
Spore is about evolution. Or is it? - robg
http://www.slate.com/id/2199922/pagenum/all/#page_start
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geuis
I bought Spore the day it came out. Played till space stage. It's ultimately
boring. The 2 evolution stages are a lot of fun but the game loses depth after
that. It's way to easy to conquer the world in tribal and civ stages. Space is
little more than making colonies and buying/selling spice for money. The
combat system seems like it was added as an afterthought. You can terraform
planets, but it's not as cool as it sounds. There's just way too much
micromanagement going on. If I'm trying to spread around the galaxy, it's
annoying to have to manage riots in cities on various worlds while being at
war and trying to stabilize several ecologies by moving the right kind of
grass or bush from one place to another. The whole game is just incredibly
shallow.

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vaksel
yeah the space stage is very boring after you spend a few hours getting your
things together

Trade? I have 4 systems within a short range of my home system, each has every
planet maxed out and every colony maxed out. Which means I get 30 items of
spice very quickly. When I stopped playing(after 2 days) I had a grand total
of 90 million.

Terraforming? I have the maxed out cargo bay and have 50 items of each stage
for terraforming. If I run out, I can go to any of my planets and just shoot
the beam around getting only those that I like

Battle? I have 5 sidekicks, they are useless though since my ship has
something like 11000 health, has the shield option that makes it invincible
for a few minutes and has maxed out weaponry. Meaning I can take out another
home planet(8 colonies) w/o needing to recharge/heal...takes like 30 seconds
to hover over a colony, shoot up the main ring of buildings, and then have
them surrender with 3 shots at the town hall.

Customization? Sure its fun at first, but it gets boring fast, by the end of
it I just went to the database and pulled out old designs.

Alliances? Also boring, I'm down to only needing to do one mission to get a
full fledged alliance and there is only like 3 variations there.

Looking back I'd say I spent more time designing the creatures, buildings and
units than I did playing the actual game. i.e. I spent more time designing the
town hall in the world stage, than I did actually playing it.

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jauco
Spore contains Intelligent Design elements? How awful! Let's build a computer
game in which the player has no direct influence whatsoever!

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shaunxcode
you've been upvoted because despite your sarcasm I actually think a game where
you control some of the initial settings and then sit back and watch
mutations/evolution happen would be really cool. More like a digital mutant
ant farm.

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derefr
That would be Tiny Crawl World, or one of the related designs:
<http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=29>

(Sean Howard's work is about as close as you'll get to "Game Design design
patterns.")

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shaunxcode
wow thanks for the link! Some interesting ideas on there for sure. While it
meets the criteria of "passive interaction" it doesn't really touch on
mutation/evolution.

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rplevy
Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really
deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary
biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the
side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight
has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has
made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we
forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead
cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many
fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins
by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In
the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into
the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role
of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is
not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the
production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to
be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms.
The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the
neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins
(also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one
and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in
other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of
fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and
make some real progress.

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peregrine
Wow this guy just destroyed my childhood love of simcity....

