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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.
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?!?
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...
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.
four card-carrying scientists
I thought it was just a metaphor. Like, leave your scientist card by the door on the way out.
No, there's a card for just about everything these days. For example, I'm a card-carrying sysadmin, but I'm also a card-carrying Slashdot geek. I am also a card-carrying American, a card-carrying driver of cars, and a card-carrying member of the Subway Sub Club.
Really, if you don't have a card for everything you do and everything you are, how can we really trust that you are what you say you are? Are you a card-carrying Anonymous Coward? Or a dirty fraud? We can't tell!
My wallet is overflowing with cards proving everything about every aspect of my life (I'm also a card-carrying wallet overstuffer!). Really, I don't know how you can get along in life without the appropriate cards.
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.
what do you expect?
Obviously what they expected was better evolutionary biology principles. Was that an unreasonable expectation? Well, yeah, and I bet they feel stupid for expecting that now, but hindsight is 20-20.
Speaking as someone who spent three years working in the field of evolutionary biology (from the standpoint of working on same with evolutionary algorithms), I can tell you that the reality of that subject, whilst scientifically fascinating, is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
You wouldn't want a game to follow scientifically realistic principles. For one thing doing so would involve including the possibility that it would go off on a tangent and fail. You don't want that, not in a game anyway, which means you have to add a lot of constraints, which in turn means a truly scientific approach is pretty much impossible.
That said, I'm sure there is a lot that can be taken from the real science. Just don't ask a scientist to do the extraction, instead, ask an experienced game designer, someone who knows what a game would need.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
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."?
Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
Huh?
Why does NOT having a higher power deprive life of value?
And if life has no value intrinsically, then why does a higher power "give" it any value at all?
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.
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?
I think it would help if you read this
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.
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 implies B) does not imply (not-A implies not-B). The original poster was saying IF there is a god (of any sort, THEN life has value. This seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say. There is of course the possibility that God exists, but couldn't care less about puny mortals, but the consensus among most religions is that they do.
The statement DOES imply "If life has no value, then it's likely there is no god", but it says nothing about what might be true if there is no god.
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.
I don't understand. If god exists, and cares about puny mortals, why does that give them value?
Why does god and his cares have intrinsic value any more than life itself?
2 things here:
#1, I've lived in Kansas and know many people there. 90% of the plains area are backwards rednecks who deny evolution. I had to work for years to overcome prejudices I learned growing up there... and I'm embarassed every time it slips through. I thank my wife for getting me the hell out of that state before the damage was even more perminant. A lot of them are nice people (if you're straight, white, and faithful), however, they are backwards rednecks who deny evolution.
#2, Yes, everyone knows that not every religious person belives in young earth... however nearly half do acording to studys. Just because these religions have split to the point where commenting on their stupidy is akin to playing whack-a-mole doesn't change the fact that you are defined by the company kept by the majority of a group. If you don't want called stupid for being part of the group don't bitch at the people calling you stupid, bitch at the people making you look stupid.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Well if you believe that God himself actually wanted the Crusades to happen, I could understand that comment.
What God's followers do in his name is not the same as what it is he wants done by his followers.
Reading the Bible helps clear a lot of these misunderstandings up.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Saying its the "ultimate authority on morals" is not enough to explain why they should care about what he thinks. Why should they accept, rather than reject morals?
Its not enough to have a god that cares about life so that life would have value. You have to accept that god's values as your own, to inherit the view that life has value.
So why not skip the god part, and accept the view life has value without all the god mumbo jumbo?
Not acknowledging the existence of a higher power invalidates a number of arguments that life has value. That's not at all the same as depriving life of value.
If life has value, the invalidation of a large class of arguments to that effect only means that this fact must be demonstrated differently. On the other hand, if life has NO value, then contrary arguments that it HAS value are necessarily disprovable in some way. However, not all disproofs of such counter arguments are necessarily valid, they are just correct. A third possibility is that existence of value in life cannot be proved or disproved within the terms of discourse. In that case one can consistently take it as axiomatic one way or the other.
That's where things get interesting. Different moralities could be constructed around either alternative. For those who take the position that life has value, this value is, in a sense, rooted in the arguments to that effect. Refuting the arguments thus really does deprive life of its value.
On the other hand, for those who take it for granted that life has no value, the success of a counter argument to their views entails the prospect of their magnificently bleak psychological landscape being cluttered with fluffy white bunny and pink valentine hearts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.