A video game for intellectuals
I’m not a technically inclined person, although I’ve been around them from day one. My father earned one of the first masters’ degrees Stanford gave in computer science and engineering, my brother began programming computers when he was 11, my first boyfriend claims the CIA came to his house when he was 14 because he and his buddy had hacked into NASA.
However, a game that will be released late this year or early next year has excited me so much I had to share it. Spore allows you to evolve life from a microscopic organism to a space faring civilization with detailed steps along the way.
You give the creature certain characteristics and the computer animates it – it makes it move like it things a land-based, top heavy, 7 legged herbivore should move. And you can buy more brain-power as you move through the game so your being can eventually become sentient. As I understand it, your computer interfaces with a web-based catalog of all the creatures and buildings and creations of all other players around the world and populates your world with beings who fit into the system you have created. Let’s say you create a giant amphibious carnivore as your primary “character.” The game will go find appropriate prey and predators for you from its library. Once you get into space, you get to go visit other people’s worlds. You can be diplomatic or you can blow them to smithereens. There isn’t (yet) an interactive component for the game – if you blow up someone’s world that only takes place in your computer’s memory, not in that person’s system.
The game’s creator says "I didn't want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien."
If you are as fascinated with the concept as I am, I suggest you go watch this video, where the creator, Will Wright, talks about Spore at the 2005 Game Developers Conference.
As an evolutionary biologist, this game thrills me on so many levels – not only do I get to be part of an evolutionary process through playing, I see this as a huge evolutionary step in the way we interact with technology. This is the first thing I’ve seen marketed to the masses that gives us a hint as to what AI can do. As I understand it, this isn’t even really AI, or if it is, it is pretty basic. I get a glimpse here of how our relationship with computers will change over the next ten years and I am awe-struck.
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Comments (1)
Gamers (a group that I now have the willpower to not be a member of) know Will Wright as the legendary inventor of such games as SimCity, The Sims, A-Train and many more simulations, or "sims". The guy single-handedly created an entire genre of gaming. How interesting that he tackles evolution as a game concept (not for the first time), as he evolves his ideas of what the very nature of gaming is. So are we going to see seven legged creatures running around the mountains of Ojai?
Comment #1 Posted by: Tyler | March 26, 2006 04:39 PM