Since the discussion forum I’m referring to in this post is available only to registered users of the Spore Creature Creator, I’ll just quote the relevant posts here.
Anyway, I said this about Will Wright in one post:
interviews w/ Will Wright:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs . ars/2008/07/15/will-wright-gaming-and-science-go-hand-in- hand//www.popsci.com/entertainment- gaming/article/2007- 02/wright-stuff
Thanks for those quotes. Unfortunately, all they demonstrate to me (esp. considering their late date) is that Wright has a poor understanding of either science or the game his people are designing.
“Accurate though caricatured?” It’s accurate only in the following two ways as far as I can tell:
It portrays creatures’ phenotypes as changing a great deal over time.
And note that though it does portray a great deal of phenotypic change, the way this change happens in the game hardly counts as natural selection. So his comment about “learning something about evolution” is also right out.
A third possibility (other than that Wright doesn’t understand either science or Spore) is that Rocketgirl is right–and that Wright has been decieving people, by playing the game up as having something to do with “science” when he knows it has little to do with science at all. That it’s all been cynical advertising, nothing more.
-Kris
…sort of not exactly nice things to say about him, I guess!
Well, anyway, just two or three posts later, I find the following. It’s long enough that it’s clear he was composing this while I composed my own post.
I do read the threads here when I get the chance (though been a bit on the busy side lately).
As you might know I’ve been very interested in using Spore to motivate an interest in science. At the same time we want to make a fun, humorous, playful game. The superpowers in the game were added both to make early decisions you make in the game (cell, creature, tribe) continue to have consequence in the later levels and also to add more humor and playfulness to the overall experience.
If you look at the Civ superpowers they are more realistic for the economic and Military strategies than they are for the religious. We could have labeled the religious powers differently (maybe enhanced memetic transmission or fundamentalist jihad) and given them the same rough effect but they would have felt a bit more gritty and out-of-character with the rest of the game.
Usually when we hit design bumps like this we like to fall back into humor, it’s something everyone can relate to and most tend to then view it as a metaphorical solution to something that’s below the simulation level of detail.
A good example of this was in The Sims when the characters needed to do things that would have been messy to simulate. For instance when a sim needs to change clothes they jump in the air, spin around and are redressed. That’s obviously not the way it works in reality. Also if they need a small object they always pull it from behind their back (the “everything comes out of your butt solution”). Most players understand these methods as a humorous metaphor for what would really happen.
The space level of Spore has a number of abilities that I guess you could argue might have technology solutions but that I personally view as highly unlikely (such as traversing a wormhole). Again these increase to playability and narrative density of what’s possible in the game.
At the end of the day I think the “educational” impact of Spore is less important than the “motivational” impact. In other words, I’d rather promote an interest in the larger world around us instead of downloading known facts. To have the largest impact we first and foremost need to make a game that’s compelling and fun to play.
This is a fascinating debate though (which is why I felt like I had to comment a bit) and I don’t mean to end it. In fact I would love to hear everyone weigh in on what they think about the creative license that we’re taking with these subjects.
:smack:
And now I feel like an ass. My closest brush with greatness yet, and it has to involve me sort of bad-mouthing a perfectly nice guy whose work I think is awesome. Geez!
-FrL-
Relevant thread can be found here if you have the Creature Creator or (later) Spore itself.
Also, to clarify, I believe Spore is going to be the most awesomest thing I will have ever seen by that point. My only point in my post was to continue an argument over whether the game is supposed to be fundamentally “about science” in some way. Some people are mad that the game has recently been revealed to have a “religious” tech path instead of the former “cultural” tech path, including miracles and everything. I never thought the game was supposed to be “about science” in the first place so I was not disappointed.
