Entertainment and reality go hand-in-hand these days. You can’t click your remote without wading through at least 38 reality shows.
When TV got “real,” the gaming industry followed suit. “The Sims,” legendary game designer Will Wright’s most successful creation, became the masterwork of simulation games when it launched in 2000.
“Spore,” released for the PC last Friday, is Wright’s latest opus and perhaps his loftiest yet. Through the course of the game, taking a page out of evolutionary, biology textbooks, players’ creatures evolve from single-cell organisms to highly advanced societies managing space-age empires.
After years of anticipation and hype, the arrival of “Spore” has people in the science world perking their ears up.
Some biologists are concerned the game’s facile interpretation of evolution undermines the theory of evolution.
Evolution is the change over time in the gene inheritance of a group of organisms. In the wild, one population of organisms may become more agile upon the arrival of a predator that will likely make prey of the least agile. Since the most agile survive, they will be the only ones left to reproduce and propagate the species.
Evolutionary biologists call this survival-of-the-fittest concept natural selection.
Natural selection, a vital component of evolution and certainly one students would need to grasp to understand, is one idea “Spore” never sniffs.
Wright, according to an interview in USA Today, wanted to incorporate random mutations, which would more accurately reflect the ideals of natural selection.
During the development of “Spore,” “We had the game carefully mutating things, and it just was not emotionally engaging. When we put the players in the role of intelligent designer, then people were much more emotionally attached to what they made,” Wright said.
Instead of following the precepts of natural selection, “Spore” designers decided to make players intelligent designers, manipulating the traits of their creatures.
By eating and propagating, players earn DNA points, which are used to upgrade their creatures with new body parts.
DNA points are hardly embedded into the principles of evolution.
Michael Singer, a professor in the department of integrative biology, teaches the clss Ecology, Evolution and Society but doubted the game would help him teach evolution.
He believes that the game provides no proof to the theory of evolution, and thus it would not be helpful in teaching it to his classes.
“It’s a game that would be fun to play for folks who already accept that very different organisms are related to each other and not fun for folks who don’t accept that,” he said. “I don’t think it would persuade a single person that cabbages or even chimps are our very distant relatives. You need to already believe that to find the game fun rather than offensive.”
The concept of evolution might be too elusive to cover in a simple video game. Indeed, it proved too complicated to incorporate into “Spore.”
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