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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.'"
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.
This game will dissapoint in much the same way Black and White promised us the world and turned out slightly dull.
...but how long does a game last? The old video of WW playing Spore seemed to take only a couple of minutes. He zoomed right through it all--completely unlike the other Sim games, which take forever to play (at least without cheating). Also, a card game? WTF?
We will finally have world peace. Linux and Mac will each own 50% of the desktop market. BSD will stop dying. Democrats and Republicans will start making sense. And a few years later we will all get Alzheimer's.
These videos might prove to give you a better idea of what the game is all about.
;)
If Robin Williams likes the game, it must be good.
Nice clean printer friendly version. Yum. http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content /jul2006/id20060720_289503.htm
Sounds like an interesting game to play. It mentions the "space phase" as the "business end" of the game. The database of content created by players can be shared between other players. Not sure exactly what this means. Maybe as simple as evolved planets can be visited by others, and tens of thousands of users will be able to have quite unique planets, none too similar. And technology can be passed from race to race.
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...
Another year to release...wow. Nothing ever lives up to the hype.
It sounds cool and looks cool, but I want to get my hands on it before I decide. I hope it's not like Wil's other games where it's fun in the beginning but then just gets tedious as you get farther along. The Sims was fun for me at first, but I ended up hating it because all I ended up doing was chasing the stats instead of doing cool stuff like putting them in unique predicaments. Those damned Sims have to hit the can more than my girlfriend.
With that said, even if Spore isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be, I'm hoping it will spawn a new class of games that use procedurally generated content for some incredibly unique gaming experiences.
-R
The "nukes" gameplay feature drove the fundamental design decision to enable user-created content?
What. The. Fuck?
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?)
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
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. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Here, read this:
More:
Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens
Moreover: Battlebots viewers with long memories may recall that Wright's daughter built at least one entry for the robot combat game. No doubt as part of a contingency plan to eliminate those who try to avoid the Games.
Stefan
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.
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.
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.
The article implies that Spore will 1) be wildly popular, and 2) be the beginning of a revolution in game development and design.
I assert that it WILL prove to be a fantastic game; but that the rest of the game industry will be notably UNrevolutionized... because this is exactly what happened before.
2000. The Sims is released. This is a totally new type of game; in some ways, a totally new form of fun. It sells through the roof, and to this day, there probably hasn't been a week that's gone by without The Sims or one of its sequels or expansions being somewhere on the Top 10 best-selling games list.
Logically, this should be a watershed. In terms of the game industry's history, this should be on the level of the release of Wolfenstein 3D, or of Dune. In other words: a game this fun and money-making should spawn many other games like it; which will at first be sneered at as "rip-offs"; but in fact people come to realize that this is a new genre, and each new entry brings something new to the table. Then, sooner or later, someone (e.g. Blizzard in the RTS and MMO genres) will create a fantastically polished new entry that pushes the genre to its next level.
But what happened with The Sims? We got "Singles" and "Playboy: The Mansion." That's pretty much it. There was no rush to make new "people simulators." The Sims still has essentially no competition - it is its own genre. Why hasn't it spawned a new genre? Lost Garden has some ideas about this. I think it's a combination of being unwilling to take on the difficulty of a really hard game design problem; combined with an ironic risk-averseness (what could be less risky than following in the footsteps of The Sims? oh, I know, continuing to crank out FPS and RTS games); combined with developers being too proud to make something someone might call a "rip-off."
Whatever the reason, I think it's going to repeat with Spore. Game developers have become too narrow-minded. Not only do they not try to conceive of a radically ambitious new type of game - like Spore - but even when one plops in their mist and draws the multitudes to it like the Monolith in 2001, they look at it for a moment and then go back to picking fleas off each other (i.e. making platform games) like they've always done... because they like doing that... and that's they're used to it... and they'll be totally safe doing that... until they get their skulls bashed in by the few apes that were smart enough to learn from the Monolith, that is.
The game industry as a whole - mainly publishers, but many developers as well - is resisting change. They didn't attempt to adapt to The Sims, and they'll be similarly complacent in their response to Spore.
Reminds me of the Penny Arcade comic that came out last year.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.