Playing the user-generated adventure 'Saving Private Raymond'
I have always been incredibly fascinated by 'virtual life'. The whole thing started many years back with the first Creatures. It wasn't the actual gameplay that blew my mind, but the stuff the game was supposedly capable of doing, the things it pretended to do.
The manual pretty much tells you that the critters you're raising are intelligent virtual beings, which slowly but surely learn how to talk in little speech bubbles, express their feelings and needs and figure out how to interact with the objects around them. Which was true to some extent, but reality was a lot simpler than that. They'd just pick up any random object or flick any switch in the game world without any actual motivation or any clue what's going on. They'd develop their skills over time, giving you the illusion that you somehow magically influenced the way they grew up and 'learned'. Basically, you just made sure they stayed alive by feeding them and injecting them with vaccines, the rest happened all by itself.
Things got a lot more interesting in Black & White. I remember raising a giant lion, which would happily beat the crap out of any other creature around it, then literally shit all over them and laugh its head off. That lion was evil and filthy, not because it was designed that way, but because I have made it evil. The basic concept was still very simple: Your creature interacted with the game world either at will or by watching you. If, for instance, you'd start watering the crops for your villagers in front of the creature, there was a fair chance the creature would mimic you and do the same thing. Now you could reward your pet, encouraging it to repeat this sort of behaviour on its own in the future or you could smack him silly, telling your furry friend to never do this again.
You could raise them to be loving, caring companions, who would do most of the micro-management for you by feeding and protecting your villagers or you could turn them into furred weapons of mass destruction, who would happily snuff out the life of any human being by dropping a massive turd on them. Or anything in between these two extremes. Ultimately, shallow and repetitive gameplay stopped the game from ever reaching true perfection and the mediocre sequel did absolutely nothing to help things, but the game was a fascinating and important milestone for 'artificial life'.
Naturally, my interest in this matter also made me keep a close eye on Spore. However, all the negative press involving the game's incredibly aggressive DRM and copy protection methods, as well as mediocre reviews drove me away from the whole thing until just recently. My friend Sandra summed it up quite nicely: Spore's gameplay is entertaining for about one whole day, then the novelty wears off.
I won't even try to deny that. If you just look at the actual gameplay elements offered by the game's five different stages, you don't find anything complex or entertaining. It is a nice touch how you can solve conflicts with other creatures through socializing or combat, but when you look at it, you'll always be clicking a series of 4 hotkeys until the other guy is either your friend or a corpse. Same with the civilization stage later on - capture an enemy city through commerce, religion or war, but no matter what you do, it always has you sending a handful of vehicles to the target city, then they'll begin trading, bombing or handing out Watchtower magazines until the population yields and joins your empire.
What truly grips me, fascinates me and turns the whole thing into an obsession of religious proportions is the actual universe in a very literal sense. When your first ever Spore creature jumps out of the ocean and starts to discover the planet it was born on, there will be a whole lot of stuff going on everywhere around it. You may find yourself trying to befriend some other wondrous, fantastic critters you run into, when all of a sudden, without warning, a third species comes running into the picture, jumps the guy you were starting to make friends with, rips him to shreds and eats him, then starts giving you the hungry eyes - and not in a Dirty Dancing kind of fashion!
And while you run and fight for your life, mate, wander and evolve, you'll eventually encounter weird, random starships, which appear seemingly out of nowhere and start abducting your buddies. And if we're to believe Fox Mulder, then these events will most likely traumatize you for life. At this stage of the game, as a first time player, you will have zero clue what is going on when it starts raining meteors and creepy UFOs start beaming up the plants and monsters everywhere around you. You run, hide and watch the events in a mix of awe and confusion.
At a much later stage in the game, when your creatures have turned into the dominant species on your planet and discovers the wonders of space travel, you will encounter the exact same situation again, just the other way 'round. You will find yourself on a mission to scan the life forms on another planet, maybe beam up a specimen or two and if you slow down and take the time to look around, you will discover creature stage all over again: Some primitive critters will make their first careful steps into a strange and dangerous world, some species will start dancing and posing when they run into one another and others hunt, fight, kill and drive other creatures to extinction. And suddenly, you're that creepy UFO, which randomly zaps one of them or beams one of them aboard and zips off again.
The really fascinating thing is how there is a whole galaxy for you to explore, full of so many different planets, each and every one of them is but a pixel within the glowy, swirly cosmos you're exploring. And the vast majority of them is full of life, full of virtual creatures eating each other, dancing with each other, evolving into tribes and civilizations, which at some point might travel the stars just like you and end up becoming useful allies or hated enemies.
I know that none of this will make the gameplay any more exciting, because all you'll ever do is scan animals, zap animals, beam up animals, do the exact same thing with plants, shoot a couple space pirates here and there and the whole thing repeats ad nauseam with every planet. But I find that utterly satisfying, especially when I know that everything I do, everything I create, somehow affects and changes the gaming experience of some other players, who are experiencing Spore for themselves, on their own computers.
Because that's the sweet thing about this virtual universe: When you create your own species, design their homes, their vehicles, turn them into nomads, scientists or warriors, define the very fabric of their existence, they will begin to populate the universe of every other player out there. And their creations will make their way into your game in pretty much the same way. When you land on any random planet, there is a high chance that all of the weird aliens, animals and monsters you encounter have been created by other players. You never know what you will run into, nothing is scripted, nothing is predetermined. It's absolute chaos, it's unpredictable, no two players will ever experience the same kind of game. And at this moment, exactly while I'm writing this, some people out there are communicating, trading or waging war with the species, which I have put into the Spore universe. And that's an incredibly cool thought!
-Cat
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