The Absence of Context in Spore

October 2, 2008 at 1:28 pm (Editorial Theses) (creature creator, ea games, interactive storytelling, maxis, spore, the sims, video game criticism, video game reviews, will wright)

It is difficult to be critical when talking about a game as earnest as Spore. I expect this is why most discussions, particularly reviews, of the game have been mostly positive. Of course, no one pretends its constituent gameplay modes are any good. After all, we cannot fault it for failing to do something it is clearly not attempting. Yet it is a mistake to ignore the gameplay in Spore. Two reasons are given for excusing its shoddiness: first, the game is intended for a casual audience, and its simplistic gameplay is meant to induct non-gamers into genre conventions, not impress ‘hardcore’ gamers with its depth. Second, the focus is not the game modes anyway but the creation tools. Yet both excuses are problematic. In the former case, I fail to see how buggy, confusing, and sluggishly-controlled genre prototypes will draw anyone into gaming. The latter case is even more problematic, because, as it turns out, the real problem with Spore is not the overly simplistic gameplay modes. The real issue is that the game fails to provide a context for what are otherwise ingenius creature/technology creation tools.

Will Wright’s thesis for Spore, if you listen to him speak of it, is so grand, so stunningly vast and all-encompassing, that it is hard to believe you could be playing a game that pulls it off. So it is hardly disappointing when you realize that Spore fails to achieve this vision. The natural reaction then, once you realize Spore is not SimEverything, is to determine what Spore actually is, all hype and expectation aside. It is indisputable that the creation tools, especially the creature creator, are well-done and powerful. Indeed, we could even posit that they are like coloring books and crayons for adults who have long abandoned their childish attempts at visual expression. In this, the creation tools are not just powerful but profound. But Maxis released the creature creator weeks ago for $10. How do these creation tools fit into a $50 game?

One possibility is the potential for storytelling. Proponents of The Sims, Will Wright specifically, often attempt to explain the series’ enormous popularity by fingering interactive, emergent storytelling. Two people can sit down and play The Sims, Wright says, and in conversation they will share completely different stories about their experience. How much more powerful could Spore be, with its broad depth of creation tools that have led to the creation of, as of this writing, over 30 million creatures, vehicles, and buildings? This could be Spore‘s thesis: expanding The Sims beyond the story of a single household to allow players to tell the stories of entire civilizations, beginning with a single-celled organism. If Spore is not about the simulation of the universe, perhaps it is, at least, the simulation of a creature’s story – your creature’s story.

It is not. Although you can make just about anything you can dream of in the creature creator, the game fails to provide a context for it. There is effectively no difference between my experience as a vicious dog covered in spikes and my experience as a bipedal, flower-power feminine creature equipped with a predator’s mouth. There are, in fact, differences between the creatures, but until the Civilization stage, your creature’s story breaks down to either killing or dancing (or a mix of the two, netting you a third method of play in the Civilization stage.) At this point, the powerful thesis of creation and story is bogged down by a desire to present the casual player with a sampling of game genres.

It is more than just simplistic game modes. The problem is that there are game modes at all. Spore, as a creation tool alone, would have provided a rich enough experience – if only the game was more open ended. It is true, I found myself telling stories, but the game provided no record of my experience. If my peaceful religious tribe turned into a military dictatorship halfway through the civilization stage, it was simply because I decided to start killing things. The choice was a result of my actions as a player and not as a creator. The game relates this story as a graph in a history menu, but that’s it. Nowhere do we find the spontaneous action of a creature with its own will guided by the rules I gave it within the creature creator. Everything, from cell onward, is player controlled, and therefore the game provides no context for my own creature to tell its story. I am not telling anything; I am just playing a game.

Nor does the ‘multiplayer’ save it. As someone who has always had trouble connecting with friends to play specific games, this aspect of Spore is silent for me. Even so, I feel confident saying this would make almost no difference. It does not matter who created that tribe of creatures over the hill. They are invariably going to hiss at me or invite me to dance – nothing more. Encountering a friend’s creature in the game (and I have) can be exciting, but it is a sentimental reaction and, fundamentally, has no effect on the context the rest of the game lacks. All creatures, essentially, act the same – as do tribes and civilizations and empires. The fact that some of them were crafted by my roommate has little bearing on my experience.

It is hard to be disappointed by a game that aspires so high. Who honestly expects a game to pull off everything Wright preached about? Yet part of having lofty ambitions is knowing which ones are working and which ones are not, so that you can cull the flock and focus your work on what is possible. Spore stubbornly, desperatey refused to do that. Indeed, after playing it for awhile, I got the sense I was reading an undergraduate English paper that was attempting to cram four different and very disparate thesis into a twelve-page work that only had room for one. Perhaps if Wright had five more years (and five hundred more pages) to work on this project, he could fulfill the many different things he was trying to do. But, he does not, and so we are left with a game full of colorful but empty experiences.