Criticism: Accepted

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Humankind has a tremendous impact on the world, and in keeping with Bierce's barb - this is a problem. As individuals in society, ignorance and structure ensure that we each make a small contribution to what has become a massive, life-consuming machinery. Given this relationship with the planet, Maxis' plan for Spore - empowering users to create life and seed entire new worlds via the creature creator - well, lets just say it's interesting (hell, it's the stuff of allegory).

The investigation begins with how the user community has adopted and adapted Spore's creature creator, which is on some level a very intuitive modelling program. Thankfully, Maxis maintains Sporepedia, a bestiary for the community's creations, to allow us access to what people are making of their genesis opportunity. Here are some questions that we should expect to answer: How is the user responding to the marketing challenge to (uhg) "Build a better being"? What sort of Tool is the Creature Creator (and, to some extent, Spore)? Finally, we will place these questions in context.

Our first category as we classify the Spore community's output is exactly what we should have expected. I bring you the Obscene:

If you (like me) have any further interest in the "if God had repressed his sexuality" category, this thread (72 pages) on the Something Awful forums is a great resource. By the way, the left-most image of the three above is actually a single creature built to resemble two pink humanoids 'in flagrante.'

If you do follow the forum link, you notice it's populated by thumbnail images like the three above. These png files exist to transmit creature data. Download the png and drag it onto your own copy of the creature creator and it will assemble the creature in question for you. Where is the data? Hidden in the R,G,B and Alpha channels of the image (Steganography). A forum post explains it best. The thing to take away is that a tactic conceived for secrecy is here being used to load an image file to the point where it can convey what would otherwise be arcane game data. So in essence, if you see something on the Sporepedia you are able drag it into your Creature Creator - collecting made easy. As a modder I can tell you that this eliminates some frustration with sharing your work. Wherever possible I will provide these png files.

Also, before we move on there's a misconception to address: Is Spore a game about evolution? As we delve into what people are producing with the creature creator, be mindful that this is explicit construction and not the process of natural selection. You can argue that user agency (insofar as a user wants to 'win' on Spore's terms - more later) represents this pressure, but the real insight is to be found in the design of a 'creature creator.' As the player, you literally shop for adaptations (yes, complete with loose change sounds and sprites). If you find a nail blocking your way you simply strive to become a hammerhead. The idea that an adaptation, be it a sort of mouth or a variation on the eyeball, is 'there for the striving' is Lamarckism. If the Creature Creator stays as is, then Spore abounds with this sort of soft-inheritance. The addition of a randomize avatar or mutation button would make for an interesting "Hardcore Mode"...

Back to categorizing, lets explore creatures composed of writing:

Usually invertebrate-like, message monsters range in content from whole words (expletives, insults, maxis adulation) to single letters. The "Fuck" worm is especially popular - I attribute at least some of this to the brilliant direction in the first few seconds of this youtube clip:

One of the more unlikely (clever) categories is populated by attempts to buck the system - these creatures are probably best described as being technomorphic:

These absurdities are all 100% 'organic.' Mandibles, eyeballs, fins, and limbs (your building block, base units in the Creature Creator) are scaled, painted, and arranged to best represent inanimate objects - think Cronenberg. The joke is on whoever first discovers the Spore world with a typewriter apex predator. A quick search on Sporepedia should give you an idea of how widespread this is.

A similar but somehow less brilliant urge comes under the plant-life category:

Various vegetation - flora from a fauna construction kit. Like the previous technomorph category, it's fun to imagine these creatures' appearances as elaborate deceptions to attract prey. This is best when imagining the toilet's ruse or how something that looks like a giant strawberry could possibly avoid extinction.

On the topic of non-viable creature creations, the next category is for disembodied anatomy:

Consider that the software is designed to supply the user with prefabbed body parts and you can truly grasp the absurdity that is building a severed foot.

Next, we have probably the best populated category - that of the fantastic creature. I chose to split this into three sub-categories: mythological, user-imagined, and pop-culture. First off, the mythological:

From left to right, these are the griffon, the unicorn, and Cthulu. Since mythical creatures are often variations on an existing species or amalgamations of many actual creatures, they seem perfectly suited to interpretation via the Creature Creator. Given the rich history to draw from, including various medieval bestiaries, I think a Spore planet populated entirely by the monsters of our forefathers could be pretty compelling (world building...).

In contrast to the mythological, the user-imagined sub-category of fantastic creatures is a place for original thinking:

From left to right we have a hand-turkey (a kindergarten art project come to life), a puppet monkey, and a snake charmer. This category is a catch-all for thinking outside of the box; it's inspired stuff. Each month, the tail end of the New Yorker has a contest where readers are invited to caption an unusually absurd 1 panel cartoon - It's not such a stretch to imagine a similar challenge involving the Creature Creator (either name something, like a "woolly duck," and reward the best rendition, or invite users to caption some monstrosity).

To round out fantastic creatures, I think the pop-culture sub-category is most fitting. I have a few favorites here:

So, from left to right we have Daffy duck from "Duck Amuck," Bender the robot from Futurama, A Big Daddy from Bioshock, Charles Darwin, Spielberg's E.T., a companion cube from Portal, the Star Child from 2001, and lastly a Metroid. The insidious attraction here is the opportunity for people to surround themselves with all of their favorite branded properties. This is media cross-pollination and it seems to be something that, for better or worse, happens when content creation tools are passed on to the user.

Before we move on, yes, tasteless memes are realized as well. Here we see the raptor Jesus, who comes from a practice of photoshopping raptor heads over depictions of Jesus. This meme climaxed at "he went extinct for your sins" :

And finally, making perhaps the most seamless transition into Spore are actual animal species.
We start with the ordinary:

The best thing about these creatures is that the Spore community has a chance to refer to them as "earth creatures" (that same silly, ostentatious objectivity that a CNN reporter from Atlanta will use as he or she refers to "the Americans").

These are all impressively detailed, but sometimes the variations, and yes even the failures, are worth a look. Lets take a more in-depth at a single animal species on Sporepedia (pigs):

I consider the Top Pig to be a proud specimen. On the bottom row (from left to right) we have an amusingly timid pig, followed by a charmingly incredulous pig (obviously skeptical of and frustrated by his sloppy construction), followed by an incomplete or iconic pig, and lastly a pig-tiger hybrid. Of course, given this pig-riffing you would soon expect some that fly:

Pigs aside, a popular practice seems to involve making 'bean' versions of favorite animals - these end up looking like plush, beanie-baby miniatures:

The implication here is that any creature can be made to exhibit Neoteny - imagine entire worlds where baby-faces are the rule.

Another subsection of real creatures is populated by creatures-that-were:

This would have been a good spot to show off Dinosaurs, but I want to focus on creatures of the Burgess Shale. The significance of the Burgess Shale is that its fossils suggest an unprecedented flowering of biodiversity known as the Cambrian Explosion. Imagining recent Creature Creator activity in this context makes for a useful comparison - the y-axis on the graph to the left increments by 25,000 because this is the average creature addition to Sporepedia each day. The total of known Spore species, as of this writing, is up above 3 million, which is a low-bound for the total estimated species of fauna living on Earth.

So we're describing an explosion of virtual biodiversity that conjures the most fertile period of earth's biological history. Of course, I think it's more than relevant to point out that right now is also a noteworthy moment in Earth's biological history - A biodiversity crisis, what scientists fear may be the fastest mass extinction in earth's history. This is also coming to be known as the sixth extinction and most aptly as the Holocene extinction event (Holocene refers to the relatively brief age of humankind). You need to be in-tune enough to summon a little anxiety if any of this is news. I think the timing for something like Spore goes beyond irony, but before we go any further on this topic I'd like to use this opportunity to segue into the last subcategory of actual creature - the recently extinct:

Left to right: the Dodo, Steller's sea cow - gone By 1768, less than 30 years after discovery by Europeans (As we read this electronically we can substitute "us" for Europeans ), the yangtze river dolphin (some possibly remain, but as China takes the lead in spoiling the planet I think we should consider the dolphin 'officially censored'), and the Golden Toad. My personal dream for Spore is a world populated by our collective guilty conscience (here's an extinction list).

Speaking of a guilty conscience, there is something of a Dodo zeitgeist occurring on Sporepedia. If you follow the link, you notice various renditions of the bird. Aside from the naturalistic attempts, most telling are the mass of creatures that can only be considered 'Dodo-esque' - obviously inspired. It's seductive to imagine that this activity is rooted in a subconscious preoccupation with extinction on planet Earth. Regardless, making a Dodo almost approaches a right of passage.

Most extinct species aren't as spectacular as the Dodo. For the most part, what's disappearing are obscure varieties of mouse, rat, and pigeon; aside from the case of the carrier pigeon most of us have never heard of any of them. It's easy to ignore some desert mouse with a 30 mile habitat in the boonies 'going the way of the Dodo.' The catastrophe in every 'minor' extinction is the loss of adaptation, or biodiversity, that was represented within said creature - more so if it was especially nuanced. In terms of Spore and the Creature Creator, this would be like removing certain creature 'parts' from possibility. The same diversity that insures fun in Spore insures the resiliency of life on earth, and that flexibility is what is disappearing (some scientists are developing Noah's Ark projects to protect biodiversity).

A quick anecdote on biodiversity: Imagine taking some beavers from Canada and flying them to Argentina. The beavers are pretty hardy, and they quickly displace a native species and destroy the habitats of many others with their dams. You could make a case for the beavers being better adapted as they kick everything else around, but a less insane realization is as follows: for those Beaver's to arrive in Argentina without what is essentially teleportation (Man/Technology transporting them), they would have had to contend with and adapt to countless miles of ecosystem. The beavers that end up in Argentina in this second case, if they make it at all, are nothing like what we air-drop in the first scenario. Things like this happen all the time - even when we aren't explicitly pouring toxic compounds into rivers our activity is knee-capping biodiversity.

Back to how Spore and the Creature Creator treat these adaptations - as currency. The creature creator is basically a superstore, complete with in-game shopping metaphors. The idea that an adaptation can be given cash value isn't entirely new, we live in a world where corporations patent genes, seeds, and the like, but compare this perspective with that of the native peoples modern society displaced en route to the present world - it's exploitation in place of stewardship. This rhetoric of exploitation infects the Creature Creator - creation is expedient, you're on a crusade to surmount the environment rather than function within it, and your options aren't disappearing...revel in the plenitude. Take the long view: We're busy ravaging our planet and along comes a tool that allows us to enjoy populating the aftermath with digital ghosts and penis monsters - "all anxieties tranquilized" (a Network reference re purposed for interactive media )

This brings us to the final analysis: My discomfort with spore as catharsis and the assumptions this game is poised to perpetuate. We should all be familiar with the video game industry marketing rhetoric that urges us to "get in the game" or "play in [corporation's] world." Such slogans are instantly ridiculous, but the experience of play is experience, and it does grace the way we think.

Spore's marketing rhetoric is as follows: "With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space." Spore, like all God games, must distill life into a game system, and within this marketing enticement exists the backbone of that system: Spore seems poised to embrace a specific, teleological narrative of progress. This means that each state (cell, creature, tribe, etc) necessarily leads into the next, and somehow civilization, instead of cannibalizing and consuming the basis for its existence, gives way to a final and thus desirable galactic mastery. As a user, we aren't limited to one 'leg' of a creature's journey, we abide - we are a force of nature - and in such a perspective one finds a narrative of ascendancy where we must forsake equilibrium and persistence in favor of world and eventual galactic dominion. After all, how else are we to get to the 'end' of Spore? It's manifest destiny. Instead of concern for the systems of life, we get genetic imperative and a cut-throat crusade for the stars. We're somewhere along on this progression here in reality, on Earth(!), and we have reason to question it's viability.

My hope for Spore is that it can be relevant in the context of this world - that it can be critical of, rather than embrace, a rhetoric of progress, combustion, and exploitation that's backing us into a wall. Otherwise it's just irony - sitting indoors, AC blasting; using digital space to play out a game-plan that the earth can't keep up with.