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Evolutionary Scientists Test-Drive Spore, Gripe
ahab_2001 writes "The computer game Spore has been marketed partly as an experience that makes evolutionary biology come alive in a game setting. But does that claim hold water? To find out, John Bohannon, a correspondent for Science Magazine (writing as 'The Gonzo Scientist'), sat four card-carrying scientists, ranging from evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge to JPL astrophysicist Miles Smith, down in front of a terminal to play the game. The upshot, says Bohannon: Spore flunks basic science, getting 'most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.'"
I mean, I'd like to finish the game in less time than 1000000000000 years...
Reminds me of some decade ago or so, when someone warned that the stone age wasn't like in The Flintstones. I never would have guessed ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Its an intelligent design game marketed as a game about evolution. Must be selling like hotcakes in Kansas.
Doesn't spore teach much much more about the idea of creationism (under the form of 'guided evolution') than it does about true evolution?
If you want to teach about evolution, make an RTS where everyone starts out with the same units, but depending on how you use them (and which units come back alive) they change over time. Still guided evolution I guess, since you could put your units in situations that would produce traits that you desire, but at least a few steps up the ladder of scientific validity.
But it is a user driven game, and natural selection takes too long. Its more fun to let the user make a creature which is not even remotely adapted to its environment and just pretend that selection pressures don't exist. Otherwise the likelyhood of getting a creature to the "tribe" level, or even just past the "cell" level aren't very good.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
what do you expect?
War veterans said that standing near an exploding grenade in Call of Duty was not at all the same as the real thing.
Since when do we have club cards?!?
four card-carrying scientists
I thought it was just a metaphor. Like, leave your scientist card by the door on the way out.
Your doing it wrong.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I can't believe it's not goatse!
That must be Will Wright's philosophy if he goes around saying stuff like this (from TFA):
Last month in an hour-long show on the National Geographic channel, the game's creator, Will Wright, spoke with biologists about "the breakthrough science that's revealing the secret genetic machinery that shapes all life in the game Spore."
And the author's writing style just hurts. Pretentious twit. And he keeps trying so hard to set up a false dichotomy between scientific and religious-minded players. Give it a rest. Stop trying to stir up controversy where there isn't any.
And "The Gonzo Scientist?" Hunter S. Thompson would shoot himself if he saw that. Oh wait...
In other news, gamers test-drive careers in evolutionary science and find them to be mind-numbingly boring.
I agree, if the intelligent design folks get a hold of this Spore will become part of the classwork. I can see it now, in classrooms during I.D. class all of the kids will be playing Spore while the teacher talks about why evolution is a lie and dinosaurs didn't exist.
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected.
I never paid much attention to they hype and went mostly by the criterion that I'd even buy Pee if it's Will Wright's anyway. Also, that it's just a game anyway.
According to TFA, though, it sounds like EA's bulshitters... err... marketers have been shooting their mouth all over the place about how the game is an accurate representation of evolution, and how there's interest from colleges to use it to teach science. And while the former borders on fraud, the latter makes me cringe. As others have said, it's really an ID game, with some evolution language thrown in. The very idea of selling that as accurate science is ridiculous enough, but hyping it as a way to _teach_ evolution... is irresponsible at best.
*Sigh* It's times like these that I see Bill Hicks's point about marketing...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Please at least try to get informed about who you are insulting. Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value) believes the universe is 6k years old. But even disregarding that, your insult didn't make sense. A game marketed about evolution is popular with people in KS, presumably because you think everyone in KS is a backwards redneck who denies evolution?
If you think this is bad you should read how those Air Force Missleares ripped the Missile Command developers.
Totally unrealistic usage of the trackball for targeting, didn't require the appropriate 2 keys, and had a high score list in a totally different configuration than the actual high-score lists that appeared on official Strategic Air Command consoles.
Well, the way I understand the point, though, it's not that the game _should_ be an accurate represetation of unguided evolution. It's that EA has marketed it as an accurate representation of evolution, and as a way to teach evolution. Clearly that claim doesn't match the game's content.
And normally I'd have said the said you did. But if they made some very clear claims about the game, I think it's fair to judge it by those claims.
I mean, for example, if UT claimed to be (among other things) an accurate flight simulator, it would be entirely fair to expect it to match that claim. After all, that's what their own marketers are telling you to use as your buying criterion.
Way I can tell, that's what they do in TFA. They didn't just come out of nowhere with the idea that a game must be like evolution. (Which would be a silly expectation indeed.) But once EA claimed that it _is_ an accurate representation of evolution, and good enough to be used in colleges, well, the game is on. Let's see how true that statement is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
but they have the income stream correct from Spore Addicts.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
First off, the pithy one liner:
Spore is Lamarkian evolution with hit points.
Seriously, inheritance of acquired characteristics, "the complexifying force", "the adaptive force", it's all there. Compare this to Will Wright's much earlier Simlife, which is substantially oversimplified, for the sake of gameplay on the computers of 1992; but is actually a Darwinian evolution simulator game. Now, that said, that isn't an issue. Spore isn't required to be anything in particular. Some games rely on realism. Spore doesn't. Some rely on verisimilitude, Spore doesn't really do that either. Not a problem. Civilization II is a great game; but anybody who thinks that it is a civics lesson is mistaken. Nothing wrong with that. I just hope that the vague notion that "Spore is about evolution" doesn't give rise to yet more peculiar misunderstandings of the subject.
Incidentally, and maybe this just makes me a bad person; but why does the Spore space stage have no concept of genocide? It keeps track of, and awards medals and stuff for, all kinds of weird things(OMG! painted 5 planets!). Why does neither the game, nor the AI races, react appropriately when I take my ship to their homeworld and suck up all its atmosphere, turning the ancestral home of their race into a barren rock, coated with bones and ashes? Shouldn't that deserve a message less generic than "You hurt our planet."?
Actually, that would be the discredited idea of Lamarckian evolution: in which body parts change to match the environment, and the children inherit the slightly improved body parts. E.g., that basically because Schwarzenegger had big muscles, his kids would automatically start with bigger muscles too.
In TFA they claimed that that's the kind of evolution that Spore has, but you just made the point that, yeah, it's not even that. A creature in Spore may never use its +1 wings, and then get the +5 wings out of a sudden anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Turns out evolutionary scientists don't like DRM any more than the rest of us :)
and I found it boring as a game. It felt like a same-old rts which made me stop playing once I got to the civilization stage. It's all so linear, I know you have a choice b/w herbivore/carnivore but the dynamics I thought were going to be involving your choice of what your organism looks like, behaves, etc. would drive your gaming experience. Now that would have appealed to gamers and scientists alike.
I personally don't see what is so wrong with a critique of a game that claimed to give an experience of natural selection and evolution.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Wow, a video game isn't scientifically accurate. Who ever would have thought it? Because EA teaches for their gains, and games aren't about fun, they're about rigid adherence to reality.
God forbid those scientists should get a hold of Super Mario Brothers.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
have somebody just You don't need to sales and so on, knows that ev3r OF AMERICA irc Since then. More all over AMerica FreeBSD had long CLEAR SHE COULDN'T perspective, the
Does tribes display tribal warfare accurately?
Does counterstrike depict an accurate representation of a counter-terrorist offensive?
> I mean, I'd like to finish the game in less time than 1000000000000 years...
Would 6,000 years be better for you? I mean, it's hard to do the 6 day thing. We're not God, you know...
My impression is that it's a freaking videogame and doesn't attempt to teach anything other than how to use sandbox editors to make spaceships and stuff. I'm surprised at all this discussion over what is merely a collection of clay editors.
Soon they'll be trying to tell us life really isn't like GTA3, or Oblivion... and here I was training to be a car-jacking thief in the Dark Brotherhood...
EA needs to make their games more accurate. The game should take a few billion years to play.
Next you'll tell me that Hollywood movies and TV shows get history and other facts wrong?
A video game is written to be enjoyed, not scientifically accurate, just as a movie or TV show was written to be enjoyed and not factual.
It is like trying to criticize fiction for not being non-fiction.
Video games have their own set of rules and laws, not necessarily the same as the reality universe laws and rules.
I'm Orion Blastar a Space Pirate Ninja from 4096AD who time traveled back into the past to make a better future. Whomever believes that does not get the joke I am making or that Orion Blastar is a parody of myself based on fiction and not everything I post as Orion should be taken seriously. Some people know that and rate my comments as funny or interesting, because they know I am posting in character. Right now I am posting out of character for informational purposes.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The only Spore ads I saw were on TV and I don't remember them saying anything about its accuracy or educational value.
So where exactly are the marketing materials that claim Spore is accurate and educational? If they exist, then yes, shame on EA.
If they don't, then shame on whoever is trying to pick a fight.
The SimEarth remake is way past due...
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
"It's been tough", Niles Eldredge claims after admitting he now has to review games for a living. "At least the pay for an evolution game reviewer is much higher than such of an evolution biologist in America"
"They asked for it!" an anonymous member of the Kansans school board couldn't hide how much he enjoys this. "At least my life will get more interesting as your taxi drier could actually be your idol astrophysicist!" said a slashdot reader that currently lives in his mother's basement.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The point of most video games is to control it from a 'God' point of view -- the player is omnipotent and omnipresent. Which rather conflicts with the point of evolution.
A 'true' simulation of evolution would simply be a button on the screen which, when pressed, would simply say 'you win' or 'you are extinct' -- the results dictated by a random number generator.
Also EA would charge $50 for this game, and you would only be able to install it once. and installing it would also corrupt your video drivers.
Dan.
This game didn't live up to the years of incredible hype. It is really a very simple-minded game that I finished within a few hours. And it has virtually no replay value. Also it has not much to do with evolution. A decision to add two eyes on my ass or 5 eyes on long stalks on my head have absolutely no ramification on my survivability. And the character creator is interesting for about 5 minutes. Don't bother with this game, well maybe buy it for your 9 year old.
I get the feeling that Spore originally was meant to be more but Maxis has always had trouble delivering. SimCity of course were amazing games. For their time. It is the reason the francise died. Because as it aged, the graphics improved but the quality of the simulation didn't and we as players became aware that more was needed. More paths, more options, more choice. Instead SimCity and the likes have always had a rather narrow path to victory and if veered of that path, the game model couldn't cope.
Spore is perhaps the greatest failure. It seems originally to have been a game about evolution or at least to use evolution.
There have been games in this nature before, so it can be done. I remember an ancient game that used clay-motion animation for its creatures that allowed you to breed creatures and cull them to get the ones best suited to their enviroment.
But there is NOTHING of that in this game. As the article mentions, antlers on your back help you charge skill. You charge backwards?
There is just one TINY hint at the slightest possibilty of evolution, fruits. If you are small, you can only reach fallen fruit, if you are tall, you can get the highest fruits. There is no difference in the fruits but it is the one and only time the build of your creature seems to matter.
The rest of the time, it just don't matter. You can't even make a monster eater with a dozen mouths that devours everything in its path, or a super defensive creature because multiple items don't stack their bonusses.
The game just completly failed to live up to its early promises. I get the feeling Will Wright is following in Molyneux's footsteps. Once a person who made innovative and fun game but one who increasingly just can't deliver on his promises.
To bad because a game that uses evolution to judge your creationism could be a lot of fun.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
NT
The comments of an Expert in Field A -
when they deal with matters in Field B -
should NOT count, ie, any more than
any other "person on the street"
Why then should they arouse any interest
in the media?
Oh, this is SlashDot, not the media. ...nevermind. :-)
A cheery "pong" sound preceded the announcement to passengers of the Boeing Sarcasm 767:
"This Sarcastic Joke Airways flight 666 from ctaylor +5 Funny airport to LOLzistan is cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet, right over Anonymous Coward's head. We expect to reach our destination 30 minutes after Anonymous Coward has had his dinner and is sitting on the toilet, giving him time to contemplate id vs. ID and whatthefuckapunisanyway.
"Cabin crew, please release the chemical toilets."
*WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH*
a better simulation of evolution would be a world where you change the world rules and see what happens to the lifeforms. i.e. if a meteorite hits how will this set of creatures evolve to cope, or global warming will affect how. i wonder what EA will evolve into?
I heard that Star Trek sometimes features unrealistic physics and that Jedi isn't a real religion. What is it with the world these days?
Special forces report Counter Strike, flunks basic antiterrorist tactics.
Apparently you don't jump about like a fucktard while firing across the room the the enemy, then hump thier corpse afterwards.
Since when has any game ever been realistic?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
especially in noting the evolution from primate, to nigger, and then finally, to elitist.
1. EA headquarters - LA
2. headquarters of rush limbuagh - new york city
3. headquarters of fox news - times square
4. will wright lives in .... san francisco
5. james dobson lives in - denver, colorado
My wife's lab - she's an evolutionary biologist, in a sense - gathered around Spore last week, and we all had a good laugh. Out of something like three master's students, three Ph.D. candidates, three Ph.D.s, and me, lowly MFA that I am, nobody could think of a single thing it did right in terms of actual evolution ... but, at the same time, it's so thoroughly, ludicrously wacko (all herbivores want to be friends with other species? Anyone who's ever seen a hippo in the wild wouldn't agree with that... ) that we agreed that it couldn't possibly help the ID folks, either. I mean ... would *they* want people to think that God sends piles of bones down to induce change in how well species dance?
It's a Big Bucket of Fail on pretty much every level, no matter what direction you're coming from.
dont like to use that word. use 'manifest destiny'
Spore is the worst game that I've ever played. If you're thinking about buying this game, or even stealing it to play, just don't. Your time is better spent else where.
Spore left me bitterly, bitterly disappointed. So much so that I'll keep posting these posts, well, forever. Survival of the fittest in my opinion. This game sucks balls and I hope the developers and publishers behind the title all get the sack.
The problem with an evolution game is that it's completely non-interactive. At most you might be able to design the environment and maybe tweak a couple of universal constants but I doubt that there is really any game that could make evolution an engaging experience.
But the environment need not be static, and cataclysmic events have repeatedly wiped out major clades in Earth's history. Evolution by creeps between these events, and evolution by jerks during and after them.
So, you could chuck an asteroid at the planet every now and then (different extinctions if it lands in ocean vs continent), or have a passing star perturb the planet's orbit (radical long term climate shift), or have a nearby star go supernova (x-rays, gamma rays, death except in deep water), or just watch the biosphere occasionally destabilize its environment without external impetus.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I say this because he donated a sizeable amount to the Republican campaign.
I simply do not believe if Will Wright gave any care to evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology he would be such a staunch Republican supporter in this election.
It is as you say rather scary that Spore is passed off as a game about evolutionary theory when it in fact teaches quite the opposite- intelligent design. One has to wonder what Will Wright's real motives behind suggesting this is a game about evolution actually are.
So, the Sims is an accurate life simulator. I.E. people can't get promoted at work unless they walk by a piece of abstract art or a potted plant on the way out their front door, and walking down a 40-foot hall takes approximately 15 minutes.
SimAnt works. I mean, just have one hill breed dozens of queens and the rest can breed pure workers and soldiers. They'll run the humans out of a house in no time!
Simtower. Elevators can't travel 100 floors, and people can't figure out how to ride three consecutive escalators. Oh, and they're more than happy to stand around at the elevator for 8 hours after work, then keep coming back to the office once they escape from your hulking firetrap.
Simcity 2k. Subways solve all traffic needs. Hydroelectric dams perched on water cubes are the energy source of the future. And don't forget, YOU WILL REGRET REDUCING TRANSPORTATION FUNDING!
Not that they aren't all interesting in their own ways, but scientifically accurate, no they are not. They're sandbox games, first, second, and even after everything else has had a turn.
You don't need to have a degree in evolutionary biology or even have taken a biology class to know Spore doesn't have anything to do with evolutionary biology, after playing it.
All you need is to have heard of evolution, and watch, oh maybe 5 minutes of a dog or cat show to realize this.
I actually read the article and they seemed, in general, to like it but only so much as it was a toy and it should have marketed more on that angle than with the pseudo-scientific cods-wallop it has on the back of the box.
Best article I have read today!
I find the game to be a lot of fun. I'll let you guys argue while I play and enjoy myself.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
I will be so fucking glad when the elections are over so all the fanboys of whatever political party can go back to myspace, or whereever they came from, and leave slashdot and wikipedia alone.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You play the game simply for enjoying it. I didn't start playing Spore because it had anything to do with ID, creationism or evolution. I played it cause it looked fun. F-U-N. Ya know that 3 letter word where you really dont care if you are learning anything as long as its enjoyable? Spore is less of a "game" and more of a sandbox for enjoyment. What Spore is not, is a soapbox. Read the article from PC Gamer in the September issue if you are interested in the game that Spore actually is and more on the game vs. sandbox concept, instead of what people have decided what they think Will Wright was trying to do.
"When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you.
False. I've run into "previous" versions of my creatures. It depends on if you save your creature after every modification.
Nor does it have natural selection. "There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest
False. ANOTHER creature of your species appears at the nest. The last one you were playing is still dead. (If you hurry you can go see it's corpse) Also the creature that ate you seems more pre-disposed to hunt you after that. (Perhaps as they learn that you=food)
Your organism does evolve, says Gregory, "in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things evolve in the real world."
Depends. The changes you can make to your species aren't 'locked' to only what is considered reasonable by evolutionary standards. HOWEVER if that's how you wish to play your species, go right ahead and make small changes over time to reach your desired goal. I played a species where I stuck to tighter evolution-style changes, and it was a very rewarding style of play. If you design your species to 'min/max' it, putting on parts just because of their point value, you WILL have a pretty repetative experience after the first dozen games. Design your critters for what YOU think is cool. You don't actually need the highest level abilities to win the creature stage, and after that the abilities don't matter much anyway.
I'm not saying Spore is the best game ever. I've hardly played it since I got to the center of the galaxy, having moved on to other games. All the stages are painfully shallow experiences compared to their potential. I can practically SEE the dotted lines where they cut stuff out to put in expansion packs. (I don't know if that was EA or Will Wright who did that, though my guess would be EA.)
Faults: Cell stage, identical creatures. Cell stage doesn't use user-created content, so you end up seeing the same (what, two dozen?) critters every game. Creature stage: Shallow play, obvious features missing (ref: game developer conference video) Tribal stage: Very shallow gameplay. I didn't feel like I was playing a species that had just clawed it's way to the vaguest semblance of intelligence. Civilization stage: Extremely shallow gameplay. I mean, seriously. We had two ways to interact before, now only 1 per type of civ. Why not two? One passive, one active. Economic: Slow Buyout*/Hostile Takeover, Military: Mercenaries/Combat Troops* Religious: Proselytizers/Converters*, existing ones marked with *. There, how hard was that? Space stage: 'OMFG why am I in a fucking kiddie pool' shallow gameplay. Why can't I tell my allies to make peace with each other? Or communicate any other complex concepts?
Verdict: If you haven't bought it already, wait for Spore 2, by that time all the expansion packs for Spore 1 will be out and bundled into a cheap discount package. If you have bought it, shelve it for a few years and then pick up the expansions when they're cheap. Otherwise be prepared for Spore to start feeling a lot like The Sims 1 with no expansions after a few games. (Remember that? Nothing but the same six objects, bed, fridge, toilet, shower, tv, and couch, which your characters endlessly wandered between in a vague mockery of life.)
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
In other news, cars can't do what they do in GTA and Martial Arts movies get physics wrong. Nearly all entertainment requires a willful suspension of disbelief. Novel concept, no?
The game Monopoly isn't like home ownership
The game Operation isn't like surgery
The game "The game of Life" isn't like real life
The game Battleship isn't like naval combat.
The game Hungry Hungry Hippos, doesn't accurately reflect the feeding habits of hippos.
It's evolution, however the fitness test is how much you like the creature you are creating. When I look over the series of creatures I've created I can see an evolution, but it's personal. The creature becomes more and more what I wanted it to be. The extra armour didn't save it from dying off, the eyes didn't give it an advantage over creatures with bigger ears.
It's a game. The creatures survive based on how much I LIKED THEM.