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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...
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.
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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.
In the spirit of fairness, I had a copy of Spore sent to Michael Behe, an intelligent design advocate based at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. After playing Spore, he concluded that it "has nothing to do with real science or real evolution--neither Darwinian nor intelligent design."
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.
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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."?
You mean like Doom or Quake? Wow. I'm a lot more interested in Spore now.
A cheery "pong" sound preceded the announcement to passengers of the Boeing Sarcasm 767:
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*WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH*
Are you serious?
You guys have taken a game ... thats it, nothing more than a game, that no one in their right mind would consider to be based on anything scientific or religous and turned it into an evolution versus intelligent design thing?
For fucks sake, not everything is about advancing some agenda that you don't agree with. Put your damn tin foil hats back on and crawl back into your fucked up world of conspiracies instead of talking to those of us in the normal world.
Its just a damn game, nothing more.
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Agenda or not, it was marketed as a game about evolution, but plays like a game about Intelligent Design. I think the comparison is very apt.
... and then they built the supercollider.