I am a huge fan of the old Sim games. I hardly ever play anymore, but games such as Sim City played a significant role in my upbringing. Since I am GetReligion’s “token normal American young male” according to Terry, I have the honor of writing about the religion ghosts in the Spore story.
The question that few seem to ask is whether this game is more about evolution than it is some version of the intelligent design theory. After all, the user has the option of controlling the development of their world. Is the user in a sense playing God?
Here is a review by The New York Times:
What is the difference between a game and a toy? Does a game that feels more like a toy — even a scintillating, empowering toy — fall short on its own terms? Or is it enough just to be a great toy?
Those questions came to mind again and again as I spent more than 60 hours recently with Spore, the almost impossibly ambitious new brainchild of Will Wright. Best known for his popular evocations of urban sprawl (SimCity) and suburban Americana (The Sims), Mr. Wright has spent the last eight years trying to figure out how to convey the vast sweep of evolution from a single cell to the exploration of the galaxy as an interactive entertainment experience. His answer, Spore, is being released in stores and online for PCs and Macs in Europe on Friday and in North America this weekend.
As an intelligent romp through the sometimes contradictory realms of science, mythology, religion and hope about the universe around us, Spore both provokes and amuses. And as an agent of creativity it is a landmark. Never before have everyday people been given such extensive tools to create their digital alter ego.
The article manages to mention the word “intelligent” and religion in that last paragraph there, but not in the sense that I was thinking.
Here is a reader comment submitted to us recently:
I’m not sure if this counts as a religion ghost, but it’s definitely an intelligent design ghost. The NY Times has a story online today about the new computer game Spore …. The focus of the article is on the game’s debt to evolutionary biology, even though its actual gameplay is much more like intelligent design (or even a “God of the gaps” theory), since it requires input and choices from the player. The creatures do not “evolve” on their own. Yet the article doesn’t come close to even bringing up the topic…. I can understand The Times not wanting to confuse a computer game preview with a scientific and theological controversy, but the connections seem far too obvious to have simply been ignored.
While the NYT article actually hints at the issue, the article never really delves into it:
Yes, Spore is undeniably gorgeous; Mr. Wright and his development team at Maxis have accomplished a prodigious technical feat with the programming that allows members of Spore’s interstellar menagerie variously to walk, stalk, flop and fly as they befriend and devour one another. For that matter, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real). And yes, millions of people will surely spend countless hours, and dollars, on the fabulous computer toy that is Spore. And they should.
Yes it would be fascinating to know how the game fares among people who are skeptical of the theory of evolution. Perhaps the NYT will cover that story soon?
There are so many places one could run with this analogy. Obviously not every evolutionary effort goes as planned in the game (otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a game). So, when things go bad, is it the result of bad decisions by the “god-like” person playing the game? In Sim City (my favorite game of all time), one could easily perform disastrously as a mayor and the result would be a miserable city filled with pollution, crime, underemployment and uncontrolled disasters. If one performs in an equally pathetic manner in Spore, the results are going to be bad for the life that one is attempting to develop.
On the flip side, the successful player of Spore seems to be able to move his or her evolutionary world into a state similar to that of today and a little beyond. The conquest of space awaits us in God’s plan for the world? That is the case at least according to one game developer.
In any event, it would be imprecise to call the ability to control or guide the evolutionary aspect of Spore “intelligent.” An experienced successful player of the game could be deemed “intelligent” while the less successful would could be termed “unintelligent.” Thus, you could have both “unintelligent design” and “intelligent design” in the same game.
In concluding this rather rambling post, check out the headline in the review by The Los Angeles Times:
Electronic Arts spawns Spore — which may be a benevolent god
The article actually covers the release of Spore from the business perspective, which is probably appropriate and inline with the LAT’s efforts to cover the business of entertainment. However, at some point, and perhaps someone has already done this (please send here if you find one), someone should cover the “God” ghosts in the release of this game.
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Comments (10) |
September 8, 2008, at 10:08 am
Dpulliam asks “…it would be fascinating to know how the game fares among people who are skeptical of the theory of evolution.”
I will hypothesize:
(1) Some folks who are skeptical of evolution will not play the game because of the heresy implicit in being the god of the Spore universe.
(2) Some folks who are skeptical of evolution will not play the game because they’re not smart enough to figure out how play it.
(/snark)
September 8, 2008, at 10:28 am
Paul,
Ha! I suppose that the appropriately snarky response would be that some people who are skeptical of the role of God in evolution/creation will find the game a waste of money, because they will simply sit in front of their computer and wait for the game to do something on its own.
I, too, grew up with SimCity, and I was glad to see a recent WSJ sidebar with Will Wright in which he named some of his favorite games. Civilization made the cut, another of my favorites. I’ve played around with the free version of Spore Creature Creator, and it’s a lot of fun.
Have any religious magazines covered the game? I hope so, as games like Spore and Civilization, which encourage creativity, foresight, and coping with consequences, are far more “Christian” than the sad shoot-em-ups that occasionally get marketed as Christian alternatives to mainstream games. I would also think that the ID community would be favorable toward Spore, since it implies that an intelligence drives evolution toward a pre-determined purpose.
September 8, 2008, at 11:21 am
I wish I could quote the TV commercials about Spore that cite some sort of evolution-intelligent design mixture (combining both terms into a long word, and asking viewers if they believe in it, if memory serves).
September 8, 2008, at 11:42 am
I too love SimCity (and am going to school now to be an urban planner) but have you checked out Sid Meyer’s Rail Road Tycoon? There is something different about it. Even the sim games can be a little seedy, amoral, or vainglorious. But rail Road Tycoon seems to be based in a moral universe in which real people are doing real work and success only comes to the play by offering better service to customers. I realize this is off-topic and will probably be spiked.
September 8, 2008, at 12:24 pm
I think people’s feelings about evolution are getting a bit out of hand when extended to a game like spore. The prime virtue of a game is that it’s fun to play. That means it typically has to be very unlike real life.
If you’re an atheist and want a realistic game, the computer would generate random events and then all you’d be able to do is watch things unfold - not very satisfying to the gamer. If you believe in a creator God, it’s little better as all you’d be able to do is set the initial conditions for the game and watch things unfold. So to be able to play a game, you need to be able to change things as the game proceeds.
To see how unsatisfying a game is when all you can do is set initial conditions, look at the classic Game of Life
Therefore, to try to see the game as a battle about the truth or scientific facts seems silly to me no matter what the point of view of the people are. Insisting that games stick to scientific facts would take a large chunk of the current games off the market. So all I personally care about is whether or not it’s fun.
There is, of course, a different set of criterion to be applied to educational games. I don’t classify spore as one of these.
September 8, 2008, at 1:11 pm
Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton touched a little bit on the issue during the taping of their “This Week In Tech” podcast on Monday. I watched the live video feed; the edited audio podcast, at twit.tv, should still have all of it. It wasn’t a very heavy discussion, but Laporte asked whether Spore was an ad for intelligent design. Of course, they probably fall outside mainstream journalism as defined by the purposes of GetReligion.
September 8, 2008, at 2:42 pm
[…] It seems that reviewers of EA’s new “sim”-type game, Spore (by Will Wright, the man behind the various other “sim” games), can’t help but review the game without invoking intelligent design. GetReligion has noticed the phenomenon as well. […]
September 9, 2008, at 5:37 pm
Wright has played with these ideas before, in SimEarth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimEarth:_The_Living_Planet
Also, I read somewhere that Wright is a convinced atheist, so promoting I.D. was most likely not on *his* agenda, regardless of how the game gets interpreted. I’m not sure the Intelligent Design connection fits, either. The player’s position is somewhat godlike, to be sure, but in more of a theistic-evolution sense, where God A) starts the process, and B) intervenes now and then to push or pull evolution in a certain direction. Although if you don’t get do set the initial conditions, you’re not so much a Creator ex nihilo as a clever Demiurge.
September 10, 2008, at 10:49 am
Elliot, I’m fairly certain that theistic evolution is considered “Intelligent Design,” even though it might be considered apostasy by others in the ID community.
September 15, 2008, at 12:16 am
[…] At Get Religion, reporter dpulliam takes a look at Spore, the new critically acclaimed evolution based video game. It allows you to take primordial soup and tweak the environment and evolutionary forces to produce eventual civilization and advanced societies. He notes that the very fact that the gameplayer manages evolution scores points for Intelligent Design in the God debate. (Actually, I think it’s not intelligent design per say but rather theistic evolution, different from what ID’s promoters have generally had in mind.) […]