• Scientists Say Spore Fails its Biology Exam
• Spore Gets an ‘F’ from Scientists
• EA Reveals New Space Expansion for Spore, Confirms Creepy and Cute Pack
• Cute and Creepy Announced
• First Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack Screenshots are Creepy and Cute
• Spore Patch 2
• Cubic Spore Planets!
• SporeCast Contest: Win a Cute and Creepy Parts Pack
• We’re Auditioning for a Third Host

I’m coming to you this week with an article not necessarily focused on the game of Spore itself but instead with a look at the potential future of the “Sim” genre. Keep in mind that I’m working from my own experience with gaming and if I left out titles that you feel need mentioning or work that is being done right now by some intrepid developer that will revolutionize things, feel free to hop onto our forums and let’s discuss the topic in depth. We’d all love to learn more.

Evolution and intelligent design in video games is certainly no new concept and I think that first we have to examine the past in order to appreciate the future. Will Wright and Maxis had the idea 18 years ago when they released SimEarth in 1990.

In SimEarth the goal was basically to take a planet devoid of life and use the tools at your command to allow sentience and eventually civilization to emerge. This process was fairly complicated and I’m not ashamed to admit that I am one of the many who just didn’t quite get it. But as complicated as it was, compared to Spore, the scope of the game was relatively small since almost all you could do was monitor the results when you changed certain elements and attempt to offer better conditions in hopes that your little critters would thrive. SimEarth was a very scientifically-minded game that looked at the interaction of life and I like to think of it as a primitive version of Spore but perhaps I’ll go more into this comparison another day. For now, let’s move on to other games that either touched upon or dealt heavily in the chosen topic.

E.V.O.: Search for Eden was another game that I still pick up from time to time because it’s simply a lot of fun to play. Released in 1993 on the Super Nintento by Almanic and Enix, E.V.O. was an interesting take on the platforming genre because it included collecting evolution points by eating defeated enemies and spending those points to upgrade parts of your body and increase your ability. The stages of this game progressed from fish to amphibian to reptilian and finally mammalian while you passed through time in order to rise to the top of the evolutionary ladder and become the perfect partner for the goddess Gaia.

These are both a couple of examples of where we’ve been and while they do come from different genres, the subject matter relies on the same basic principle. Now that we have Spore, we can clearly see how far we’ve come. The question remains however, where are we going?

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The future of Sim games could lie within this image.
No idea what you’re looking at? Today I stumbled across a project called Darwin@Home and if you are at all interested in computer simulations of algorithm-based, self-evolving structures then this is the site for you. What’s that? You’re not? You should be and here’s why.

Right now, the technology behind this seems confusing but intriguing and though it’s primary use seems to be focused on building things that can withstand the forces of nature such as buildings that won’t fall over in earthquakes, I can see this sort of thing leading to a lot of innovation in gaming because of it’s sheer malleability. But for those of you without 45 minutes to spend watching their lengthy videos, let me sum up for you what Darwin@Home is.

Gerald de Jong of the Netherlands founded the Darwin@Home project and began work with an interest in artificial life and a knowledge of complex mathematics. Having gone through several prototypes, he has managed to design a java-based program that anyone can use from his website to design a simple structure and watch it evolve with the simple goal of being able to move further in a limited amount of time. The science and math behind all of this is much more complicated than this but if you watch this in action on the videos on their website it’s easy to see how something like this could be translated for Sim games in general.

Sure, you can create all sorts of otherworldly creatures in Spore but what if you throw in some realistic physics? Well your little bobble-headed monster finds itself unable to move about let alone catch those tasty little yellow things the next nest over. All is NOT lost however. With a little addition of the code developed by Darwin@Home, that creature, through a series of mutations over several generations could develop a more efficient way of getting around and thereby become more successful at whatever it needs to do. What if the goal of the program is not to move over land but through air? This code, given the proper parameters of weight, air viscosity, etc. could also potentially work to develop a realistic mutation that is capable of flight. This is where the intelligent design aspect slips away and a true, evolutionary game could reveal itself.

I love Spore and understand that it’s developed with every average gamer in mind but I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to see a little more reality, detail and diversity of species. I dream of a day when I can make a quadrupedal creature that moves like no other quadruped because of the shape of it’s spine. I would love to see just what it takes to make an insect that floats about on inflated sacs full of hydrogen.

Now I understand that realistically we’re a long way off from this but today was the day when I saw that we’re standing on the threshold of the advancements that will inevitably lead to much bigger things in gaming. Now if only some game developers would see what’s being worked on and incorporate it into their projects. I’ll let you all know if I come across anything in the future because I’m sure I’ll be returning to the subject again one day.

For those of you who are interested in the project, you can find the Darwin@Home project at www.darwinathome.org where they have hosted a blog and basic information on the project along with a few videos. If you don’t have a lot of time, I would recommend at least viewing the Darwin at Home in Ten Minutes video here - Darwin@Home in 10 Minutes. Enjoy!

A game we all know and love, Spore, incited the imaginations of enough gamers to have 100 thousand creatures created within the first 22 hours of the release of it’s “demo” Creature Creator. A million within it’s first week. 18 days after it’s release the total known species on Earth had been exceeded by the creations in this tiny fragment of the game. With numbers like this, no one could deny that Spore was going to be a gigantic hit among not only fans of the Sim-Game genre but a wide variety of gamer.

But it seems that Maxis and EA made one tragic mistake when releasing the full version of Spore. They tried to protect their game with DRM (Digital Rights Management) software and it appeared that this decision didn’t sit too well with people who had been anxiously awaiting it’s release. Because of this, Spore received over 2500 single star reviews on Amazon.com which drove it’s rating down and made it drop off the radar for the average consumer who shops on the site. Almost all of these reviews cite it’s “draconian DRM” and for the most part were filed on the site before anyone had even had a chance to really try the game out.

Undoubtedly, DRM issues will be resolved in time. In fact, the restrictions have already been lowered to offer a game owner 5 installs instead of the initial 3 it launched with and they are working on a way to refund install credits when you uninstall the game without having to contact customer support. The majority of us will never even have to lodge a formal complaint because they were posted all over the internet before the game was even released and a solution will be found before most people use up their 5 installations.

Personally… I’m not worried. Here’s why.

Let’s look back at BioShock from 2K Games. Released in August 2007 and bundled with it’s own version of the “draconian” (yes it WAS described using the same terms) SecuROM copy protection, BioShock allowed gamers 2 installations over it’s lifetime and there were many claims of the system itself being quite buggy and not doing what it was supposed to do to begin with. Indeed, it seemed to be a big mistake for 2K to have included such a horrible affront to their customers’ gaming rigs in with their game. BioShock had sold a million copies of the PC version of it’s game by the time they removed the SecuROM requirement in June 2008. Not exactly a failure despite it’s DRM issues.

What I’m getting at is that the DRM make no difference to the average gamer. If it were not such a media bomb, most of us would never even have known about it. The majority of the PC gaming community is not looking for Big Brother over our shoulder nor do I feel that we have to be. This big a stink was raised by a community of people who felt such a sense of entitlement that they seemingly decided that they would rather pirate the game than buy it when the publisher did something that they didn’t agree with. Those of us that bought the game could only sit back and be horrified because in a game that relies heavily on user-generated content being shared, anything that would hurt it’s popularity would only hurt us in the long run.

Now that we’re roughly a month since the release of Spore, how has it done despite the controversy?

Reports claim that though a million copies of Spore have sold within the first month, 500 thousand copies were also illegally transferred via P2P clients. While this might seem like a lot, honestly, it’s not. If you’ve never downloaded anything either through torrents or file sharing programs, I will personally tell you that it’s usually a gamble. A good half of everything you download can be either corrupted or a mislabeled file leading to all sorts of nonsense such as viruses or winding up with the newest Power Rangers episode instead of that sweet new release starring Christian Bale. Besides, other games have been far worse off when it comes to ratios. Crysis for instance. EA and Crytek’s project sold about the same amount of copies as were estimated to have been pirated within the first month of it’s release.

In the end, piracy isn’t going to stop any time in the near future but either is the practice of including copy protection with games. I’m not saying that either side of this debate is right or wrong. I think that both the fact that games are pirated in such record numbers and that game companies have to go to such great lengths to protect their investments are BOTH the wrong way to do things. Honestly, I don’t have a solution either. But let’s forget who forced whose hand in all of this and move on to bigger and better things… like playing Spore!

• Spore Cute and Creepy Parts Pack
• We’re giving away a free expansion pack to one lucky listener!
• Emotional Account: Spore
• ‘Spore was made for casual gamers’
• Spore: State of the Galaxy Interview
• Whack-A-Mole by Kilo_II
• EA DRM can’t accomplish job one: 500K Spore torrents so far
• Center of the Galaxy and Power of the Gods

• EA Makes Changes To Spore DRM
• EA to Allow De-Authorizing a Machine?
• Spore Patched to 1.01.0000
• Spore Asymmetry Modification!
• Zounds YRM: Christian Gaming Zone
• Anti Spore

• Spore massively pirated despite DRM
• Spore DRM could kill PC gaming
• Opinion: Spore Origins and the iPhone’s growing domination of handheld gaming
• Spore breaks into Euro charts
• Spore becoming a popular BitTorrent pirate game
• Will Wright talks about Spore. . .again
• Spore Amazon.com reviews vanish, then reappear; EA talks about DRM
• More Spore account issues surface
• Spore Modification to reduce Attack Rate
• Copy Protection

• Kym and Alehkhs reveal what they think about Spore.
• Game bugs galore.
• Intelligence and the evolution of species.
• DRM haters slam Spore in Amazon reviews.
• Amazon Reviews Give Spore 1 Out of 5 Stars
• Will Wright not upset by Spore review scores.

• Spore PC Pre-Loads Now Downloadable
• Let the Spore Billboards Begin!
• Spore Invades Harvard Square Red Line T Stop Station
• Spore Available on iPod Classic
• Spore the Movie
• Get Spore Signed by Will Wright and a Free Spore Tee
• Metacritic Rates Spore 93.6/100
• Australian Grabs Spore Early

• Spore conventions: What to expect.
• More Spore monsters than Earth species.
• Nintendo DS version of Spore.
• Spore going gold.
• Spore given a 9/10.
• Interesting expansion ideas.
• Spore television show?
• Secret Spore Easter egg.
• Militant atheists attack Spore.
• Don’t forget The Sims Online.

• Intelligent Design in Spore
• Penis Monsters
• Spore Text Dump and more Spore Text Dumps
• Spore: It’s a game after all but maybe even more
• Spore Bridging the Gap Between Gamers and Non-Gamers
• Help file for full game extracted
• Spore Creature Creator Beats The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft
• Moving on from Penis Monsters
• No Plants in the Official Release of Spore

• Creature Creator at Spore
• A brief overview of the game
• Bringing together all the features of the best games
• Content Sharing
• Can the content be filtered?
• Spore gets 130,000 creations in the first day
• The Spore release date revealed
• A little bit about Will Wright
• Adult themed creatures at Spore
• Spore Galactic Edition announced
• Spore Expansion Packs
• Procedural Animation Differences
• Is there too much hype for Spore?
• Syncing content in Spore?
• The Unique Multiplayer Concept
• Back to the Spore hype!
• Penis Monsters
• People getting suspended for penis monsters and bitchin’-a-saurs
• User generated content the new sweatshop of the 21st century?
• The war on user generated content
• Public Service Announcement: Naming an entire race of creatures “Bobby” is bad!