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Evolutionary Scientists Test-Drive Spore, Gripe
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 23, 2008 04:52 PM
from the but-not-bitter-about-salaries-in-academia-no-sir dept.
from the but-not-bitter-about-salaries-in-academia-no-sir dept.
ahab_2001 writes "The computer game Spore has been marketed partly as an experience that makes evolutionary biology come alive in a game setting. But does that claim hold water? To find out, John Bohannon, a correspondent for Science Magazine (writing as 'The Gonzo Scientist'), sat four card-carrying scientists, ranging from evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge to JPL astrophysicist Miles Smith, down in front of a terminal to play the game. The upshot, says Bohannon: Spore flunks basic science, getting 'most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.'"
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Um, no duh. (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, I'd like to finish the game in less time than 1000000000000 years...
Reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of some decade ago or so, when someone warned that the stone age wasn't like in The Flintstones. I never would have guessed ;)
Parent
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected.
I never paid much attention to they hype and went mostly by the criterion that I'd even buy Pee [penny-arcade.com] if it's Will Wright's anyway. Also, that it's just a game anyway.
According to TFA, though, it sounds like EA's bulshitters... err... marketers have been shooting their mouth all over the place about how the game is an accurate representation of evolution, and how there's interest from colleges to use it to teach science. And while the former borders on fraud, the latter makes me cringe. As others have said, it's really an ID game, with some evolution language thrown in. The very idea of selling that as accurate science is ridiculous enough, but hyping it as a way to _teach_ evolution... is irresponsible at best.
*Sigh* It's times like these that I see Bill Hicks's point about marketing...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It feels as you're playing it that it *wants* you to assume intelligent design. You're "designing" it, aren't you? And your designs are utterly unscientific and impractical, though terribly cute. And there's no explana
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious?
You guys have taken a game ... thats it, nothing more than a game, that no one in their right mind would consider to be based on anything scientific or religous and turned it into an evolution versus intelligent design thing?
For fucks sake, not everything is about advancing some agenda that you don't agree with. Put your damn tin foil hats back on and crawl back into your fucked up world of conspiracies instead of talking to those of us in the normal world.
Its just a damn game, nothing more.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are overgeneralizing. It isn't just a game, it is a game about evolution thus the arguement of evolution vs ID.
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to school you on "science" and "science fiction", because you've made an error in your assessment, a fairly major one.
There's a difference in literary terms between "hard science fiction" and "soft science fiction". Star Trek falls under the category of "hard science fiction", as does almost everything by Isaac Asimov. Hard science fiction is science fiction that is as heavily based in science FACT as is possible. While Star Trek may be a little "softer" than Foundation, it still falls squarely in the genre of "hard science fiction" and deserves to be treated as such.
That said, "soft science fiction" is just as valuble in literary terms--its simply a slightly different genre. Soft science fiction includes authors like Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Ubik) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine). Soft science fiction sacrifices scientific fact for much weightier raw speculation, and generally uses this speculation to spawn plots and plot devices. _Dune_ is an excellent example of soft science fiction in this manner.
All of THAT said, the game is neither soft nor hard science fiction, it's just intelligent design masquerading as fun (and not very well at that). The reason that it's very important to understand this is that currently a very small number of very, very loud people are actually getting laws passed in the United States (and elsewhere) which are rooted firmly in the ethic of "ID". This is horrifying to me and all free-thinking people, and must be stopped at once. Shining a very clear light on suspicions of ID prattle in video games (and elsewhere) is important to start a dialog about it.
But you're not taking part of a dialog. In your assessment of some of our arguments as "blah blah bla whine whine whine", you yourself have become the biggest whiner of all.
But thanks for the irony.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
ID is creationism packaged in pseudoscientific terms to make it more appealing to people who don't understand what is happening. The core of Intelligent Design is that things are too complex to have evolved on their own and thus must have been magically created that complex.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is, it's been /marketed/ as sketching evolutionary law, which is not the case.
This is not a case of bad game design (although it might be) but a case of misleading marketing.
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Funny)
You mean like Doom or Quake? Wow. I'm a lot more interested in Spore now.
Parent
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Funny)
If you play long enough, eventually your creature will start forming Duke Nukem Forever
Parent
Sarcasm (Score:5, Funny)
A cheery "pong" sound preceded the announcement to passengers of the Boeing Sarcasm 767:
"This Sarcastic Joke Airways flight 666 from ctaylor +5 Funny airport to LOLzistan is cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet, right over Anonymous Coward's head. We expect to reach our destination 30 minutes after Anonymous Coward has had his dinner and is sitting on the toilet, giving him time to contemplate id vs. ID and whatthefuckapunisanyway.
"Cabin crew, please release the chemical toilets."
*WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH*
Parent
Re:Um, no duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I think the main point is that "Evolution" in spore is not driven by Natural Selection at all, but rather by the whims of the user, or at least changes are made in way that the user perceives will help them be successful in the game.
If anything, Spore gets right (in a very broad definition of the term) the different possible eras of evolution. Cell to pack to tribe to city to space-faring civiliation. And that only parallels advanced intelligent civilizations.
Some species have evolved so well to fit a niche (like Honeybees) that they haven't evolved that much.
If anything, I would say that Spore is part of an experience that makes "Intelligent Design" come alive in a game setting! After all, it's the user who's "designing" the creature! ;)
I wonder how that would be for marketingspeak!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, and you don't understand evolution, either, because evolution has nothing to do with a hierarchy of progress. It's ridiculous to claim that we are "more evolved than honeybees"; it shows that you don't understand evolution.
Evolution has no stages like "tribe" or "civilization". These are parts of human creation. Perhaps intelligent life forms may undergo similar stages. Perhaps they'll form differently based upon their behavioral characteristics. Either way, though, evolution has nothing to do with
Re:Um, no duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=199 [vgcats.com]
Parent
Re:Um, no duh. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually Intelligent Design simply stipulates that the universe was created by an intelligent being (say, God) in some state not equivalent to total chaos and/or guided by that benefactor through its existence to keep things running smoothly.
There are very few intelligent ID proponents in the world (don't stop reading here) who don't believe in what would be called 'micro-evolution' or evolution within a species/genus, but they would happily argue that birds, fish and beasts of the land did not evolve from each other or a common ancestry.
Parent
ID (Score:3, Funny)
Its an intelligent design game marketed as a game about evolution. Must be selling like hotcakes in Kansas.
Re:ID (Score:5, Informative)
In the spirit of fairness, I had a copy of Spore sent to Michael Behe, an intelligent design advocate based at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. After playing Spore, he concluded that it "has nothing to do with real science or real evolution--neither Darwinian nor intelligent design."
Parent
Re:ID (Score:4, Insightful)
In seriousness, however, the reason it's not ID to Behe is probably because Jesus Christ himself isn't directly each and every creature in Spore.
In true seriousness, why would sending something to Behe have to do with "fair"? That implies Behe's side deserves fair representation. In my books, cranks do not deserve representation until they have actual science to back their claims up.
Parent
Re:ID (Score:4, Interesting)
Great! Free copies of Spore for everyone with a wacky view on how species came about! Whooo-hooo! That's what free speech is all about! I personally believe that species come about by mutating in nuclear waste instead of natural selection; I'm eagerly awaiting my copy! Though I might not install it with the DRM attached...
Quit trying to karma whore by turning this into a free speech issue. That trick isn't working for the creationists and it's not going to work for you. Quite simply, Behe doesn't deserve a "fair and balanced" treatment because his views, under scrutiny, are not science and should not be treated as if they are a viable alternative view.
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
Huh?
Why does NOT having a higher power deprive life of value?
And if life has no value intrinsically, then why does a higher power "give" it any value at all?
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:4, Insightful)
The statement DOES imply "If life has no value, then it's likely there is no god", but it says nothing about what might be true if there is no god.
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand. If god exists, and cares about puny mortals, why does that give them value?
Why does god and his cares have intrinsic value any more than life itself?
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying its the "ultimate authority on morals" is not enough to explain why they should care about what he thinks. Why should they accept, rather than reject morals?
Its not enough to have a god that cares about life so that life would have value. You have to accept that god's values as your own, to inherit the view that life has value.
So why not skip the god part, and accept the view life has value without all the god mumbo jumbo?
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well if you believe that God himself actually wanted the Crusades to happen, I could understand that comment.
What God's followers do in his name is not the same as what it is he wants done by his followers.
Reading the Bible helps clear a lot of these misunderstandings up.
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not acknowledging the existence of a higher power invalidates a number of arguments that life has value. That's not at all the same as depriving life of value.
If life has value, the invalidation of a large class of arguments to that effect only means that this fact must be demonstrated differently. On the other hand, if life has NO value, then contrary arguments that it HAS value are necessarily disprovable in some way. However, not all disproofs of such counter arguments are necessarily valid, they are just correct. A third possibility is that existence of value in life cannot be proved or disproved within the terms of discourse. In that case one can consistently take it as axiomatic one way or the other.
That's where things get interesting. Different moralities could be constructed around either alternative. For those who take the position that life has value, this value is, in a sense, rooted in the arguments to that effect. Refuting the arguments thus really does deprive life of its value.
On the other hand, for those who take it for granted that life has no value, the success of a counter argument to their views entails the prospect of their magnificently bleak psychological landscape being cluttered with fluffy white bunny and pink valentine hearts.
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:5, Informative)
Please at least try to get informed about who you are insulting. Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value) believes the universe is 6k years old. But even disregarding that, your insult didn't make sense. A game marketed about evolution is popular with people in KS, presumably because you think everyone in KS is a backwards redneck who denies evolution?
I think it would help if you read this [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:4, Insightful)
#1, I've lived in Kansas and know many people there. 90% of the plains area are backwards rednecks who deny evolution. I had to work for years to overcome prejudices I learned growing up there... and I'm embarassed every time it slips through. I thank my wife for getting me the hell out of that state before the damage was even more perminant. A lot of them are nice people (if you're straight, white, and faithful), however, they are backwards rednecks who deny evolution.
#2, Yes, everyone knows that not every religious person belives in young earth... however nearly half do acording to studys. Just because these religions have split to the point where commenting on their stupidy is akin to playing whack-a-mole doesn't change the fact that you are defined by the company kept by the majority of a group. If you don't want called stupid for being part of the group don't bitch at the people calling you stupid, bitch at the people making you look stupid.
Parent
Evolution or Creation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't spore teach much much more about the idea of creationism (under the form of 'guided evolution') than it does about true evolution?
If you want to teach about evolution, make an RTS where everyone starts out with the same units, but depending on how you use them (and which units come back alive) they change over time. Still guided evolution I guess, since you could put your units in situations that would produce traits that you desire, but at least a few steps up the ladder of scientific validity.
Re:Evolution or Creation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
SimLife did a pretty good job on that score. It doesn't have to be completely non-interactive; SimLife allowed you to tweak a huge number of universal variables, but also intervene directly and modify a creature's phenotype or genotype by hand.
The way SimLife implemented it was by allowing creatures to undergo randomized minor mutations when breeding. If a subset of a creature's population got sufficiently different from the rest, it would be designated a new species (assuming there was an open slot for s
Losing perspective here? (Score:5, Interesting)
My impression is that it's a freaking videogame and doesn't attempt to teach anything other than how to use sandbox editors to make spaceships and stuff. I'm surprised at all this discussion over what is merely a collection of clay editors.
Parent
Re:Evolution or Creation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, someone who can see that it is CLEARLY CREATIONISM.
Everything Will Wright is creationism, that is the idea. God games, and you get to be god. Simcity 1/2/3/4, Simearth, The Sims, now Spore. You can be an evil god (In sims, put someone in a room, remove the door, they die eventually. Better yet, in the kitchen and catch it on fire.) or be a good god (yawn). But it is all creationism. That this game is too really isn't a revelation. You are just starting a few million years earlier.
Parent
Well, yea - its way off (Score:5, Insightful)
Way I understand the point, though... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the way I understand the point, though, it's not that the game _should_ be an accurate represetation of unguided evolution. It's that EA has marketed it as an accurate representation of evolution, and as a way to teach evolution. Clearly that claim doesn't match the game's content.
And normally I'd have said the said you did. But if they made some very clear claims about the game, I think it's fair to judge it by those claims.
I mean, for example, if UT claimed to be (among other things) an accurate flight simulator, it would be entirely fair to expect it to match that claim. After all, that's what their own marketers are telling you to use as your buying criterion.
Way I can tell, that's what they do in TFA. They didn't just come out of nowhere with the idea that a game must be like evolution. (Which would be a silly expectation indeed.) But once EA claimed that it _is_ an accurate representation of evolution, and good enough to be used in colleges, well, the game is on. Let's see how true that statement is.
Parent
In other news (Score:4, Informative)
"four card-carrying scientists" (Score:5, Funny)
Since when do we have club cards?!?
Any publicity is good publicity (Score:4, Interesting)
That must be Will Wright's philosophy if he goes around saying stuff like this (from TFA):
Last month in an hour-long show on the National Geographic channel, the game's creator, Will Wright, spoke with biologists about "the breakthrough science that's revealing the secret genetic machinery that shapes all life in the game Spore."
And the author's writing style just hurts. Pretentious twit. And he keeps trying so hard to set up a false dichotomy between scientific and religious-minded players. Give it a rest. Stop trying to stir up controversy where there isn't any.
And "The Gonzo Scientist?" Hunter S. Thompson would shoot himself if he saw that. Oh wait...
Air Force Missleares ripped Missile Command (Score:5, Funny)
If you think this is bad you should read how those Air Force Missleares ripped the Missile Command developers.
Totally unrealistic usage of the trackball for targeting, didn't require the appropriate 2 keys, and had a high score list in a totally different configuration than the actual high-score lists that appeared on official Strategic Air Command consoles.
Not too surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spore is Lamarkian evolution with hit points.
Seriously, inheritance of acquired characteristics, "the complexifying force", "the adaptive force", it's all there. Compare this to Will Wright's much earlier Simlife, which is substantially oversimplified, for the sake of gameplay on the computers of 1992; but is actually a Darwinian evolution simulator game. Now, that said, that isn't an issue. Spore isn't required to be anything in particular. Some games rely on realism. Spore doesn't. Some rely on verisimilitude, Spore doesn't really do that either. Not a problem. Civilization II is a great game; but anybody who thinks that it is a civics lesson is mistaken. Nothing wrong with that. I just hope that the vague notion that "Spore is about evolution" doesn't give rise to yet more peculiar misunderstandings of the subject.
Incidentally, and maybe this just makes me a bad person; but why does the Spore space stage have no concept of genocide? It keeps track of, and awards medals and stuff for, all kinds of weird things(OMG! painted 5 planets!). Why does neither the game, nor the AI races, react appropriately when I take my ship to their homeworld and suck up all its atmosphere, turning the ancestral home of their race into a barren rock, coated with bones and ashes? Shouldn't that deserve a message less generic than "You hurt our planet."?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They're probably in disbelief that you managed to guess the code to the atmospheric shield.
I have the same combination on my luggage!
They're right (Score:3, Funny)
Where are the ads? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only Spore ads I saw were on TV and I don't remember them saying anything about its accuracy or educational value.
So where exactly are the marketing materials that claim Spore is accurate and educational? If they exist, then yes, shame on EA.
If they don't, then shame on whoever is trying to pick a fight.
Disappointing, over-hyped (Score:3, Insightful)
Spore probably was meant to be more (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the feeling that Spore originally was meant to be more but Maxis has always had trouble delivering. SimCity of course were amazing games. For their time. It is the reason the francise died. Because as it aged, the graphics improved but the quality of the simulation didn't and we as players became aware that more was needed. More paths, more options, more choice. Instead SimCity and the likes have always had a rather narrow path to victory and if veered of that path, the game model couldn't cope.
Spore is perhaps the greatest failure. It seems originally to have been a game about evolution or at least to use evolution.
There have been games in this nature before, so it can be done. I remember an ancient game that used clay-motion animation for its creatures that allowed you to breed creatures and cull them to get the ones best suited to their enviroment.
But there is NOTHING of that in this game. As the article mentions, antlers on your back help you charge skill. You charge backwards?
There is just one TINY hint at the slightest possibilty of evolution, fruits. If you are small, you can only reach fallen fruit, if you are tall, you can get the highest fruits. There is no difference in the fruits but it is the one and only time the build of your creature seems to matter.
The rest of the time, it just don't matter. You can't even make a monster eater with a dozen mouths that devours everything in its path, or a super defensive creature because multiple items don't stack their bonusses.
The game just completly failed to live up to its early promises. I get the feeling Will Wright is following in Molyneux's footsteps. Once a person who made innovative and fun game but one who increasingly just can't deliver on his promises.
To bad because a game that uses evolution to judge your creationism could be a lot of fun.
It's not dangerous; it's too stupid to be. (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife's lab - she's an evolutionary biologist, in a sense - gathered around Spore last week, and we all had a good laugh. Out of something like three master's students, three Ph.D. candidates, three Ph.D.s, and me, lowly MFA that I am, nobody could think of a single thing it did right in terms of actual evolution ... but, at the same time, it's so thoroughly, ludicrously wacko (all herbivores want to be friends with other species? Anyone who's ever seen a hippo in the wild wouldn't agree with that... ) that we agreed that it couldn't possibly help the ID folks, either. I mean ... would *they* want people to think that God sends piles of bones down to induce change in how well species dance?
It's a Big Bucket of Fail on pretty much every level, no matter what direction you're coming from.
Re:Card Carrying? (Score:5, Funny)
four card-carrying scientists
I thought it was just a metaphor. Like, leave your scientist card by the door on the way out.
No, there's a card for just about everything these days. For example, I'm a card-carrying sysadmin, but I'm also a card-carrying Slashdot geek. I am also a card-carrying American, a card-carrying driver of cars, and a card-carrying member of the Subway Sub Club.
Really, if you don't have a card for everything you do and everything you are, how can we really trust that you are what you say you are? Are you a card-carrying Anonymous Coward? Or a dirty fraud? We can't tell!
My wallet is overflowing with cards proving everything about every aspect of my life (I'm also a card-carrying wallet overstuffer!). Really, I don't know how you can get along in life without the appropriate cards.
Parent
Re:dude, it's a friggen game (Score:5, Interesting)
what do you expect?
Obviously what they expected was better evolutionary biology principles. Was that an unreasonable expectation? Well, yeah, and I bet they feel stupid for expecting that now, but hindsight is 20-20.
Speaking as someone who spent three years working in the field of evolutionary biology (from the standpoint of working on same with evolutionary algorithms), I can tell you that the reality of that subject, whilst scientifically fascinating, is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
You wouldn't want a game to follow scientifically realistic principles. For one thing doing so would involve including the possibility that it would go off on a tangent and fail. You don't want that, not in a game anyway, which means you have to add a lot of constraints, which in turn means a truly scientific approach is pretty much impossible.
That said, I'm sure there is a lot that can be taken from the real science. Just don't ask a scientist to do the extraction, instead, ask an experienced game designer, someone who knows what a game would need.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it was an unreasonable expectation. I don't even know how one can make a game about natural selection / evolution. Once you put interactivity into it, either by changing the environment or changing the creature, it plays right into the hands of the principles of ID.