with crayons or dolls -- limited primarily by your own stories and creativity. The problem with Spore could be that many of us have forgotten this old way of playing, and will have to spend some time relearning the habits of youth.

— Laura Brunts

Filed Under: entertainment, evolution, gaming, science

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