The dumbification of Spore
scienceblogs.com
scienceblogs.com
Designing by consensus will always lead to an average product. The only way to create a blow-out success is if a single person handles the design part of things.
No major artwork was created by a comittee. None of the great books were written by a newsroom team. Engineering has to go the same way. Let people use their imaginations without being constrained by the opinions of tens of other people.
Actually, William "The Princess Bride" Goldman argues in his famous book about screenwriting (Adventures in the Screen Trade) that all movies are created by committee. He lists a bunch of people that need to do their jobs correctly in order to make a movie any good, starting (obviously) with the screenwriter and the director but also including: The cinematographer, the casting director, the designers and costumers, the film editor, and the composer. To say nothing of the producers, who need to come up with sufficient money or the film doesn't get made.
Goldman makes this point in the course of lampooning the "auteur" theory of criticism, in which entire films are attributed to the genius of one person -- usually the director. It's because of those auteur theorists that we tend to speak of "Hitchcock's" North by Northwest, ignoring the fact that a lot of that film's genius was contributed by Cary Grant, to say nothing of Bernard Herrmann.
A great example is Star Wars, which as we all know sprang from the brow of George Lucas. Except, of course, for the parts that were actually created by Ben Burtt (sound designer), John Dykstra (FX supervisor), Rick Baker (makeup artist), Ralph McQuarrie (production illustrator), John Williams (composer), and Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas (film editors). And that's just scratching the surface.
A game on the scale of Spore is also, inevitably, created by committee. The question is whether you can keep the committee on the same page. It sounds like Spore's team had some struggles, which had to be mediated, and which were ultimately resolved in a way that isn't quite to my taste. Which is not to say that the enterprise is a failure. It's sold a lot of copies, and no doubt many people are pleased with it. I played with the creature creator, and it was very cute.
http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks_vol3_index.jsp
Mahito Yokota originally wrote the soundtrack as an homage to Mario 64: goofy and kid-friendly. Kondo told him to scrap it: he said that if you aimed for kids, you'd get a worse product than if you aimed for something with a more timeless feel. So he changed the music to a full orchestra, and the result was the brilliant soundtrack to Galaxy, which is incidentally absolutely worth owning.
Spore dumbed down and lost. It's a shame.
"Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical 'average' user. It's too vague a target. It's also a moving target: the average user might not be as stupid as you think." http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html
I enjoyed most of the Sim games because they give you a complex system with rules where every little decision has some slight impact on the way the game turns out. Part of winning is learning the rules to the system and strategizing (whether or not that system really reflect the reality of what it is ostensibly a simulation of).
There are too many things in Spore that don't make any difference in the gameplay. Most of the influence from one stage to the next is purely aesthetic or otherwise very limited. And everything except the Space stage was pretty simplistic with few opportunities for strategy.
Spore was one-dimensional, start to finish. (Though I didn't play too far on the space stage: from there I'd lost interest.) There was no interaction. I wanted the first stage to be the simplest. I wanted rapid iteration of complexity. Something for everybody. I got none of that.
It's a shame, because the technology was so incredible. It just went into an awful game.
Have you ever played sim earth? I liked it a lot.
http://shop.ebay.com/items/_W0QQ_nkwZsimQ20earthQQ_armrsZ1QQ...
I don't understand how the 'game industry' expects to beat piracy when it costs so much for so little assurance that you'll get what you want.
If this had been (nearly) any other product, I could have returned it, gotten my refund, and gone on my way.
I bought Spore, even after seeing all the warnings about piracy, because I had such faith in Will Wright and Maxis. I thought that they would make my money worth it. Now? My list is down to Valve and Maxis. If The Sims 3 or Spore 2 comes out, I'm going to pirate it first to make sure it's worth my money. I'll buy it afterwards, but my trust is gone.
Turns out that the creators, and sharing your creation, and then pimping your creation IS the entire game. Your meticulously designed creation which took 3 hours to make is evolutionarily no better than a 10 year old's cell with legs and googly eyes, with the only difference being how much time you have to "sell" it on the official forum to get any attention. It's an intelligent introvert's worst nightmare: your works will not be noticed amongst the hundreds of millions based on merit, but on how marketable it is and how much marketing resources is backing the creation.Your beautifully designed planet with semi-realistically balanced ecosystem performs absolutely no better than a randomly generated neighboring planet inhibited by "variations on the theme of vomit-green spheres."
As a new best selling game it's not bad, but I was looking for a "simulation" game. I did find a spectacular one though, so this year wasn't a complete loss : http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves
Too bad.
I'd have preferred something great, and then decided not to play it if I wanted to spend my time more wisely. There's no excuse for what Spore became.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
I'm not saying that Spore is perfect, just that it's very easy as a game developer to get carried away with stuff that you find cool, only to find there's no game there.
The irony is that Chris Hecker is pretty much the man who popularised (and evangelised) the use of simulated physics in games. Virtually all papers on inverse-kinematics in games reference his essays.
the only problem is that Spore wasn't advertised to many of us that way. We got a beautifully decorated cake, but wholesome multi-grain was promised to the masses who have been starving for the past 5 years.
if they had followed that route, the game would probably have been a lot more fun to play. games should really be done in an exploratory way, since what comes out is a universe of ideas, closed over itself.
There is simply no element of creationism in the game. All terminology and interface point to an (albeit inaccurate) model of "evolution". Guided evolution, panspermia, saltations, probably. Creationism, no.
On a tangent: Spore has specified organized religion as a viable route to planetary domination, on the same effectiveness level as economic and military take-overs. Elements of conversion and religious assimilation also comes into play in the space stage, somewhat. But even if I replace the word "Creationism" with the word "religion", your "think of the children!" sentiment is still...naive at best. One could equally ineffectively argue that the game promotes ruthless economic colonization, militaristic violence, wasteful exploitation of resources, intentional extinction of entire species.....