This is not to say that Will Wright is a visionary genius to come up with it. I figure he came up with *lots* of ideas, and then dropped them one by one — like the evolutionary stuff noted above — as the team got down to the problem of getting the game, the players, and some kind of noticeable *fun* onto the same page with each other. The notion of “well, let’s make something that a lot of non-hardcore folks will enjoy” might have come late in the process. Perhaps after failures to make deeper gameplay work.

Then again, this whole just-so story could be a load of crap.

Has someone already said that the most interesting display of evolution in Spore is the evolution of the *game* from concept to final product? If that line hasn’t been used, I have dibs on it. I’d *love* to see a detailed timeline of that evolution, with all its knots and trimmed branches.

My disappointment with the game is exactly what you were saying when you said “The promise of Spore was, in my mind at least, a world of automata”. I’ve done a lot of Artificial Life research in a past career and spent a lot of time looking at SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, etc and how they made fun games out of indirect control of automata. I was really excited to finally get an evolutionary version of one of those games. But Spore is even more of a play-with-dolls game than The Sims. And sadly, the actual minigameplay of the five stages seems awfully dull.

I heard Will Wright on an NPR call-inshow talking about Spore. A caller asked why there was no evolution and he said they originally intended to have that, more of a selection kind of gameplay. But they said it didn’t test well, that gameplayers felt too distanced from their creations when they evolved automatically. Which makes a lot of sense if your goal is The Sims, but seems like a lost opportunity to me.

You know what’s really fun instead of Spore? The new Viva Pinata game. That’s a fantastic play-with-automata game.

There was a great opportunity here to slowly ratchet up the goals and rewards, but it really felt like that opportunity was completely and thoroughly missed in favor of, “that’s ok, people are mostly playing for the creature creator.”

I recognize many people are ga-ga over the game, but I’m with you Pete — I just feel no compulsion to start it up.

Spore is ambitious, simulating no less than the entire evolution of a species, from single-celled microorganisms to interstellar explorers. But it doesn’t inspire the sense of awe you get from, say, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

I think “doesn’t inspire [a] sense of awe” is a good way to sum up the problems with a game that is ostensibly about such an awe-inspiring subject.

Consider this snippet from CNN, which I think is representative of how the mainstream press portrayed the game:

“Spore,” from the mind of legendary game designer Will Wright (“SimCity,” “The Sims”), is best described as a “God sim,” where players must assist the development of a single-cell organism until it evolves into a more advanced creature and then multiplies to form a village and then graduates to a thriving city.

Gamers can change the look and behavior of these creatures as well as customize the city’s objects, buildings and vehicles.

Read one way, that’s a simple description of what we got. But frankly, I think most people who read that (before the game’s release!) would have inferred a certain ‘distance’ from the creatures being “assisted”. Certainly, it would read completely differently had it been written “Spore is best described as a ‘maze game,’ where players must steer a single-cell organism around a pond, looking for food and power pellets.”

Or consider this preview from GameSpy:

We thought Wright had made his point but were surprised when he went back into the game and showed us how it was about to take a weird turn. See, along with adding extra legs and mouths and tails and claws to your creature, you could also slowly invest in the creature’s brain power. When you maxed out the creature’s brain, it suddenly developed … sentience!

And here, the game shifted focus. Instead of managing a single creature, you were suddenly in charge of a whole tribe of your creatures. Wright’s odd three-legged little critters danced around a hut in the center of a village. You could still evolve your creatures, but now, instead of buying new appendages or physical features, you bought them things like fire or weapons. Wright built a fire pit and his critters danced around it (making up a three-legged dance as they went along.) He built a drum and they started playing with it.

Then he placed down a rack of spears, and in a scene reminiscent of 2001, they stared at the rack of weapons with awe and wonder before all reaching forward with their tails and grabbing one. The three-legged critters all danced around, waving spears in the air with their tails. The game was smart enough to figure out which appendage was the likeliest for carrying stuff around in.

Now, maybe it’s unfair to blame Wright for what people wrote about the game. But the fact remains there’s a gap here, and I think at least some of the blame for that gap lies at the feet of those who sent out the press releases.

Andy P: I’m not seriously expecting people to pick up Dwarf Fortress. I accept that unless you are a Certain Type of Person the game is quite literally unplayable. I’m simplying exploring the shallowness of what “a fully realized world” means in context of this game.

It does bring up an interesting question. Did the run up for Spore really promise “sim-universe” or is that just what we projected on to it when we watched the demos?