What Spore May Spawn

ches_grin writes with "A new look at Spore, including a slideshow that examines the broad influence that the game is expected to exert on fields ranging from law to education. From the article: 'Spore's unprecedented level of user-generated content is sure to send ripple effects through and beyond the video-game world. Could the mass-market game provide the tipping point for the burgeoning retail trend of mass customization? How will it redefine the roles of game designers and publishers alike? We asked a variety of experts to predict the economic, educational, legal, and other effects of the game.'"

Videos of Gameplay

[se7en11]

These videos [google.com] might prove to give you a better idea of what the game is all about.

If Robin Williams [google.com] likes the game, it must be good. ;)

Easy to read page

[RickPartin]

Nice clean printer friendly version. Yum. http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content /jul2006/id20060720_289503.htm [businessweek.com]

Re:Sounds cool...

[rockchops]

Well, the point of the videos was a demo . The point was to cover all of the phases of the game in a reasonable amount of time to expose us to all or most of the game elements. I do believe it was mentioned in at least one of the demos that the final game was being very much paraphrased, and that each phase would take a substantially longer time to advance.

As for the card game, WW explains in the E3 demo that a new "cool factor" that they are trying out with the game is the ability to make a tradable card game out of the user-generated content. e.g. You evolve a creater, it get appropriate stats from the parts you pick for it, and a card is generated from that. You can also add to your virtual card collection as you explore the spore universe and discover other peoples creaters?

A blatant marketing tactic? Most likely. But knowing Maxis, they will try to capitalize on the popularity and addictiveness of other game types (card games).

Re:I read it - sounds interesting - but come on...

[Justin Shreve]

It has been a month or so since I have watched the Spore video, but from what I can remember you are not actually playing online against other people. Instead the whole universe is your own separate universe and populated by creatures and planets which are designed by other users. (But not controlled by them).

Re:I read it - sounds interesting - but come on...

[myster0n]

Does this mean that my "planet", which I spent 2 months building after I spent 3 months evolving my race, can be wiped out by an evil player who simply wants to nuke everything in site? I hope I have time to spend 2 months on defense systems...

From what I've heard about the game, the content you make gets shared with every player, but you're still in your own, isolated universe. There's no interaction with other players other than the creatures and stuff you create. And your whole universe is always on the same level (and/or lower?) of evolution as you are. So when you're still a single-celled organism, you won't have to worry about UFO-attacks.

Re:Captain Non-Sequitur to the Rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the point of that line of thinking was that with nukes you could destroy every planet in your instance of the little game world. That would sort of kill the playability of the game, so to combat that they created the database system. The database system will constantly pull in copies of other peoples world's and creatures, and put them into your universe. This essentially creates an infinite universe for you to explore... and nuke if that's your persuasion.

Who the FUCK tagged this "hype"?

[I Like Pudding]

I am the most jaded gamer you can find, but this is a Will Wright game. WILL FUCKING WRIGHT. You know how American McGee get's his name plastered inexplicably onto shipping product? That's hype. Contrast that with a totally white box, save for the words "WILL WRIGHT MADE THIS" printed in bold on the front. That, my friends, is the closest thing you will get to guaranteed quality in the gaming industry.

Re:Customization is King

[grumbel]

### How long have we been screaming for fully deformable terrain? When I miss someone with a rocket launcher I want it to take out the fucking wall. Granted the technology hasn't been there

The technology was there back in 1994, see Magic Carpet or XCom:UFO, both have had fully destructable terrain. The throuble is that Doom recieved all the hype and instead of destructable terrain developers focused on developing static maps with precalculated shadows and stuff, which resulted in better locking games, but also games whoes levels simply couldn't be deformed at runtime anymore. The technologie simply moved into a direction that made destructable terrain an hard problem (BSP trees), while it was an pretty easy one before (tilemaps), so gameplay got axed to create flashier graphics.

Re:Game-trained Apparatchiks

[modi123]

It's funny that you mention this. I was chatting over lunch with an associate about how I was berated in by an english teacher once at college for playing RTS. His comment was something about the desensitizing nature of the games - I throw waves upon waves of troops against my opponent completely ignoring the causalities of war.

Of course this being college, I pondered the topic, freaked out a bit, and eventually calmed down. It's a freaking game.

Now addressing your aspect about how games are lacking real world actions - yeah that would be nice at some level but really I play games to escape from reality and not mimic it. I would rather not, as a mayor of my simcity, have to deal with clamidia outbreaks, famine, AIDS, resource scarcity, and so on. I want to build a freaking city alright! Lord knows what sort of environmental impact I had on the terrain when I shaped it to my needs, paved over almost all of it, and so on. Don't care, don't care, don't care.

Side note, during lunch we also discussed the genocidal nature of RPGs. I have cooked a few papers on the topic of my character wiping out whole warrens/maps/games worth of kobolds, goblins, and orcs. Once I left a single kobold alive after visiting his people's three-levels-deep home with my +2 vorpol sword of freedom. He was in the corner and was pretty damaged. I glanced around at the blood soaked walls of his people, and felt a pang of pity. Then I noticed I would roll up a level if I killed him. A second later his head rolled along the floor. Yeppie! I leveled up! So this is what Chris Columbus must have felt.

Repeat after me folks - it's just a game.

Re:Customization is King

[Jackmn]

To elaborate, the reason you can't do completely deformable terrain is that there are no algorithms for realtime occlusion culling that are both accurate and light on the CPU. You either spend too much CPU time determining what is visible from where or your algorithm leads to the rendering of a great deal of objects that are not actually visible. In either case you end up with poor performance.

Using heavy handed LoD and simple map geometry can fix this, but then you end up with an ugly game.

Limiting terrain to a heightmap system (where you can lower the height of a piece of land but not tunnel through it) can be done relatively well, but that's not truly deformable terrain.