Robertson, Margaret. “The Creation Simulation.” Seed Magazine. Seed Media Group,
Sept. 2008. Web. 4 Mar. 2010.
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In her piece, The Creation Simulation, Margaret Robertson takes an inside look at the development of the highly anticipated game Spore. Early in the article Robertson introduces Will Wright, the creative force behind the then unreleased, Spore, as well as the commercially and critically popular The Sims. Robertson explains that Spore could very well be the culmination of Wright’s games saying, “…it’s no great risk to say Spore is his magnum opus. It’s moved on from its original title of “SimEverything,” but that remains the snappiest way to describe it.” Robertson also emphasizes the scope of Spore in writing, “[Spore is]…a laboratory in which a player could experiment with the parameters that determine the emergence of intelligent life.”The aim of Spore is to give the player the ability to create and then guide their creature from a single celled organism in a primordial ocean all the way to an interstellar traveler looking for resources, and all of the evolutionary stages in between. In the piece Roberson writes on Wright’s desire to create a game that was, at least initially, evolutionarily sound. To achieve this foundation Wright began by gathering a group of like minded game designers and studying the works of evolutionary scientists. It was this approach to the game’s design that would result it its first major hurdle, as Robertson wrote, “Could the game be both scientifically accurate and fun?” Within the development team behind Spore, two factions arose to the surface, the original team who had wanted to deliver a more scientific experience and the designers who joined later and wanted to make the game more approachable. The designers choice to follow the more approachable route is summarized by one of the designers Quigley Ocean, saying “it (attempting to convey billions of years of evolution) is so absurdly vast, so radically outside of any scale that people can really empathize with, we knew we had to turn it into a toy.” Though the designers made concessions to make the game more user friendly, Robertson relates how the game retains hard science behind the scenes, specifically the organic spread of user created content.
The article, The Creation Simulation, not only brings to light the typically unseen side of videogame design but it also gives an insight into the depth that videogames can achieve. While no one on the design team on Spore would maintain that the game is a realistic depiction of evolution, it does display at the least a passing interest (on the part of designers and gamers) in big picture issues such as the nature of life and how it began. Robertson’s article shows the struggles that Wright and his associates went through, so as not to do a complete disservice to their belief in the theory of evolution. Robertson helped her readers to see a side of game design that is not concerned with saving the princess or getting a high score, but (while on a superficial level) where life began and the possibilities of life in the hands of an intelligent designer. In the end Spore is still just a game, but it does deal with the very human issue of considering the origin of life and ultimately where all living things have the potential to go. An altogether different and important aspect to Robertson’s article is what it reveals about the growing impact that gamers can have on other gamers by the means of user created content. One of the biggest examples of how user created content is becoming a central part of gaming is found in the article where Robinson explains, “each Spore galaxy is populated not by creatures designed by the game’s creative team, but by animals, plants, buildings, and vehicles made by players within the game’s extraordinarily flexible editing tools.” By the designers of Spore giving gamers the ability to actively take part in shaping the world where the gamer plays, a long standing barrier has been further eroded. The aforementioned barrier was the design philosophy that gamers wanted to be given an experience and to give them editing tools would either overwhelm them or they would contribute very little meaningful content. Spore is part of the next evolutionary stage of games where user created content tools are not only allowed or available, but absolutely necessary for the game to exist in a meaningful way.
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