[For the latest guest post, I’m happy to hand over once again to Alexander Sigsworth, who you can find blogging at alexsigsworth.wordpress.com and who most recently wrote here about Lego Star Wars: The Video Game and Need for Speed: Underground 2]
“It’s probably the greatest creative risk maybe going on in the game industry today… I believe it’s going to be one of the greatest franchises in our industry and will rival World of Warcraft or The Sims or Rock Band. It’s going to be right up there.”
SimAnt. SimCity. SimEarth. SimLife. The Sims.
It was inevitable that Will Wright would eventually attempt SimEverything.
A game combining all his previous efforts and concepts into a single, unified vision. A game about building the atomic blocks of the universe, evolving organisms, navigating the ocean, fighting other creatures, commanding an army, running a city, conquering the world, terraforming planets and colonising the galaxy – all in one and taking place over hundreds of billions of years.
It had the potential to be his magnum opus. A game so big, so expansive and so all-encompassing that it was as though the video game medium itself had completed its evolution and achieved its final, ultimate form. The place they’d always been heading. The logical conclusion of everything that had come before it. The culmination of an industry and its technology.
The end point of gaming.
In a way, this is exactly what the finished game ended up both being and also not being. It is a game that, for some people, was a transcendent experience, while, for others, was a disappointing failure. It raised questions over what games should be and how we should think about them. It has a mixed, divisive legacy. Just as the game charts the development of the player’s own species from one form to the next, as the seed of Spore grew into something bigger, it, too, evolved. But then, over the fourteen years since its release, so did the conversation about the game. It’s fitting that there should be such a diversity of opinions about a game inspired by the diversity of life, such a wide range of reactions to a game taking place across an entire galaxy. In the end, that’s what happens when you try to make a game about everything.
SimEverything was, in fact, Will Wright’s first title for the game. Inspired by SETI, the initial concept was a game about exploring the galaxy. He began developing it in 2000 but it wouldn’t be publicly previewed until 2005. At that year’s Game Developers Conference, Wright delivered a presentation on procedural generation and how it had been utilised to develop the game. During his 35-minute demo, he showed the audience the game’s multiple stages as his species became more advanced. Their reaction was palpable as they realised that each stage wasn’t the final stage. They became more audibly impressed with each advance. When his spaceship left the planet’s orbit and the game zoomed-out to show his local star system, they cheered and applauded. But, after a few minutes of hopping from planet to planet, he showed them that he still wasn’t done and left his local system entirely. The game zoomed-out yet further to reveal an entire galaxy full of systems and planets, all of them able to be explored.
It is at this point that the audience gasped. Nothing like this had ever been seen before. There’d been games like each of the different stages individually but none had ever strung them together to form a single game. It combined gameplay formats, each of them detailed on both the micro and macro design levels and each of them forming part of an overarching progression system.
The secret was out. The world now knew it was coming. The anticipation had begun. It finally had a name, too: Wright revealed “we’re calling it Spore”. The new title had been proposed by senior art director Ocean Quigley – a less gimmicky, more concise way of describing the game.
It’s no surprise that it won Best in Show at E3, when guests were told they’d be able to play it in 2006.
But Spore’s appearances at the expo became annual, with the release date being continuously pushed back. The excitement for it being released turned to doubt that it ever would be. In 2007, the game placed second on Wired’s annual vaporware list based on reader votes. There were questions asked as to why it was taking so long – which, I think, raises a further question: when is the right time to a discuss a game and how should it be considered?
Spore was revealed during the middle of its development. The purpose of that reveal was to generate excitement and discussion – but about what? The game or the preview of the game? Similarly, why had it been promoted at three consecutive E3 conventions: to bait the gaming world into getting excited over nothing – or to reassure them that it was coming with a demonstration of how far along it was?
The problem was likely compounded by Will Wright’s status as a developer. Coming off the success of SimCity and The Sims, there was a high expectation on him that his next game would be at least as innovative, if not more so. Most other developers wouldn’t have been burdened with such anticipation, nor would they have received such wide coverage in the press over a game they were still developing. Adding to this is the Internet, which can amplify the cultural conversation but can also inflate it out of proportion.
However, all of this was only possible because of the decision to reveal Spore so early. Once the f. catus is let out of the bag, it can’t be put back in. Once you let it be known that a game is coming, you have to keep providing updates or people will naturally begin to wonder what’s going on. Of course, for a project still in development, this means showing them a version of it that will likely differ in some way from the finished product – and the earlier in its development you show it to people, the bigger that eventual difference is likely to end up being.
When it comes to the creative process, video games are no different from a novel that’s rewritten multiple times until the author has a version of the story they’re happy with or a film that goes through various cuts with alternate takes or different scenes. Things change, you realise something isn’t working. You make alterations until, finally, you’re satisfied with what you have and then, when you think back to the first version and all its flaws, you feel a sense of accomplishment at having kept at it and seen it through, even when doing so felt pointless. Every great game you’ve played is the result of this same process, you just don’t see that process.
Unless you’re shown a version of the game that’s still three years away from being released.
It is inevitable that, over such a long period of time, it will have changed substantially, otherwise it would have been released much sooner. While the false expectations leading up to its release were made possible by the game being revealed so prematurely, there was also the responsibility of the gamers following it online to understand that such early previews are not the same thing as the final game. Every trailer, gameplay demo, and piece of concept art should be taken in moderation for what they are: samples of an incomplete process. It’s important to remember how that process works so you can respond to each part of it appropriately. That doesn’t just mean taking advanced glimpses in moderation but also means separating the finished version of the game from those advanced glimpses. Otherwise, you enter the game with false expectations that negatively influence your reaction to it.
So…
When Spore was finally released in September 2008, its reception was… quite different from the reactions to its initial demo.
During its development, the developers had split into two camps, cute and science, and ultimately compromised on creative decisions. As a result, the game had evolved from a realistic simulator to something more playful and fun. While it established a consistency that helped ease the transition between each stage by providing a stylistic throughline, it was also in keeping with the Maxis brand of being more kid-oriented. The creatures had a more cartoonish appearance, right down to the cells of the first stage having big, round eyes, and the gameplay mechanics were simplified. Evolution didn’t resemble anything observed by Darwin and it certainly wasn’t naturally selective. Science dismissed the game’s scientific inaccuracy while Seed went several steps further and criticised the game for promoting the idea of intelligent design as being science-based.
Seed’s article further explained that one of the earlier design decisions that had been reversed in subsequent versions was that faster-than-light travel shouldn’t be possible in the space stage, as in real life. After several weeks of replaying the game as research, I can’t imagine a version of the space stage without faster-than-light travel. The freedom, the very ability, to zip between stars is so fundamental that it doesn’t even need to be unlocked – the interstellar drive is granted to the player’s spaceship when they embark on their first mission to another system. There are so many stars and they’re so widespread that not being able to hop from one to the other would’ve made it, at best, too frustrating to be worthwhile and, at worst, practically impossible to play at all. Being scientifically accurate wouldn’t have made for a game with broad appeal. You can have one but not both. The former would have become an obsession with its players – but its players would have been a very specific niche. Whereas the latter was a game for everyone.
Wright explained that early prototypes didn’t garner an emotional response from players. The evolution mechanic was mutation-based and happened slowly over an extended period of time. But once it had been reconfigured to place the players more in the role of divine intervener rather than simple observer, they found it more personal. The creatures were now being evolved rather than evolving on their own but this gave the player more options rather than limiting them to whatever they ended up with. They could give their creatures parts they didn’t need just because they liked how it looked and could attach it to the next generation. Rather than developing adaptations to suit their environment through the millennia, members of the player’s species were being born with new organs fully developed and seemingly with no explanation.
This was not the simulator that the game’s earlier material had resembled. Such a big change did not go down well with the pre-eminent fandom that the game had built. On the video of Wright’s first demonstration of the game in 2005, comments include:
“Still one of the biggest crimes EA has committed”
“Once or twice every year, I like to go back and watch this video just to remind me what Spore could have been.”
“It’s just depressing to see how much they butchered the idea.”
“It actually makes me genuinely angry watching this now”
The evolution mechanic was nothing like reality (Science awarded the game an F grade for mutation, natural selection and genetics). “Gamifying” it while retaining accuracy was never going to be possible. But being accurate and fun at the same time was also never going to be possible. In the event, Maxis decided that games should be fun above all else and chose to make the necessary sacrifices. This decision was the opposite of what the serious gamers had wanted. They had wanted “science Spore”, a game that was intellectually stimulating and academic.
It was a prime example of a developer doing the opposite of what groups of vocal gamers desired. But consumers aren’t creators. There’s a dividing line between them – and on Maxis’ side of the line, there’s a better, less obstructed perspective. You can see the lay of the land more clearly. So Maxis knew something the gamers didn’t: it knew that those gamers were, despite their enthusiasm, not actually all that many in number. It is, after all, a professional development studio. It does understand the industry. It knows how things work. Whereas gamers can often forget certain things. They can forget that they’re not necessarily all that significant compared with the rest of the market, that their tastes and opinions don’t necessarily reflect those of the typical consumer and that not every game is necessarily made specifically for them.
In the case of Spore, gamers had made the mistake of confusing access to early, still-in-development versions of a game with being given a say in how it should be made. They’d confused being invited to observe with being asked for their involvement. They’d confused their own status as fans of gaming with an actual, professional position within the industry. But as far as that industry was concerned, they were, at the end of the day, just consumers. Consumers with a particular interest in the product, consumers who liked to discuss the product with each other, consumers who spent a lot of time giving their opinions on the product, but still just consumers.
When Spore was released and turned out to be different from its early versions, this divide was exposed. Wright responded to criticism of having “dumbed-down” the game by explaining that the intention was to make a game that was accessible to casual players. That’s who games are made for in the end: the players – not the minority who’ve followed their development online, not the forum posters, not the E3 attendees – the majority of video game players, who only find out about a particular game once it’s released or is soon to be released, who don’t know what a game was like in its early stages and have formed no preconceptions or personal attachment, who can judge a game for what it is, not for what it isn’t or for what it could’ve been.
It was controversial at the time but it was the right choice: the more ambitious your gameplay concept, the more important it is to create a space for the average gamer. The average gamer would not have been interested in playing “science Spore” for the simple reason that, while it could have made for a great simulator (albeit with at least some elements of science fiction) and educational tool, “science Spore” would not have made for a compelling game – which is what Will Wright and the rest of the development team wanted to make… and that meant cutting out certain excess features so players weren’t overloaded. Whole stages were removed: molecular, aquatic and city, while terraforming was merged into the space stage. It meant making the combat less graphic by removing blood and the ability for players to make abducted creatures explode by dropping them on barren worlds. It meant skipping each creature’s infancy and taking out events such as nest defence and music-based communication sequences inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So much of the game was cut down that, even in positive reviews, a recurring criticism was that it no longer matched its intended scale – and, while that’s true, its actual scale is still immense.
Even compared with how much was ultimately cut, I remain impressed with the sheer volume of content in the game.
The transitions between each stage are sudden, giant leaps – cells “evolve” into land creatures as soon as they gain legs rather than spending time as fish first and tribes invent modern civilisation over night – but the inclusion of the other stages wouldn’t have changed this. The transitions are abrupt because each stage is a different gameplay concept (the tribal and civilisation stages, while both real time strategy, still vary in their execution); simply including more stages, with their own concepts, wouldn’t have changed that. It would still have presented an oversimplified version of history with distinct, defined eras.
Plus, what information is known about the cut stages calls their relevance into question. The molecular stage would have essentially been a tile-matching game, the aquatic stage was removed due to alleged problems with the physics engine, the city stage would have been too derivative of SimCity and, given how simple it is in the space stage, the terraforming was likely too insubstantial to justify as its own stage.
Whenever content from an early version of a game is cut from the final version, there’s always accusations of executive meddling or cynical money saving; the idea that more game is better game. But without playing a version of the game that includes the cut content, the reality will always remain unknown. The version of Spore that was published was derided for being a reduction in its possible scope – but the version of Spore that could’ve been published could just as easily have been rejected for being too ambitious, too much like other, better games and unfocused. One version is not enough but the other version is too much.
For a game with as high a concept as Spore, each new stage brought a different gameplay genre and, with it, the risk that it was one extra genre too many. Combining genres in the way Spore does only works if the number of genres combined is right. If it’s too few, it’s not worthwhile, but if it’s too many, it’s exhausting and tedious. Five is a good number of stages for Spore to have because, for some reason, five just feels like the right amount to have of anything – like digits on a human hand, days of the working week or members in a boyband.
Cell stage was necessary to lend the game its Kubrickian scale. Creature stage is about controlling an individual creature to have an up-close understanding of what you’ve created before you decide on your species’ final form. Tribal stage is a good way of summarising early-to-middle history, since there’s less difference between each year the further back through time you go. Civilisation stage is the modern day, so it makes sense to have that there too and the space stage, as the sandbox mode, is essentially the whole point of the game – so much so that it tends to overshadow the previous stages.
What made SimCity and The Sims popular is that they were sandbox games from the beginning. Spore has a sandbox mode that is unlocked by completing all the previous modes before it. They have objectives that can be fulfilled. They’re linear, with win/lose conditions that unlock the next stage. The player can choose not to advance, remaining in the stage perpetually, but there won’t be anything else for them to do. The space stage isn’t so much the end point of the game; rather, the stages leading up to it are essentially an extended prologue – but then, when so many different gameplay styles are included in one game, such a rigid progression structure is necessary. Without a clear sense of direction, the player would become swamped. To help them navigate such a large game, it was essential to establish a throughline. Yet each stage’s concept is inspired by non-linear genres. For example, civilisation stage is the same genre as, um… Civilisation (Civilization IV’s lead designer, Soren Johnson, was even recruited to work on it). Whereas civilisation in Spore is merely one of multiple stages inspired by other genres that all have to lead to the next one and, in so doing, lose the open-ended nature of the genre that inspired them.
As the final stage, space stage can be the sandbox mode; but anything before it has to have a predetermined destination, despite one of the defining traits of the genres they borrow being the absence of one. The space stage is three dimensional but the other stages are only two dimensional – perhaps even one dimensional. If the space stage is played expansively, the other stages are played horizontally. They can’t develop outwards or upwards like the space stage, they can only move from side to side. Of course, this is all to help the player advance so they can experience each stage but it reveals the contradiction inherent to the game: that homaging multiple genres in one game in a coherent way with a clear structure requires the jettisoning of the element that makes those genres popular.
It also turns each stage into less of its own thing and more of a checklist the player has to complete before they can play the game proper. I have to confess, I did find myself rushing through those first stages so I could get to the space stage. As much as I appreciated the variety of styles and how simple they were to get into straight away, I wasn’t invested in what I was doing beyond it being to get to the space stage and, in a way, that’s a failure of game design. The idea, I imagine, was to provide a backstory for my eventual space empire so I could appreciate everything that led up to it but, honestly, I didn’t.
Because, whereas the stages before space have a problem with too much linearity, the space stage itself has the problem of too much non-linearity. The events of your game are determined by your nearby empires, how close to you they are, their size and their philosophy. If, for example, your nearest neighbours are peaceful traders, you’ll soon be able to establish a trade route with them; But if, for example, a few systems over, there’s a warmongering state that wants to eliminate those who defy the word of Spode, you’ll find yourself under constant attack and forced to keep defending your cities and worlds. In my case, I had bad luck and found myself overwhelmed by an empire too big to possibly defeat, which grinded away at what few colonies I’d managed to establish before reducing me to my homeworld with only a few cities.
Too frustrated by the insurmountable odds against me, I decided to simply start a new game, this time going to the space stage now that I’d unlocked it in my first game. It was a species I hadn’t created with cities I hadn’t run and a world I hadn’t conquered. But I found that this gave me a sense of freedom. I didn’t feel the crushing weight of history behind me. Instead, it was refreshing to have the entire galaxy to explore without the burden of the hundreds of thousands of years that had led up to it.
This time, the political environment around me was much more stable. I managed to establish multiple peaceful alliances and began placing colonies like stepping stones in a lake to take me further toward the centre of the galaxy (by which I mean, toward the edge of my arm of it, then down the side toward the core). I could’ve started the whole game there and been quite satisfied. Especially given that all the work toward the space stage in my first game was ultimately proven pointless when I finally got there. Perhaps it was supposed to mirror the cell stage, in which the player controls a small organism in a vast ocean of many larger organisms? Perhaps it’s some sort of analogy for global politics? Or maybe it’s just uneven procedural generation? That would explain why I encountered some species and planet names multiple times in one game.
The volume of content created by Maxis is simply not enough for playing the game offline without breaking the illusion of it being just a game. The galaxy is not teeming with diverse lifeforms, there’s an observable limit to how many there are and that is the most disappointing aspect of the game. I understand this may have been to encourage online connectivity in order to populate the galaxy with downloaded user-generated content, therefore putting the players’ creativity at the heart of the game as in The Sims, but usually that’s to enhance the game. In Spore, it’s to finish the game, leaving the offline version of it being, essentially, a limited collection of placeholders. It makes the galaxy feel shallow and unbelievable and the concept squandered. It is because of this reason – if no other – that the artistic ambition behind the game of creating a galaxy full of life isn’t met. The reuse of familiar creatures and world names gives the galaxy a shallow gene pool. You don’t need to travel far to see most of what’s there, which is the opposite of what a game with such a large scale should require.
It has its fair share of other flaws, too, like colonies and allies calling for your help preventing an ecosystem collapse or defending them from pirates. Depending on how large your empire has become, travelling all that way for a simple mission can become tedious, especially when you’re already dealing with so many other things. The problem is, if allowed to happen, the ecosystem on that world will decline and eventually die.
Another problem with the space stage is that, to say it’s so open and non-linear, advancing through it is rather repetitive: raise funds by completing variations on the same mission for your colonies and allies, locate a habitable system within travelling distance that will get your empire closer to the centre of the galaxy, place a colony there, defend it from enemies, rinse and repeat. It’s how I imagine Minecraft if you were only required to find the same material over and over again. As in reality, most of the galaxy is of no practical use. Managing your funds and resources economically means only covering the ground you need, so most systems aren’t worth colonising, most worlds not worth visiting.
However, while its flaws are more apparent to me than they were before, its strengths have remained. Its execution may have fallen short in a lot of ways, yet its capacity to inspire awe is just as strong as it always was.
Its depiction of life may be inaccurate – but only in how it functions, not in what it is. There’s more to life than biology and natural processes. Once a species’ brain expands enough to become sentient, it can begin to consider beyond its own physical form and understand the cosmos. Evolution and reproduction may be what life is, but what life does is learn, think, feel, imagine – and in this way, Spore gets it exactly right. Zooming out of my spaceship to see the entire galaxy, suspended in space, full of twinkling light and shining stars with soft, gentle electronic music… I felt something. It was like meditating, bathing in the galaxy’s beauty. Carl Sagan once said “The cosmos is also within us, we’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Spore may not have ended up as a simulation of how life works, but it’s absolutely an accurate representation of what life is like; not of how and why we exist but how existing feels. It is inherent in every lifeform to look up at the night sky and contemplate the hugeness of it all. The human race has been doing it for aeons. When I’m warping from one system to another until I’m hundreds of lightyears from my home planet, I find myself considering how much that distance would be in real terms and how far away in time it would take for it to be possible. It may only be in miniature, but it’s all I need. Similarly, the history of my species may only be simplified and contracted but it’s enough to get me thinking about how far we’ve come, how much we’ve achieved from nothing despite the mistakes we’ve made along the way and how our future can be determined by the simple choice of whether to destroy ourselves or not.
We cannot comprehend how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big our galaxy is alone. The experience of playing Spore is mind-enhancing, as if my brain is opening up, trying to understand that which cannot be understood. I love video games. They’re one of the ways I process the world. None of the effects of playing Spore are new, there’s nothing profound about it, nor any of its ideas. But that’s because they are the oldest ideas known to humankind. What Spore does is to communicate them to me through a medium I can understand, based on the particular time in human history that I, specifically, get to experience. The chances of that ever happening at all were so small as to be almost zero. In the grandest scheme of all things, my problems are insignificant.
I like to think of Spore as an analogy for the experience of all humans. It starts with us swimming in the dark, then taking our first steps, learning how to use tools, running our own life until, one day, we can break away to set out into the wider world, overcoming whatever we may face. Almost no one reaches the galactic centre in the end. Very few of us discover the secret knowledge within. But it’s the search that makes it worthwhile. By the time you find it, you’ve already learnt enough that you don’t need it anyway.
While I may not be a religious person, I still find sources of wisdom in other things. For me, one of those things is Spore. It doesn’t tell me anything new; rather, it merely reflects what’s already inside me, what I already believe. Playing it is something of a religious experience. It fulfils the same needs. Maxis may have been criticised for not giving it enough brain, but they made up for it somewhere else: its soul – and that gave the game a completely different lease of life than it could have had.
While the initial fans who’d wanted “science Spore” were disappointed, “cute Spore” eventually found its own, new fans who enjoyed the wide spectrum of creativity the game provided. On the video of the final trailer of the game at E3 2008, comments include:
“One of the best games ever made”
“I haven’t played Spore in forever and this makes me want to play it again”
“This video game was great, I used to play Spore all the time when I was a kid.”
“Am I the only one who gets chills when I watch this….”
The game’s launch was overshadowed by comparisons with its earlier versions but the decision to shift the gameplay towards the player being able to take ownership of their creations and determine their own experience means that, today, it is much more fondly remembered. It was rejected by the audience who’d awaited it and were disappointed by it but it was embraced by the audience who discovered it and were enraptured by it. The first video on the YouTube search results page for “Spore” was uploaded one day ago (as of writing) and has over 43,000 views. Going down the page, most videos are creature-focused: EVOLVING The Most DANGEROUS Creature Ever in Spore (447, 000), Spore But Dinosaurs NEVER WENT EXTINCT (1, 200, 000), Can I Evolve A BLIND SPECIES in Spore? (1, 000, 000). Spore has become a game about creating different creatures and experimenting with different designs. That isn’t the game certain people spent several years waiting to play, but the idea that developers should allow loud voices on the Internet to dictate what game they make has been dispelled by the home Spore found with players who didn’t know they were looking for it. It is, after all, the players who ultimately decide what a game is.
Fourteen years later, after the initial hype and the backlash that followed, Spore’s legacy is one that leaves in its wake questions about how we should think, not just about video games, but about all cultural products.
The window into behind the scenes of games development is becoming ever more transparent but it is still a window. We are able to observe ever more closely the process of making a game but we are still observing. Our opinions are becoming ever clearer but they are still our opinions. Not every game is for us. That doesn’t mean there isn’t someone else out there who’ll love it.
“One of my original goals was to give players the equivalent of a drug-induced epiphany. I’ve been surprised, given Spore’s epic scale, that it has such broad appeal — that the average person finds some meaning in it. Of course, every player finds a different meaning: how big the universe is, or the existence of different timescales, or how precious life is. The important thing is getting people to step back and enjoy the view.”
Top of the charts for week ending 6 September 2008:
Top of the charts for week ending 13 September 2008:
