It has taken me far too long to settle down and actually write about SPORE.

I think part of the problem has been time, since I have very little of it – however, a bigger problem has been that I’ve been too lazy to do it.

My friend Alex Vance recently uploaded a series of journal entries elaborating on people who are Not Writers – writers who say they write but do not do so as much as they should, and do not try to get over the minuscule hurdles that stop them from writing and hence differ from Writers, who need to write – who eat, sleep and breathe writing. (It is a good read – check it out sometime.)

I have my own name for these, and it is “writters”. It is a playful, mocking name. I now realize I have been mocking myself.

I’ve been trying to write and not doing it for far too long. (Do or no not – there is no try – I know I know)

So let’s talk about SPORE.

A great many people were expecing a great many things from SPORE, and I suppose it’s only fair that on release the general outcry was “This game is not what it should have been.” Plenty of people were baffled by the lack of complexity and intricacy in the gameplay in comparison to more profound civilization games, such as the aptly titled Civilization – I vividly recall Brenda Brathwaite watching me play SPORE feverishly in the same spot for five hours and ask me what I thought, then say someone told her Civilization IV was far better.

In a sense, they were right. In another, they were not.

I’ve heard SPORE be criticized on a lot of grounds that are all very valid. It’s been called “simple,” “stacked all wrong,” “disappointing at times,” “not quite an amazing game,” and, most importantly, “toy.” It is one hundred percent true that SPORE is not so much an immersive journey towards the Win Condition as it is an individual experience of endless possibilities–which is pretty much what most every one of Will Wright’s games have been. I think, however, that many people mistakenly believe the SPORE experience is simple out of a lack of insight into its design.

SPORE was an accident, is what I’ve concluded after a great deal of thinking, playing and speculating. It was a very exotic road trip stop on the way to a bigger finale. Will Wright has been one of my heroes for a great many years and I’ve taken a great deal of time scrutinizing his game design pattern and determining how it functions. I have come to believe that SPORE is an excellent game in what it seeks to achieve. Where it faltered and did not receive notable victory was in accomplishing people’s expectations for it.

The following is my theory.

Will Wright has been working on SimEverything for a long while now. It’s a fairly well-known fact that Will Wright wants to encompass the universe in a large simulation tool and allow players to possess and manipulate a tiny, yet massively complex system of simulacra that mimic every fathomable, fashionable part of the Earth.

During this time, he developed this evolutionary system that he believed would be a part of SimEverything.

He did not make SimEverything.

I can’t say how many people I’ve spoken to who express their frustration at SPORE for not being SimEverything. I partly blame EA/Maxis’s advertising campaign for over-hyping the game and trying to have too much of a hand in development (that we will touch on later), but I think a great deal of the issue was people’s misinterpretation of what Will Wright meant when he changed the name of his project from SimEverything to SPORE. In an interview, years ago, I recall him saying something along the lines of “I wanted to call it SimEverything.” I’ve had a hunch for a while now that in Will-Wright-Speak this means “I wanted to make SimEverything, but what I got was SPORE instead.” I knew, from the moment SPORE‘s name was announced, that I was not going to be playing SimEverything. But that was okay. I was okay with that. I just wanted to see what this was about.

Anyone who knows Will Wright as more than just “that game developer that made SimCity and The Sims” knows there is much more to Will than meets the eye (he is a robot in disguise). I recall an extensive and fascinating TED talk (and here it is for your viewing pleasure) where Will stood at the front of the room (while wearing an inexplicable gear on the cast on his arm) and explained SPORE, as he had many times before, and then went beyond SPORE and spoke in depth about his motivations behind the game, his experience in Montessori school that led him to find an interest in toys that teach valuable lessons and ideas through play and his own attempt to build a kind of toy that could enable the same spark of understanding and learning.

To sum it all up, my theory? SPORE is not SimEverything. It is a game meant to explore and educate on principles and theories behind the evolutionary process.

spore (n) a small, usually single-celled asexual reproductive body produced by many nonflowering plants and fungi and some bacteria.

The name somewhat gives it away, in a sense. Will Wright is rather predictable when it comes to nomenclature. He names things for what they are – SimCity was the simulation of a city, SimAnt the emulation of an ant colony. SPORE as a name does not give the impression of being a game about terraforming planets and the intricate struggles of civilizations. Oddly enough, the all-caps plays into it well: SPORE is a game that begins with a miniscule cell which then grows to gargantuan proportions. First, it’s a spore, then it’s a Spore, then it’s a SPORE - first a cell, then a creature, then a civilization. Eventually, the irony of the title speaks for itself – the smallest thing in the organic realm earns the all-importance of all-caps. Now, let’s continue onto more concrete evidence and less philosophical theorizing that nobody believes anyway.

The magic of SPORE theme lies in its presentation and game design. While naysayers argue that SPORE lacks the depth and complexity of so many other games it “emulates”, I believe these “copycat stages” are simplistic because they’re leading the player memetically through a select few key elements in order to bring a larger point into perspective. And that point is the following: as the player builds and evolves their creature from very early on, they’ll find certain traits and attributes earned from body parts and accessories will not help them continue the level they’re playing on. It may be as simple as “I need more firepower”, leading the player to sacrifice a couple of pretty feathers on their creature’s forehead in order to give them a wicked, curved beak. The point is, necessary traits for survival are lost and necessary traits are enhanced to guarantee survival. This is the very core principle of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest.

While yes, essentially a lot of the basics of evolution are somewhat sidestepped in SPORE such as common ancestry, several generations of dominant and recessive genes, etc. etc. the point is that SPORE still ultimately communicates that important idea behind natural selection, where something ends up determining when parts and features “work” and when they “don’t work”.

If the core of the game had been better communicated, this simplicity could have been overlooked. The point of SPORE is that it is not another Civilization game, it is an evolution game.

Unfortunately, in order for the game to adhere more appropriately to a new target market, as per requested by EA (my theory, at least) much of the game’s reliance on evolution to determine ability to survive was dumbed down to a points addition system, where having enough points in one of three basic “skills” (fighting, trading, charming) would allow you to survive by relying on that “skill”. This was a theme followed through the whole game, but was unfortunately so underenforced in order to allow players freedom that it didn’t end up appearing to be a strong mechanic. For a wider target market, however, it worked just right to keep the game accessible.

SPORE‘s original overtones of scientific simulation were, at some point and for some reason, abandoned in favor or a more toony, playful presentation where the end path to any and all creature evolutions is an intelligent civilization with fairly universal social customs and engineering developments (essentially they all have tanks, planes and boats, regardless of whether they’re a race of flying reptilians or plant fish). This is clearly not an accurate representation of how evolution actually works, not to mention that giving the player complete freedom to build their creature however they like strangely has a kind of Creationist conext behind it. SPORE‘s dev team referred to their approach towards explaining evolution as a “creativolution” presentation. Indeed, even from watching the television ad for SPORE, one would get the feeling that the game steers players into believing a Creationist approach to the way the universe was created.

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How does this tie into my theory about SPORE‘s design purposes, then?

The intermarriage between Creationism and Evolution that’s presented by SPORE results in being both another market move by attempting to avoid the flak from insane individuals who want to force their religion into you and your Subway Sandwich and also being a clever point about the existence of a common ground between religion and evolution. After all, as my mother once said (and I can’t believe I’m quoting my mother in reference to a video game controversy) “God works in mysterious ways – who’s to say God didn’t intend for us all to eventually evolve into what we are now?” Hence, another nick in Will Wright’s initial plans, made for the sake of audience.

SPORE did have its flaws that cannot be ignored, perhaps most notably that the endgame is so difficult to get to that most people didn’t even know it was there (not to mention that the godforsaken Grox are the most irritating, unforgiving and relentless enemy I have ever faced). To be fair, Will has never been one for endgame scenarios, and SPORE reflects that, not really giving you a clear indicator of what it expects from you.  The Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues that came packaged with SPORE‘s installation did not help matters, bringing outrage from the community as EA and Maxis struggled to save their game from scurvy-ridden pirates.

In the end, SPORE failed where it should have succeeded – the ideas behind it were all right, but I believe much of Will’s original vision had to be scrapped in order to avoid controversy after controversy that would have plagued the game had they released what he intended. And where were the land missions? Where were the plant design suites for players? Put in expansion packs for later release, in order to squeeze a couple of more cents out of the franchise before it fizzled out.

Several aspects of the unfortunate nature of today’s politically correct world, the overwhelming pirate culture and simply a few ill-placed choices on the accessibility of the game for a wider target market all contributed to SPORE not being the commercial success it could have, should have been.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s keep our seats and wait for SimEverything. Will tried, but he is, after all, like us…

…a robot in disguise.

tl;dr: You jerk, read my critique.

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Anyway, read the critique. It’s here: http://blog.ortizgames.com/gamecrit/the-controversial-spore/
Thanks for the patience, lads and ladies!

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But learning all about the issues and bugs in SPORE and the features that have been lacking in the final version, I’ve become thoughtful as to what problems must have arisen in its development, and where focus has been placed in the game design in order to refine particular aspects of the game that were considered core to its experience. Why is it plagued with so many glitches, errors and difficulties? Why is the DRM so broken?

I’ll be sure to write up a SPORE critique for you all sometime very soon. For now, I’m going to go into hiding for a few days while I play it.

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I’m going to go be very depressed for a while.

[EDIT:] I realize I was too vague with my post, clearly, so let’s elaborate quickly: I have a Hewlett Packard laptop, which has had sufficient power to run a lot of what I’ve given it. It even ran Oblivion at like, ten frames per second. It ran the Warhammer Beta, if with horrible lag. But SPORE simply crashes every time I try running it, and when I checked The System Requirements Lab, it revealed to me that despite my previous assumptions, my ATI Radeon Xpress 200M integrated graphics card simply misses the mark for playing SPORE. It’s just a smidge under requirements, where everything else on my computer is relatively decent. Even my processor isn’t half bad, and it’s a Turion 64, which is nothing compared to a Intel Core 2 Duo.

I was devastated all yesterday, and I’ve really kind of lost hope to be able to play SPORE anymore, except for one small glimmer of hope: the ASUS XG Station, a portable external graphics card and multimedia handler for laptops lacking in the graphics department. According to its Wikipedia Article (which isn’t a very reliable source), the ASUS XG Station has been delayed until sometime mid-September while it’s finished up. This means it could be possible to upgrade my laptop using the external video card and be able to play SPORE. However, I have no idea what the price tag on this thing will be, and considering the video card used in it is $260 USD or so by itself, I’m worried the Station will cost somewhere around $350 dollars or more, a cost I just can’t dish out so readily.

I await to hear more news, but for now, I’m pretty much resigned to not be able to play SPORE until I get a new computer in a couple of years. And that really hurts.

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The first stage of So Much Cool came when I got my hands on Monster Hunter 2 Freedom for the PSP, which I will be reviewing promptly–as soon as I can stop playing World of Warcraft again, since I could not resist the grind and already have a new Warrior up to level like, 15. MH2F is an amazing game. I have been geeking out over it for the past two weeks. If playing online wasn’t such an ordeal (especially with my absolutely shoddy connection down here in Mexico where I get 4,000 ping in World of Warcraft–I mean, come on) I would be giving this game Grade A points. But I’ll talk about MH2F later this week.

Part 2 of So Much Cool was the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots. I have never seen the Internet this excited. Well, I have, but over a game, never. Post after post on blog after blog is about MGS4 and IGN’s perfect score rating for it. I, unfortunately, am not one of those lucky enough to have a copy of the game since launch date, but my good buddy Squall assures me after having beaten the game last night that it is spectacular. His only worry is that it is a great deal of servicing the fans, and he wonders whether a non-fan would appreciate the game in the same way.
Luckily, I’m not a hardcore MGS fan–I’m absolutely awful at sneaking and I have never owned the games–though I did try to play Squall’s MGS1 copy on my computer only to have it fail epically. I do know the entire storyline after having analyzed and researched the whole thing along with Squall, but I’m pretty sure there’s things I don’t know and I’m definitely sure it’s not the same as playing the game. So depending on how I react, we can make some safe assumptions about how accurate 10/10 may be.
I’ll be getting the game sometime in the last days of June, so we’ll wait and see.

The last stage of So Much Cool has been the release of the SPORE Creature Editor and the upcoming demo release on June 17. Details:

I don’t want to be an advertisment here, but download the demo on June 17, for your own sake. The Creature Creator is a ten dollar buy and it’s just indescribably awesome, but considering the demo is released in two days you might as well wait for something free, especially since you can already preorder the game from EA’s Online Store. Launch date for SPORE: September 7, 2008.
The game works on my computer–and not only works, but works on a decent resolution with pretty stellar graphics and I was able to make a lovely number of different creatures. I am just thrilled. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to play the game on my computer. But Will Wright loves me, I keep forgetting, and would never let me suffer that way.

This is such an action-packed summer, and already up ahead are the release of the In-Game XMB for PS3, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, SPORE for PC and Final Fantasy XIII and XIII Versus.
Slap Gran Turismo, GTAIV and Metal Gear at the beginning of that, and this is my favorite year ever.

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The other day Shadow of the Colossus came up again. I love SotC. It’s a beautiful game. Most people agree with me. But then there’s some people who keep prying, nagging, demanding justification as to why it is good. So let’s recap here.

Music, great. Visuals, great. Gameplay –repetitive but refreshing, with the grip system and holding on to dear life from flailing stone beasts’ backs, driving a sword into their weak spots–so yeah, it’s great. Replay value,–I’m still playing it over and over because it’s so short and sweet–great. Story.

Here is where the controversy comes, and what most bothers me. Shadow of the Colossus is done by the absolutely incomparable Ico team, masters of weaving story and lore into gameplay. Every time I sit down to delve into SotC, I feel awed by the grandeur of the universe before me, and mesmerized by the stalking giants though which conquering I may be vindicated. In my eyes, Shadow of the Colossus has a tremendous amount of story. But people keep bringing up to me, what is the theme? What’s the premise? What’s the catch? Why is this story being told?

If you’d stop nattering, I’d tell you.

There’s plenty of themes in Shadow. I’ll get into them later, but they’re there. There’s a premise, too. Someone goes around and kills large stone giants. Simple, right? Themes don’t make a story, however.

The thing about a game is that, unlike a book or a movie or any other experience in which the director guides the viewer by the hand through their mystical, otherworldy vision, in games it’s usually the player taking rein and whipping the director to go faster, to turn, to stop. This makes it an entirely different kind of sensation, and by definition a true experience as opposed to a bystanding observation of the events taking place. In Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico shed light on something amazing by setting the game up for the player to fill every hole. Nothing about the protagonist’s past is explained, and even the murky details that arise are guesswork at best. But the actions that the protagonist executes throughout the actual body of the game are as clear, concise and blaringly obvious–he goes from one rock titan to the next and brings each down. The scale of each of those actions puts the experience the player actually engages in (as opposed to backstory, which the player will only hear about in the game) on a massive pedestal, and highlights it as most important. So important, in fact, that it’s the premise of the entire game.

Basically, Team Ico wanted the player to make a story him or her self, in order to explain these phenomenally epic events. Whwther the player considers the protagonist a valiant knight, sacrificing him for his princess, or whether he thinks of the hero as a remorseful assassin, regretting his kill when it is too late and doing everything he can to receive pardon once more, or even as a dedicated, fierce lover, fighting to bring back his only with tooth and claw, the action is still the same. In other forms of storytelling, action is usually caused by the elements of the story. In Shadow of the Colossus, the story is sprouted from the action.

This is the magnificent thing about games. We try so very hard to make games that follow a set storyline like a movie, trying to lead the player from event to event and finally to the end, where we culminate the whole tale and explain our cleverness in setting things up the way they are. I, as a writer, am guilty of that, and so are most other game writers (do not lie). We love our story. It’s our baby. We want the player to discover it, and learn to appreciate it.

But what we forget is that, through play, we make our own stories. I remember countless of imaginary characters my friends and I would invent and adopt in roleplay, running around in empty soccer fields and calling out attacks, chasing each other, trying to escape the nonexistent hordes behind us with nothing but our fighting skill and nerve. That was what play was for me, story. Clearly, it’s resulted in me loving to write and read stories–but I have to remember the player wants that indulging ability to create their own universe, too. It’s the reason games like Morrowind, Oblivion, SPORE, World of Warcraft and Shadow of the Colossus appeal so much to me–they don’t force me into a story, they just give me a universe and invite me to go play. Granted, sometimes it’s not as free as one might think–you can’t avoid the Oblivion main quest forever, World of Warcraft is boring and absurdly slow if you’re not doing quests and there’s nothing to do in Shadow of the Colossus other than run around like a dolt in an empty environment and take down stone giants. But we’re getting there–someday we may make an entirely free universe, where anything is possible within the rules of the world, and people will be free to truly “roleplay”.

Then again, we tried that with Second Life in a way, and it didn’t work out all that well. Maybe we still need more time.

To conclude with Shadow of the Colossus, it’s a game that’s designed with the player’s story in mind, with themes supporting the player’s interpretation of his or her own actions. In the end, the real theme is Sacrifice. You, as a player, give up your six hours to crush these creatures for reasons of your choosing, losing bits of yourself along the way, becoming corrupted, tainted and yet pushing on, even to the point of losing your horse, Arrow–the only other living creature with any sort of unique identity to it in this forgotten world, and the only named character you know, leaving you completely and utterly alone to face the price of your Sacrifice. And in the end, you are cripplingly betrayed, and all seems to have been for nothing.

…But then your sacrifice gives birth to hope.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you were fighting for. They were your reasons. It was your fight. The game was just a means to achieve it. And that’s what makes a game so much different, and so uniquely beautiful. The fact that the story was strong, well thought out, on purpose–down to dropping you in an abandoned, empty world with nothing but stone giants to remind you of how alone and unsupported you are in your great sacrifice–only a game can do something this amazing.

Only in playing do we truly experience. Watching is never enough. Don’t make a player watch.

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