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.'"

news story?

[bryan_is_a_kfo]

news story? advertisement? what's the difference?

None of the above

[MuNansen]

Because like all Will Wright games, people will try it and admire it for its creativity and inventiveness, and then go play something else that's a good deal more fun.

Yeh Right

[Anonymous Coward]

This game will dissapoint in much the same way Black and White promised us the world and turned out slightly dull.

Captain Non-Sequitur to the Rescue

[Tackhead]

Pretty good article, right up until the last paragraph, where we get change the subject so fast I got whiplash.

If you are feeling particularly vindictive toward a planet, you can hover above it and indulge in a spot of terraforming - such as submerging the main city under a lake. And you can acquire nuclear weapons that completely destroy planets, which is why Will Wright developed Spore's database system, which sucks up and redistributes content created by other players (apparently, a fully compressed creature occupies a mere 3Kb).

The "nukes" gameplay feature drove the fundamental design decision to enable user-created content?

What. The. Fuck?

Here's my prediction

[Chris_Jefferson]

Spore will turn out to be a good idea, but have the odd spot of poor execution. There won't actually be that many ways in which you can evolve creatures, and there will be fairly obviously fixed levels where you progress to another level of evolution. The game when first released will work poorly, and require a series of patches. The CD copy protection will be annoying. There will be many expansion packs.

Don't get me wrong, I think Will Wright is great, and I think this game will be too. But I don't think it's going to "change the face of gaming", any more than the sim, simcity Psychonauts did (sure a lot of people bought the sims, but has it really effected anything else?)

Re:some perspective

[rockchops]

I think the change may come as a virtue of being one of the first, at least widely popular games, to have forever new content. The whole "massively single player" idea that WW is riding on is somewhat revolutionary, you have to admit. Many people love WoW or FFXI or EQ for the aspect of exploring new content. I have had so many friends abandon a MMORPG because they ran out of new content to find, and it got boring as a result.

Spore's advantage is two-fold:
1) As long as there are people playing and have a connection to the internet, there will be infinte new content.
2) (Correct me if I'm wrong) Not being pay-per-month like most modern MMORPGs, and no buying millions of expansion packs to get new content (The Sims).

Customization is King

[drinkypoo]

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone but gamers want to interact with their environment. 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, so it's understandable it's taken this long for even a few games to do such a thing.

If you look around, just about every multiplayer game has some customization. At the lower end, you can usually pick colors. At the upper end, you have... Well, Spore :) Somewhere in the middle you have custom models, custom skins, tags, decals.

But also, keep in mind that customization is the difference between good and great in a lot of genres. Sure, I still love Civilization 2, and play it. (Civ 3, on the other hand, I found to be ugly, with muddy graphics.) But Alpha Centauri keeps me captivated far longer, mostly because of all the things you can do with customizing units and so on.

Gamers want control. Otherwise they could go live life, where you have much less of it. :)

Here's my prediction.

[mashuren]

Spore isn't going to revolutionize anything. It's not going to change the landscape of videogaming as we know it. Spore is just a video game. Sure, an awesome, unusually creative, really fun videogame, but just a video game nonetheless. Everyone out there please stop hyping it so much, because the more you hype it, the more I raise my expectations, and eventually they're going to raise up so high that not even Will Wright will be able to meet them.

Please, just let the game be, and we can talk about it after it comes out, okay?

I agree completely.

[Corngood]

Spore seems like even less of a 'game' than Black and White.

I hope you don't get modded down to much by people who are caught up in the hype. Hell, we are looking at an article which is basically about how Spore will change the world as we know it. I think that's slightly out of control, in the end most of us will just move on to something else after a week or so (like we did after B&W). I'm certain it will be a technical masterpiece (as with B&W again), but that alone will never be enough.

Re:Borg creature

[Chineseyes]

You won't have to face disgustingly powerful neighbors until you are almost equal in power. I know thats the way the game is suppose to work but I think it would be more fun if you actually had to evade vastly more powerful creatures. If it is created with reality in mind if you are a larger more powerful creature you won't have enough energy to chase after smaller creatures for the hell of it because if you don't catch a significantly large enough prey you will starve yourself. It's the same reason you don't see lions hunting the savannahs for field mice. Maybe I am missing the point of the game what happened to survival of the fittest?

I'll believe it when I see it.

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

Frankly, it doesn't look like Spore is going to be a game, so much as an interesting experiment in computer science. Good for people who like that sort of thing, but when I play a game, I want it to either test your reflexes in a fun way, make you think to overcome certain challenges, engross you in an intriguing story, or any combination of the three. It doesn't look like Spore will have any of these things, so I'll be saving my money come release day.

Unless I'm wrong, that is... can anyone sell me on this game on the basis of the above points?

Game-trained Apparatchiks

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Wright makes excellent games.

But there are severe problems using them as educational material.

SimCity's demolition is a case in point: $5 to bulldoze a city block. No fair market value, no Fifth Amendment (or the equivalent, if there are any), no neighborhood groups, no angry owner mounting a campaign against you.

Maybe it's prophecy, and Will Wright foretold what America will be like post-Kelo [cornell.edu].

Now of course, there are hundreds of games which have valuable educational content. With an appropriate counter-bias, even SimCity could be educational.

But out-of-the-box, it trains people to become authoritarian apparatchiks.

In interests of fairness, I should say that I was a programmer at Maxis. We were supposed to make non-violent games. Those who say we succeeded just don't realize how violent totalitarianism is.

Now just a minute...

[EEBaum]

Shouldn't we wait until the game is out to make such outrageous claims? For all we know (though I hope not), the gameplay could suck and the game could disappear into the bargain bin within a few weeks.

Re:None of the above

[MuNansen]

Who plays Sims, though, mostly? Young girls. Sim City was interesting to non-gamers because they got to play god with a situation familiar to them: human cities. Spore will neither attract young girls nor attract anywhere near the number of non-gamers Sim City did. Basically Will's come full circle back around to Populous. And hardly anyone played Populous. This enormous effect that Wright games are going to have on the industry never surface. Yes a bunch of games tried to clone The Sim's success. None of them have succeeded. The Tycoon games took Sim City's basis and took off, but only in the tiny, non-gamer, $9.99 niche. Wright's games exist in their own little world because while they're respected and appreciated by all the industry, they catch the imaginations of only very limited audiences. It just so happens that with The Sims he hit the ultimate niche audience, teenage girls. No one's going to revolutionize gaming by capturing their time, though, just as Britney Spears and N'Sync won't revolutionize music.

Re:Game-trained Apparatchiks

[Anonymous Coward]

it's cheaper to let a disaster roam over the area you want to demolish. Imagine if the goverment did that IRL.

*cough*Katrina*cough*