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Spore Is EA's New Ace
BusinessWeek reports on EA's Next Big Thing. From the article: "EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change. The company hopes that its next mega-franchise will revolve not around a football star, a boy wizard, or a dashing British spy, but...a microbe. The game is called Spore. Developed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, it lets players design an invertebrate in its primordial stages and then guide its evolution until the creature's offspring develop into a thriving civilization with cities, religion, and spaceships. EA's ambitious goal is to create more such innovative, internally developed games while lessening the company's dependence on professional sports and Hollywood movie franchises."
I'm surprised to see people going in the opposite direction that GTA did insofar as raciness considering they had the most successful game. Perhaps it wasn't just GTA's R-ratedness that made it such a hit but the quality of the game itself, and it appears that EA and other companies agree if they're making games about microbes in lieu of cop/whore/pedestrian killer games.
"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. A franchise, after all, is exploiting an existing idea, and is all about "same". A game like Spore, should it be succesful, will be succesful because it is unique, not because there are a zillion and one Spore-a-likes.
On whether the game will be succesful; it's essentially a new gametype (or mix thereof) by an industry vet, it's being hyped to hell and back, and it's got the backing of EA. I hear echoes of Black and White, and the echoes do not sound good.
Its not EA's new ace. I dont give any credit to a company that BUYS good ideas and claims them as their own.
Will Wright is the mastermind of this one. Its Will Wright's next smash hit.
Screw EA, if they had their way, we'd all be buying 6 sports games a year, every year, and thats it.
EA is doing its part to provide slashdot with the weekly 'video games in a slump?' stories.
Will Wright is like a recently eaten explorer trapped inside a monsters body.
If you look at the other new game they mention, it's yet another Medal of Honor game. Wow, a company like EA is really innovating by changing the way its employees work to churn out the fiftieth iteration of a proven franchise! How wonderful.
In reality, EA has Will Wright so they're guaranteed at least some innovation. Aside from that, I see nothing to suggest they're actually interested in innovating too much.
Homosapien wins?
Huh?
What planet do you live on?
Have you seen what current homosapiens are doing?
You could make the same argument against SimCity, The Sims, etc: "That looks like a lot of cool technology, and there is a huge degree of player freedom, but is it a compelling game?"
;) Or maybe we have a very narrow-minded stereotype of what actually makes a game compelling.
Maybe Spore is just doomed to repeat the failures of SimCity and The Sims
so here is my idea for EA. I think they should change madden releases to bi-yearly, with a $5 or so roster update/patch in the off-years. The huge pool of resources poured into madden every year could be directed into these smaller home-grown projects.
Will they lose money? I dunno. They'll make money on their roster update, that's for sure. And if they create a few gems with those reallocated resources, they're opening up loads of future franchise possibilities.
so the choices are to continue to cash-in now, or to plant these seeds for the future.
Spore is going to be a monster hit. The video is from a year ago. Knowing Will Wright, it has probably evolved a long way since then.
Anyone else play SimLife, which was a kind of very primitive precursor to this? I bought it, along with all of the other Maxis sim-titles way back when, and spent a long while playing it, but found it frustrating in the end because the complexity was not well handled and every scenario seemed to decompose into a monoculture or a mass extinction. If Spore can nail all that, it will be a massive winner. It will also prove WW's point that procedural content is better than created content.
What I like about WW is that he seems to have thought more deeply about the concept of play than anyone else I can think of in the videogame realm. His are the games you don't feel bad giving to your kids (in fact I don't feel bad about giving most games to my kids).
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Ignoring your typical, condescending, vehemently anti-religious comment about a large cross-section of normal folks with a certain set of faith beliefs you happen to disagree with in an attempt to feel enlightened, this game is great in that you can interpret your input in the game as the natural hand of evolution, or you can interpret it as God shaping the development of the creatures. Whichever floats your boat.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Watch the video again. You missed the point he was making about content. If you empower the USERS to make content, it makes game developement more tractable. So much money is spent modeling every chair, creature, and piece of dust on every table. But in Spore, (and in the Sims to a lesser degree) the content can be created by the players.
Actually, I think it is quite the opposite. It makes a very compelling case for the mechanics of evolution. Granted, the player exerts a guiding hand over mutations, but the whole point of the game is to grow organisms from single cells all the way to intelligent extra-planetary species. This is achieved by progressive mutations that, hopefully, give the newer organsim an advantage in it's environment. Intelligent design proposes that fully-formed complex creatures simply sprang forth onto the earth from a 'designers' hand. The beauty of Spore is that you cannot create your creatures with the end result in mind. You start with a single cell and intervene with it's design at intervals based on it's ability to succeed in the environment. You would never get to simply sculpt an intelligent humanoid from clay, give it a soul and toss it out into the world. Instead your end-game form is dependant on a multidue of generational mutations which were each a reaction to a gradually changing environment. Add in the fact that the other creatures in your world can be comprised of the creations of other players and, if anything, you get polytheism- multiple creators whose 'children' compete for success in the universe.
Raph Koster outlines in his presentation titled Moore's Wall how, right now, the growing power of computers is making games prohibitively expensive to produce. As the power of the machine grows, there is pressure to utitlize the new power to improve on the presentation (mainly, the graphics) of the game, which makes the game a lot more costly produce without adding much in terms of gameplay, and usually resulting in a reduction in the amount of actual game content.
One way to break this trend is to utilize the increasing CPU power of PCs to procedurally generate content, or to assist the player in creating his their own content. Of course, our procedural algorithims and software have to improve a lot if it's going to be an important supplement (let alone replacement) to the traditional way of doing things, which is to have professional artists hand-craft everything.
In this regard, Spore looks to be a huge step in the right direction. We need more projects like Spore to mature the technology. The fact that EA seems to be recognizing Wil's genious and throwing their support behind his project is a good thing, if the suits at top see the promise of this kind of approach, it can only mean good things for the industry. EA was not exactly in love with the idea of The Sims before it was proven an unmitigated success, despite the fact that Will was already an acclaimed game designer well before that game's release. So, even if EA isn't entirely turning over a new leaf, at least they're trusting their golden boy enough to say that they're pinning their hopes on his newest experimental idea.
All macroscopic life is an evolutionary abberation.
If you get right down to it, "evolutionary abberation" is either an oxymoron, or redundant, depending on your definition of abberation, but at no point is that a useful statement.
It's important to realize that humans aren't the absolute unparalled masters of the living world in every conceivable manner. It's equally important not to make the opposite error. Macroscopic life is Mother Earth's only significant hope of actually getting off the planet on a big scale, for instance, and "macroscopic life" is only a hair's breadth on the cosmic scale from effectively enslaving microscopic life. (Even if we humans muck it up, I'd bet somebody or something cracks the problem before the sun wipes life from the planet.)
Macroscopic life exists because it works.
Speaking as a full-on, 100% bible-believing Christian, I very very much would like to play this game. It's a game. It's not the real world. In that way, I see no reason to ban it, or whatever. Now, if the game claimed (which it does not) to represent the exact same structure as creation on Earth, then that's something else.
While I'm sure there will be some idiots out there who will not take a moment to review the game, and condemn it outright, I see no reason for this game to be "bad" or "threatening" to anything Christian. It's definitely NOT a booster to Evolution, in my opinion, because (1) behind it is an intelligent creator...you (2) it's very tongue-in-cheek in terms of characters, as well as colonization (3) it's very detailed for a game, of course, but compared to real life science, it's quite simplified, and (4) it's again, just a game.
So, just to once more try to deflate those who outright attack Christians because of some stereotypical pidgeonhole, allow me to be one of the first to say that I wholeheartedly endorse this game's innovative style, and will definitely be one of the first to purchase it (given that it won't require crazy-expensive upgrades to my hardware to run)!
Why would that be "something else?" As you said this is just a game. Whether or not you agree with what it claims is no reason to ban it. The Bible Game claims that the biblical representation of Genesis is 100% truth and you don't see atheists storming the streets in protest. It's EA's right to make a game that claims whatever they wish, as long as that claim isn't outright slanderous.
Well, until you put a muzzle on your less tolerant "co-religionists" you can expect to have the most noisy used as a synecdoche for the whole.
It happens with every group. In FOSS the quieter members are seen as supporting the views of the noisy. (From inside it looks quite unfair, but I really don't see how those outside could do anything else.) Similarly, if you want Christianity to have a good public image, then civilize the noisy ones.
Actually, since "Christians" have started getting more political power I find myself less willing to cut any slack to some apparently reasonable person who proclaims "I'm what a Christian really is.". The people censoring books are what a Christian is. The fomenters of mobs are what a Christian is. I've seen them in action, so I recognize them. If you want to identify yourself as the same as them, then why should you expect any toleration?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.