The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Looking for something to keep me busy over about 30 hours of flying time in the last week, I decided to pick up the new game called Spore. Well, I actually have to admit that it wasnÕt that casual of a decision. I had been waiting for Spore to come out for the last year and a half. Will Wright, the creator of games such as The Sims and SimCity, started releasing teaser videos for the game over a year ago and IÕve been waiting all this time. Dropping down the 50 dollars for the game when I walked into Best Buy after flying into Winnipeg wasnÕt that much of a decision. The game has been getting mixed reviews. When it was in its final release form, it received a lot of bad press online over the digital rights management (DRM) system that was hooked into the game. According to rumours, the game had a strict certificate, requiring the game to call home every five days and only allowing the software to be installed five times. After that, it wouldnÕt work anymore. Needless to say, people were upset and promised to boycott the game. Since its release, the game has needed a large patch to be downloaded that changes all of this, but bad press before a release is never a good thing. Once I had bought my game I had to choose a planet and a food source: herbivore or carnivore. I was given a basic paremecium-looking creature and allowed to swim around. Eating more and more, I soon evolved into larger creatures and began opening menus, allowing me to change my body: getting different eyes and mouth pieces, changing my swimming methods and allowing me to stretch out my creature into different shapes. I knew the decisions I made here would affect me later on in the game. The game has been panned by a lot of fundamentalist Christian groups for its take on how creatures are formed. Basically, Spore is evolution in action. By eating more and more food, you gain more energy and this allows your DNA to change. As only a video game can do, you are then sent to a menu where you get to further choose the pieces that your creature has on it and also change how your creature looks and moves. There is no denying it, this is evolution. Saying that killing things in video games has been a crutch for too long, Will Wright has long called on game designers to think more widely, to look for inspiration in more places and to use the power of new gaming systems to push the ways we think. And Spore does make us think. Eventually my new little creature gathered enough DNA and went through enough stages that he went in search of a piece of land to crawl out onto. Once I was out here, it was an entirely different world. I now had to go in search of food, protect my nest of hatchlings and make allies who could help me accomplish the goals set out for me. Even though I had all of this time in the air, I found the in-flight movies too irresistible and instead immersed myself in mindless entertainment, the game set aside. I know IÕm almost finished this stage. My next is to step up again into communities. My little phetons need to learn how to form communities, and how to live together in relationships with those around them, not just viewing the entire space around them as food. After that, IÕm off to space, getting to spread my species onto other places supplied by the game. This is where this game is different from others. Instead of being a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) like World of Warcraft or Eve Online, Spore is what Wright calls a Massively Single Player Online Game (MSOG). This means that while I donÕt directly compete against other players, all of the other characters in my game have actually been made by someone else on their computer. When the game registers, it calls home and supplies the creatures made by other payers to my game. While I never see these other people, my creatures work against theirs in constant competition. An entirely new idea, IÕm looking forward to having more time getting my guys out into space. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
