When you see two reviews of one game in major journal, that sure should make you wonder what it's all about. Or more likely, why?
Here is a resume of the both articles about Spore. I haven't played it yet, since I don't even have time and I'm not sure it will run on Linux, but still it looks promising. And just like other scientists in the second article, I think it's very swift move to promote evolution. I mean, seriously, it's a very logical theory, it's elegant and well, beautiful. It has some flaws, but it's the best we came up yet. The best that is set over facts, not mythology that is. So, I think the game will do good to science at some point. So, now at least, we'll use their tool against them. By "them" i refer to the fanatics, who bug me so hard recently.
And it looks like a fun game. Even if it's not so close to the real scientific simulation, Avida, I still think they could borrow ideas from each other. Evolution as any n-body problem is very serious task for solving and programming, but if you can make it on game and provide freedom to the player, maybe it can be used in real simulations...
In any case, it's good we have scientific games and I'd be happy to play a little on that game. I just don't like it that there is limited successful scenarios, because in real life it's not so simple. And a dominating specie is not so simple idea-because humans might be considered winning specie, because we explore the Earth the most. But from other point of view, we still know so little about other evolved species, like dolphins. We're starting to understand plant life and the compelxity of ants. How can we say who won after all. It's a difficult question.
And the articles in NY Times looks little bit paid to me.
Playing God, the Home Game
Published: September 4, 2008
Best known for his popular evocations of urban sprawl (SimCity) and suburban Americana (The Sims), Will Wright has spent the last eight years trying to figure out how to convey the vast sweep of evolution from a single cell to the exploration of the galaxy as an interactive entertainment experience. His answer, Spore, is being released in stores and online for PCs and Macs in Europe on Friday and in North America this weekend.
Spore both provokes and amuses. And as an agent of creativity it is a landmark. Never before have everyday people been given such extensive tools to create their digital alter ego.
Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.
But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.
People who are more interested in playing Spore than in playing with Spore — that is, people who are more interested in a game than a toy — are likely to come away feeling a bit let down.
Yes, Spore is undeniably gorgeous; Mr. Wright and his development team at Maxis have accomplished a prodigious technical feat with the programming that allows members of Spore’s interstellar menagerie variously to walk, stalk, flop and fly as they befriend and devour one another. For that matter, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real). And yes, millions of people will surely spend countless hours, and dollars, on the fabulous computer toy that is Spore. And they should.
Yet like me, many players will end up crestfallen that the genius bestowed on Spore’s creative facilities was clearly not matched by similar inspiration for deeply engaging gameplay. Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.
At some level that seems by design. As perhaps befits its subject matter, Spore is not one game but a collection of five discrete mini-games, each reflecting a different stage of biological and social evolution and a different archetypal game style.
Life begins in the cell stage, basically a simple prologue. Drifting in the primordial soup, your cell eats pellets (plants or prey) and avoids ghosts (bigger organisms). After maybe 30 minutes (if you survive), you evolve onto land and into the creature stage.
That stage is where Mr. Wright’s team seems to have spent the most effort, and for me it has been by far the most enjoyable and interesting part of the game. The entire Spore project might have been better handled if the cell and creature levels had been released together a couple years ago at a lower price (Spore now costs $49.95), allowing the more pedestrian later phases to receive a comparable level of time and attention as expansions.
Keep in mind that Spore includes no real-time multiplayer;
And so the creature stage rules Spore, because only there can you fully appreciate the range of expression possible using Spore’s tool set. As you explore the planet and meet other players’ progeny, the DNA you collect allows you to customize your creature with any of dozens of different body parts. Various mouths, hands, feet and wings convey different abilities, perhaps singing or dancing (for making allies of other species) or biting or clawing (for fighting).
But Spore goes a bit off the track as it reaches the tribal phase and beyond. Perhaps the biggest problem is that all that time you spent lovingly fine-tuning your otherworldly avatar in the creature phase basically doesn’t matter anymore. After the creature phase the cosmetic appearance of your species is locked in, but the abilities it developed are largely meaningless. Instead, in the tribal stage, you get just a few choices of different weapons and clothing. In the civilization phase you devise airplanes, land vehicles and ships, and in the space phase you obviously make spacecraft. But as Spore goes along, those choices matter less and less in shaping how you can actually play the game.
Progressing out of the tribe and civilization stages requires either conquering or co-opting all the neighboring tribes or cities. These “conquer the world” stories are classic computer game styles, and Spore borrows heavily from the basic mechanics of some of the best strategy games ever made, like Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Civilization.
Once you leap to the space stage, Spore’s strategic gameplay becomes a bit of a hash reminiscent of games like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, only with horrendous, almost carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing interface controls and insufficient tools for managing what is meant to be a galaxy-spanning empire. The exploration and planet-shaping functions of this phase are enjoyable, but they are largely obscured by a gratuitous amount of low-level tasks like warding off pirate invasions and manually moving trade goods from one system to another, over and over. In none of its later stages does the depth of Spore’s play come close to matching the best-of-genre games available in each of the categories it derives from.
In fairness, one could also note a similar lack of depth in the basic play systems of The Sims, which has proven enduringly popular. But there are some intersecting design reasons why that works better in The Sims than in Spore.
Most important, The Sims is profoundly noncompetitive and open ended. The Sims is structured so you can help your family putter around the house forever. There are other families in the neighborhood to interact with, but they aren’t trying to eat your children or burn your house down.
Spore, like real life, is largely about the survival of the fittest. In each stage your species either becomes dominant and evolves, or it becomes extinct (meaning you try over and over again until you “win”). In The Sims making a family dysfunctional is half the fun. In Spore a dysfunctional species basically loses the game. That competitive nature is one reason why, despite its cutesy looks, Spore is aimed both at adults and children. And that competitive aspect is why a relative dearth of rich and interesting play mechanics hurts Spore more than The Sims.
The real frustration with Spore is that the team behind it was capable of such high achievement in the areas it focused on, while other parts languished.
Now if Mr. Wright and the Maxis team just take another few passes through Spore’s later stages and release a big revision patch next year, they may finally end up with a game to match the stellar toy they have already unleashed.
source Gaming Evolves
Published: September 1, 2008
Correction Appended
NEW HAVEN — By day, Thomas Near studies the evolution of fish, wading through streams in Kentucky and Mississippi in search of new species. By night, Dr. Near, an assistant professor at Yale, is a heavy-duty gamer, steering tanks or playing football on his computer. This afternoon his two lives have come together.
On his laptop swims a strange fishlike creature, with a jaw that snaps sideways and skin the color of green sea glass. As Dr. Near taps the keyboard, it wiggles and twists its way through a busy virtual ocean. It tries to eat other creatures and turns its quills toward predators that would make it a meal.
The chairman of Dr. Near’s department, Richard Prum, watches him play and worries about his reckless lunges.
“You’re just attacking them?” he asks as Dr. Near tries to eat a fat purple worm that looks too dangerous to bother.
“If you kill them, you unlock their parts,” Dr. Near explains. But then the purple worm sticks its syringelike mouth into Dr. Near’s beast and begins to drain its innards. “Uh-oh, I’m about to die,” he says. The screen fades to black.
The next time, Dr. Near’s luck changes. He gains enough points to move to the next level of the game. His creature grows a brain. “Oh man, it’s like I graduated college,” he says. Dr. Near can now alter his creature. He stretches the body to give it a neck. He adds a pair of kangaroolike legs.
His creature — or, rather, a swarm of his creatures — charge out of the ocean and onto land. Dr. Near pushes back the laptop as his creatures find a place to make their nest and lay eggs. “So that’s pretty cool,” he says with a grin not often seen on a professor.
Dr. Near and Dr. Prum have spent a few evenings testing out Spore, one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is the best-selling computer game franchise of all time.
Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.
Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. Mr. Wright will appear in a documentary next Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel, sharing his new game with leading evolutionary biologists and talking with them about the evolution of complex life.
Evolutionary biologists like Dr. Near and Dr. Prum, who have had a chance to try the game, like it a great deal. But they also have some serious reservations. The step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution. “The mechanism is severely messed up,” Dr. Prum said.
Nevertheless, Dr. Prum admires the way Spore touches on some of the big questions that evolutionary biologists ask. What is the origin of complexity? How contingent is evolution on flukes and quirks? “If it compels people to ask these questions, that would be great,” he said.
Evolution may seem impossible to capture in a computer. It is a hugely complicated process by which millions of individuals change over millions of years, as thousands of genes mutate and are spread by natural selection and other forces. Yet scientists have managed to distill some of the most important features of evolution into the language of mathematics.
In the early 1900s, mathematicians figured out how to represent a population of organisms in simple equations. They used those equations to show how natural selection can spread some genes from one generation to the next. Their work transformed the study of evolution into a modern, rigorous science.
Today, mathematicians use far more sophisticated equations to analyze evolution. And some of their most important insights have come from treating evolution like a giant game. Organisms can evolve different strategies to survive, in the same way game players can choose different strategies to win the most points in a game. Using a branch of mathematics called game theory, scientists can figure out if natural selection will favor a strategy over all others, or if it brings them into a stable balance. Game-theory models have shed light on the evolution of things like human cooperation and the deadly relationship of parasites and their hosts.
Today’s computers make it vastly easier for scientists to build these models. They have also allowed researchers to study evolution by building digital organisms. Scientists at Michigan State University and the California Institute of Technology, for example, have developed software called Avida that allows tiny computer programs to behave like real organisms. They make copies of themselves and mutate (randomly changing lines of programming code).
As the programs process more information in more powerful ways, the mutations are favored by a digital version of natural selection. The Avida team has published a string of papers in leading scientific journals on their experiments, testing ideas about complexity, mass extinctions and even the evolutionary benefits of sex.
Computers have also made it possible for scientists to build simple simulations to help people understand the principles of evolution. This year, for instance, Ralph Haygood, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, built a Facebook application called Evarium that lets users watch flowerlike creatures drift around a box, attracting one another with their colors. They mate and shuffle traits in their offspring, which then go through the same cycle. Players can control how quickly traits mutate and how strongly the organisms are attracted to some traits and not others. Or they can just watch the creatures change each time they open their Facebook page.
Mr. Wright came to the challenge of an evolution game with a long track record of simplifying complex systems without losing the feel of reality.
One thing Mr. Wright and his colleagues decided Spore should reflect was evolution’s ability to produce life’s staggering diversity.
The game begins with a meteorite crashing into a planet, sowing its oceans with life and organic matter. Players control a simple creature that gobbles up bits of debris. They can choose to eat other creatures or eat vegetation or both. As the creature eats and grows, it gains DNA points, which the player can use to add parts like tails for swimming or spikes for defense. Once the creature has gotten big and complex enough, it is ready for the transition to land.
On land, the creatures can grow legs, wings and other new parts. And it is at this point that some of Spore’s features really shine. Mr. Wright’s team has written software that can rapidly transform creatures in an infinite number of ways, as players add parts and alter their size, shape and position.
Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, was enchanted when Mr. Wright came to show off Spore to him. Dr. Shubin’s own research has helped reveal how real evolution recycles and modifies pre-existing biology to produce different body plans. In 2006 Dr. Shubin and his colleagues reported the discovery of a 370-million-year-old fossil called Tiktaalik that illuminates our ancestors’ transition from sea to land. It offers clues to how our hands and feet evolved from swimming fins.
Dr. Shubin found that Spore gave players a feel for how evolution uses the same basic tool kit to produce different body plans. “Playing the game,” he said, “you can’t help but feel amazed how, from a few simple rules and instructions, you can get a complex functioning world with bodies, behaviors and whole ecosystems.”
Spore embodies another major theme of evolutionary biology: evolution is not a simple kill-or-be-killed affair. If a Spore player ends up with a carnivorous creature, it will certainly do its fair share of killing. But it will not make it very far unless it makes alliances. In Spore, creatures bond by dancing, wiggling and singing. Taking the time to bond allows players to move in packs and herds, which do a better job of fighting off predators and attacking prey.
“You always wonder why life tends to become more complex over time,” Mr. Wright said. “If you look at this balance between cooperation and competition, at almost every level it explains it neatly. You have agents competing at some level. The agents might be cells. At some point the cells can group together and work collectively and outcompete the other ones that are not cooperating. Then competition jumps to the next level. At every level you have to have the right balance between co-op and comp. That balance is driving the organizational complexity.”
Even as scientists praise Spore, they voice concerns about how the game does not match evolution. In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and spread gradually through entire populations. Winning Spore’s DNA points does not work even as a remote metaphor.
“I do hope that it doesn’t confuse people as to what evolution is all about,” said Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University and a creator of Avida.
Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence. Evolution is more like a tree than a line, with species branching in millions of directions. Sometimes species become more complex, and sometimes they become less so. And sometimes they do not change at all. “There’s no progressive arrow that dominates nature,” Dr. Prum said.
These caveats notwithstanding, Dr. Near hopes that Spore prompts people to think about the evolutionary process. “This may be totally off about how evolution works, but I’d much rather be dealing with a student who says, ‘O.K., I have no problem with evolution; I think about it the same way I think about gravity.’ If it does that, it’ll be great.”source
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