Spore, Part 2

After watching the three videos (Spore, The Web's Secret Stories, and Fantastic Voyage Inside the Cell) the only one that really sparks my interest is Spore again. Hopefully there isn't a rule about recovering a topic.

Spore is being hailed as a potential game of the year, for combining game play with creativity and allowing the player to innovate. However one of the greatest and most revolutionary aspects of Spore was glossed over in Will Wrights Ted Talk. He explained how players love to create, and how when a player uses their imagination to mold out their own content, they are much more attached to said content. Spore takes this concept and runs with it, and instead of the designers creating levels and enemies to face like traditional games, they modify the tools they use to create the world and release it to the gamer.

Typical games last anywhere from 20-100 hours to beat, depending on the type and game itself. Role playing games and strategy games usually take longer to beat than action games. There is one major exception to this, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (or MMORPG’s) are often designed so that the game never really ends, and so the player never stops paying for the game. The most famous example of this is the World of Warcraft, played by some 8 million worldwide. However every bit of WoW was created by game designers, every piece of weaponry, every character face or movement, every level and tree and monster in the game was painstakingly created and implemented in the game. That makes for an enormous amount of work for the game designers. Then they use that content, and make the player go over it again and again to progress. This is called the “Grind”, and gets boring fast.

Spore’s major innovation is that players become the designers. Lets say I create a creature I call the Humdinger, with 6 legs and a big mouth. This creature is then uploaded to a central database, and redistributed to other peoples worlds, seamlessly. So someone in Australia playing spore may run into my Humdingers, and decide to make peace with my civilization, and start trading with them. Then someone from Canada also meets my Humdingers and decides to annihilate the civilization by destroying our home planet. Neither of these actions affect MY game, my home planet is not harmed on my side of the server, but the other players get to experience new content daily, so that there will never be a “Grind”. Endless worlds can be explored, made of many different creations from many different players, not limited to the creatures, but vehicles (air, land, sea and space) vegetation, buildings and the planets themselves. Instead of having a team of 100 designers flesh out a level, you have thousands of designers, all creating, all allowing you to have more to explore and interact with. When uploaded into other peoples games, the creatures you have created will behave as you have played them, being as aggressive or as peaceful as you made them. The idea is that Spore is a Massively Single Player game. Thus, the game will never run out of content for you to explore, and is never ending.