http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/09/the_creation_simulation.php

Interesting reading, though not well sourced. Seed is legit, though.

The article says Will Wright was sort of overturned on a lot of sciency simulation stuff by others on the team concerned about marketing and playability.

-Kris

Of course.

Did people really think that Will Wright was coming down on the side of cells with eyes? Come on. He built robots for Battlebots.

Poor Will =(

I guess it is not his fault

That guys a freakin idiot (not Will he cool). I simply fail to understand why the
cuteness was nesscary. Look at other games (hunting, RPG, FPS) they don't need
cuteness and they sell millions of copies. *sigh* maybe some day they will create
a realistic add-on to make the game look better. Don't get me wrong, I like the current
Spore but that "Cute Man" should be fired as I see him as the reason Spore dissappointed
many, he killed Science Spore!

Progress in many games depends on a cycle of observation, theorizing, and experimentation, and Spore is no different. The whole game is a giant consequence generator, and scientists like Webster feel this is where much of Spore's value is to be found. "There's a degree of reasoning. You're trying to make changes that you think will affect the future — isolating factors, changing one thing, keeping others the same, and seeing what happens. This is often how science is described, and there is an element of the scientific method in all of that."

Whaaaaaaat? Where is this in Spore? *boggle*

Poor Will =(

I guess it is not his fault

Maybe...but then again, I see him as somewhat complicit for not coming clean on this issue much, much earlier. For not speaking up, especially to those of us who are on his side in this...assuming that's what we are. Cuz while I'm more willing to accept FTL in the name of gameplay than he was according to the article, in many other ways I would prefer a less marketable game that gets into genuine scientific concepts than this...this Smurfs-in-a-terrarium game we've got.

I'm honestly getting tired of these debates, when people try to akin a video game to a scientific theory. Spore, just like every other Will Wright game is played from a third person perspective, which we've all come to recognize as the god position, be it SimCity or The Sims or Spore. This makes sense because how would the player interact with the creatures if it were truly evolution, and how many tedious evolutions would I have to do to get into space? What I think is that a lot of evolutionists were pegging spore to be a teaching tool, which its not, its a video game, one that isn't supposed to be taken so seriously.

I would so give anything to play the Spore that Will Wright envisioned. Cute Spore is fun, but I want a shot at Science Spore. I want the Spore that I don't have to beat down 10 year olds to play. I want the one with blood and corpse dragging, real CELLS and not cartoony zooplankton, Karl Sims-inspired evolution, breeding and culling, favoring mutations and ecosystem-pressured trends, selecting dynamic forcers and really feeling like God in the sandbox. Will had to compromise so much to get this current Spore to us, and it is so much fun. But I'll always feel like I'm missing out on the game he wanted to make.

That article is pretty much the saddest thing I have read about Spore. Maybe I'm too much of a simulator player, but I think sacrificing realism for "cuteness" is just plain wrong. Sure, you could sacrifice some realism for playability, but I don't think that's what happened with Spore.

When I first saw Spore in that 2005 preview video, I was completely amazed. Here was Will Wright, the creator of my favorite game (SimCity 4), showing me a game that I could almost never have dreamed of! How could this go wrong? Then I saw the videos with the cells and their eyes. Okay, I thought, so they got rid of some realism. I can deal with that.

But then Maxis started releasing thos prototypes, and I started gaining hope again. Hope of a game that really could simulate, even in the most limited sense, a living, breathing galaxy! All those prototypes pointed to a Spore that I would have wanted, with the same amount of detail and realism as SimCity 4 (or at least the Sims).

Unfortunately, that's not what Spore is. The focus of Spore should really have been put on the editors, not the supposed "universe in a box" concept. Spore isn't bad, it's just not what it was meant to be.

ddhboy wrote:This makes sense because how would the player interact with the creatures if it were truly evolution, and how many tedious evolutions would I have to do to get into space? What I think is that a lot of evolutionists were pegging spore to be a teaching tool, which its not, its a video game, one that isn't supposed to be taken so seriously.

That's not the point! SimCity was extremely realistic, but it wasn't meant (or implied) to be a "teaching tool". Of course they're games, and they are not supposed to be taken seriously. What we miss in Spore is the depth and realism the exist in SimCity and The Sims. Just look at those prototypes! If Spore had contained more of the ideas in those then it would have been awesome!

klokkwork wrote:I would so give anything to play the Spore that Will Wright envisioned. Cute Spore is fun, but I want a shot at Science Spore.

I too would give anything. I'm glad Will Wright was on the science side of Spore, and very disapointed with those "cutsie" and "marketability" people (is this what happend to SimCity Societies?).

The saddest quote from that article:

Evolution, despite his staunch Darwinism, became a massively telescoped process that depended on the external, deliberate interventions of the players.

Clearly, the implication is that there was at least some consideration of making evolution in the Creature phase occur more meaningfully. Maybe they played around with the notion of making creature creation involve more than purely esthetic fluff and simplistic, artificial stat lines. Maybe they talked of making your creature's previous evolution have some actual meaning for its future development, instead of having the ability to go from small legless blind invertebrate to giant 8-limbed horned mammal with wings in one mating.

But the cynical and shamefully compromising conclusion was, apparently: the unwashed masses are too dimwitted to grasp such advanced concepts. Give them something suited for a slow 5th grader with ADD and they'll be lulled into handing us money.

That is unfortunate.

The fact is that Spore could have appealed to the casual and the "hardcore" crowd, without any essential compromises on its original design concepts. A game like Spore could have been both accessibly engaging on a casual level and have contained enough further optional depth, in terms of sophisticated gameplay and a multitude of non-rigid, non-repetitive, non-mindless "sandbox" activities, to to keep the more invested players (not to say the more mentally active...) coming back for more.

Spore's failures are, as I've long suspected, evidently the result of specific wrong ideas about the kind of mindset the developers were targeting.
Above all, the game's faults are the result of a definite deficiency of integrity toward any ambitious, large-scale, intellectually meaningful ideas--whether ideas about the artistic potential and future direction of computer games, about their relation to broader intellectual thought, especially science, or whether simply about the scope of novel, challenging game design concepts that could be accommodated in a mass market product.

To put it simply, they thought that by dumbing down their product they could appeal to the crowd. But at this point that is merely stating the obvious.

The fact is that they would have truly earned unqualified respect and, without any hyperbole, an exalted place in (gaming) history, if they had simply stuck to their principles and made the kind of game they could have--a game that actually encompasses the ambitious conceptual breadth they spoke of in their rhetoric, a game with engaging, clever gameplay, with broad appeal but which nevertheless didn't sacrifice its intelligence and didn't start with insulting the minds of its players as a basic premise.

It might still be done, and Will Wright et al. should be the ones to do it. In justice, they deserve a good deal of credit for what they have in fact done.
But they need to follow through on their own ideas.

spongb6f1 wrote:[snip]

Quoting your whole post would be pointless, redundant, and wasteful. I think that it deserves a reaction, though, and I think the most significant and meaningful reaction I could give is this: "Yes."

I mean, what more need be said?
Oh, I could wax hyperbolic, repeat something I said once about stunned silence following by the single strong and forcefully sincere clapping of one person, which then crescendos into an audience-wide uproar of support...but you get the idea without that, I think.
Frankly, I think they underestimated their audience and the power of word-of-mouth to sell a game, and they wasted a golden opportunity by succumbing to marketing. To make an analogy to movies, they sacrificed the chance to be a beloved classic for the flash-in-the-pan revenue of a summer blockbuster that does two weekends of brisk business and is then quickly forgotten.

"Here Lies Spore, Killed by the Almighty Dollar; Abandon All Intelligence, Ye Who Enter Here"

huhh

Yes.
I'll just add that it was not their pursuit of the dollar that caused the problem. That is a thoroughly virtuous quest in itself.

It was the totally short range approach they thought was necessary to obtain it that caused the problem. The flash-in-the-pan, fly-by-night, pander-to-the-crowd strategy.

But a game of substance would result in more profit in the long-run. That is the contradiction.

hammarskjold wrote:http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/09/the_creation_simulation.php

Interesting reading, though not well sourced. Seed is legit, though.

The article says Will Wright was sort of overturned on a lot of sciency simulation stuff by others on the team concerned about marketing and playability.

-Kris

That's a fascinating thing. I kind of figured his dreams would be overshadowed by the almighty dollar.

darwintheory wrote:That guys a freakin idiot (not Will he cool). I simply fail to understand why the
cuteness was nesscary. Look at other games (hunting, RPG, FPS) they don't need
cuteness and they sell millions of copies. *sigh* maybe some day they will create
a realistic add-on to make the game look better. Don't get me wrong, I like the current
Spore but that "Cute Man" should be fired as I see him as the reason Spore dissappointed
many, he killed Science Spore!

Yeah but then you need to look at World of Warcraft over a lot of the other MMO's that are out there. It's the *most* popular out of all of them and it is cartoonish. The fact is cute sells. There's also a reason why the alliance side in WoW was always more popular then horde - again because people want cute little gnomes or night elves instead of things that look like Bulls or have huge ugly tusks.

Some people in here have made some very realistic and not-cute designs and other people have made cute designs. My personal tastes is for cute (That's why my favorite animals are things like rabbits and koala's and dogs and cats because they are all cute) the way I see the current set up though is that it caters for all kinds of styles and preferences.

i dont mind the visual look, i would just like the mecanics of the demo