Press Fire to Start

Imagine this: it’s 1985, and you’re playing this new video game called Tetr. In it, one of seven differently shaped blocks appears at the top of the screen and starts its slow descent. You can then rotate and move that block and even make it fall faster. Once it settles either on the bottom of the field or on top of another block, a new block appears. You can stack the blocks more efficiently, making your construction reach the top of the screen less quickly. When your construct does reach the top, the field simply scrolls down and play continues. There are three difficulty settings, which affect the speed the blocks fall with. Oh, and you can design your own blocks, although all anyone uses that feature for is making slightly more phallic straight lines.

This is the mystery of Spore: Why has no one walked up to Will Wright and said, hey Will old buddy, how’s about lines disappear when they’re full and the player loses the game when the blocks hit the ceiling? That way you’d have a game.

 

What is wrong with me?

I’m in no way opposed to post-modern experiments in gaming. I enjoyed the hell out of flOw when it was just a little Flash game. For no more than half an hour, of course, but still. I don’t mind sandboxes. And does cute bother me? Well, wait for my Civ Rev review to find out, but the short answer is no.

The “design your own 3D models” editor at the core of Spore is pure genius. Obviously you could nit-pick about this and that, say that a toggle for the snap might be nice or that a grid could be really helpful, but what the editor does is present a minimum complexity, maximum accessibility interface to 3D modeling, and already its success can be measured by the amount of variations on the human penis the internet has come up with. One guy (it must be assumed) made a species that looks like a perpetually copulating human couple. Inspired, really, and amazingly funny when they dance or jump.

What seems to bother me most is that there is but an empty husk of a game loosely attached to these editing tools. I’ve seen this before, in Wright’s last offering. Fasih seems to like the Sims, but we should all remember that in many ways, he is actually a woman. But clearly I embody the vocal minority here. The Sims sold like Heroin Hotcakes, and Spore seems to have earned its creators at least enough money for a decent-sized space station. Someone out there must be enjoying this stuff, but this new casual crowd is as alien to me as gamers must have been alien to the mainstream ten years ago.

 

Toys vs games

Two things sucked up large chunks of my playtime back in my early childhood: first it was Lego, then it was computer games. With myLegos I always asked for those boxes of generic bricks and parts, never the model sets where you could build one specific vehicle only. I really liked coming up with my own designs. But that was the thing about playing with Legos: once I’d built something, that was that. It was built, it was done, and if I wanted to move on and build the next thing, I had to break it down and start over. In short, creation was lots of fun, but ultimately rather pointless. There was no purpose to it.

When my father came home one day and brought me a PC game he had borrowed from a colleague at work (supporting my addiction and teaching me to be a good pirate from day one) I was a little perplexed and couldn’t fathom how this was supposed to be fun. “Run a railroad company? Ship cargo and passengers? That sounds like something grown-ups do at work!” And of course I spent many, many months doing exactly that.

Railroad Tycoon qualifies as a sandbox game. Sure, there were competitors you could buy out, there was money to be made and so on, but there always came a certain point when it was clear that your company was successful enough to dominate the rest of the game. This was never the point when you stopped playing. Constructing railroads and optimizing train routes were ways of creative expression not unlike building a spaceship on wheels with Lego (okay, so I thought it would look faster if you added wheels. It makes sense when you’re nine years old). Here’s the thing, though: there were conditions for failure and success in the game. Even after it was clear that failure would no longer be a threat, the presence of this guiding system gave the whole experience purpose.

A good toy is one that gives the player ample opportunity for creative expression. A good game is a good toy with a purpose. A plastic guitar is a toy. A game that makes you play songs on the plastic guitar and grades you on how well you played is a game.

 

Spore. Spore never changes.

When you play a new game that you’ve been anticipating for some time, there are always two conflicting games: the one you’ve made up in your mind and the one you’re actually playing. Sometimes these can be nearly identical (Serious Sam anyone?) and sometimes the discrepancy can be truly jarring. Of course this doesn’t mean the game has failed, but often looking at the differences between expectation and reality can be educating.

When Spore was announced, I was excited even though I couldn’t have told you why. Clearly the premise had a lot of potential: play through a creature’s evolution from single-cell stage to galactic hegemony. And that Will Wright guy, he and I may not see eye-to-eyestalk on the whole Sims thing, but he made so many games that I played obsessively. I’m old enough to have played both SimLife and SimEarth when they came out, and I loved them both to death. I could see Wright revisiting that kind of game, tying everything together nicely.

As more and more previews came out it became increasingly clear that Spore would be a collection of minigames connected by an overarching meta-narrative, the development of your species. Okay, less exciting, but hey, this can still work, right? I bet what you do in minigame 1 changes everything about minigames 2, 3, 4 and so on. I bet it’s going to be a really dynamic game.

And there’s the jarring discrepancy. Spore is about as static a collection of minigames as I’ve ever seen. Sure, depending on whether you eat meat, plants, or both in minigame 1 you get a different special ability in minigame 2, and there’s the ever-present editor which allows you to come up with your own 3D models for all stages of the game, but in none of the stages do these models make any real difference.

No matter how many times you play through it, Spore is going to be pretty much the same game.

 

So close it hurts

I can hear you ask, so why do you complain? Lots of people like the game. Maybe you wanted it to be something else, but you’re not Will Wright. Well, normally I’d move on and ignore the game. My problem is that they got so very close to what I imagine could have been a legendary game. Time and again I caught glimpses of that incredibly good game just below the surface.

Let’s walk through the minigames. Fasih mapped the progression of Spore thus: flOw to WoW to Dune II to Civilization to Star Control. Each of these are great games for different reasons, and a game that ties sufficiently good clones of them together in a satisfying manner would have been amazing.

The similarity between the Cell Stage and flOw is probably greatest among these comparisons. The cell stage was really great fun: it felt like flOw with a purpose. You eat/avoid other creatures and gain DNA points for doing so. These points you invest into new parts. This is a great, addictive mechanic. You constantly toy with your creature to make it better somehow. Forward-pointing spikes are great for charging into enemies, but they make it harder to gobble up the resulting food-bits, electricity and poison are great defence mechanisms, but wouldn’t you rather invest those points in more speed?

This is all great, but once you replay that stage for the first time, problems become apparent left and right. For my second play-through, I decided to be a hippie and eat only green bits. I found myself heavily handicapped, with the constant temptation to simply add a carnivore mouth and be done with this nonsense of trying to outrun hunters who mostly were faster than anything I could afford buy with my meagre budget of DNA. By the time defensive options became available and affordable, the stage was already over. Also, many of the combinations and experiments I’d had in mind during my first play-through turned out to be impossible due to the very low DNA point limit.

While I do think that the cell stage is the best part of Spore, there’s still plenty wrong with it. These short-comings seemed like oversights to me at first, but now that I know the rest of the game, I think I can call them symptomatic. In short, it’s decisions and scope that are off in each segment.

 

Decisions, decisions.

My childhood hero Sid Meier said something about meaningful or interesting decisions once, and that line has taken on a Frankensteinian life of its own, used variably to define what a game is, what a good game is, what fun means, or how you should live your life. Unfortunately, even with my advanced google-fu, I could not reconstruct the original line or its context. Here is the version I knew:

“A game is a series of interesting decisions.”

Chris Bateman does a good job of debunking that sentence, although he could have saved a lot of bandwidth/breath by just saying Guitar Hero. Troy Goodfellow tries to track the quote down but doesn’t fare much better than me. Guess there are things Google doesn’t know the answer to after all! At any rate, that phrase will be the subject of a future article. For now, let it suffice to say that there is a sub-genre of games for which “a series of interesting decisions” (with varying definitions for “interesting”, “decisions”, “series”, and “a”) (and “of”) is a central defining phrase, as in if you removed these decisions, you would no longer have a game. All the stages in Spore draw heavily from tropes generally found in these types of games.

But here’s the thing: none of the decisions in Spore are interesting or meaningful. This goes for all stages. You can create a creature with no legs, two legs, or many more legs. However, it doesn’t make any sense to build anything other than an erect bipedal creature for game-play purposes. Further legs cost more DNA (of which there is never nearly enough) and add nothing useful to your creature. It goes on like this in all stages. There are always seemingly a lot of decisions to be taken in the editor, only most of the time there’s only one truly viable way if you’re playing to win, or worse, nothing you do matters at all.

My happiest and unhappiest moments in playing Spore were within minutes of each other. I had just finished the tribal stage and was plunked down in the vehicle editor. Vehicle editor? Oh yes, I get to design a land-vehicle for my budding civilization! Awesome! I made a pimped-up version of the Bird of Prey on wheels with extra rocket boosters for awesomeness (my stance on spaceships-with-wheels hasn’t changed much in the last 19 years). I was so happy with it–and look, there are three stats! Power, speed, sturdiness! Cool, it looks like my decisions finally matter!

That was my happiest moment. Then I got to playing the Civilization stage, and fuck, talk about disillusionment. First, you don’t see your own design anymore, because in order to see what’s going on, you need to zoom out as far as the game allows. Next, those three stats? Utterly and completely irrelevant. You just pump out a number of indiscernible vehicles from your cities and drive them over to your enemy. Whoever happens to have more vehicles wins, at which point the vehicles start their ultra-generic attack animations against the cities. In a word, everything you’ve done in the editor was useless and is ignored. I’ve seriously spent more time designing my ground vehicle than using it. I breezed through the Civ stage like through all other stages, never to see my creation again as I took off into space.

Oh, yeah, space. Either the culmination of a great game, or the actual game proper, according to most reviews. Well, let me tell you this: everything that’s broken in the first fourminigames is also broken in space, only now it’s broken on an epic scale. Decisions still don’t matter, you are still required to do simple menial tasks again and again, only that now there is no end in sight.

Scope

By the time you understand what’s asked of you in any of the minigames, you’re either done already, or in such a dominant position that the rest of the game is a series of meaningless grind. This is particularly bad in the two early stages, where you get DNA points to add things to your creature. You never have enough points to do any interesting experiments. You just build your way to a generic creature with pretty much the same parts each time, and you’re done.

In space, this is inverted. Now you can play around with everything you want to play around with, only hours and hours of go-and-fetch quests, the most boring space combats I’ve ever witnessed, and micro-management on a scale that shocked and deterred this veteran of Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven (if you think the amount of micromanagement in Civ IV proper was bad, try a mod that not only allows 100 pop cities, but that also has two different classes of units for terraforming).

Armchair Design Inc.

Right, this is the moment when I derail the article completely by indulging in that wrongest of things a reviewer can do: armchair game design. Look, I know I don’t understand half of the intricacies of developing a complex piece of software and clearly enough, Wright & Co. don’t need my help to make heaps of money, but I feel that by describing the game I’d love to play I can express the wasted potential I perceive best.

First of all, let’s re-do the cell stage. The carnivore vs herbivore decision now affects part prices. Carnivore parts are cheaper for carnivores and vice versa. You see members of your own species in the cell stage, which is a nice touch, but irrelevant as it is now. How about creatures of your race start hunting in packs at a certain DNA level, and you can decide whether to hunt with them (and risk getting less food per kill) or go solo. That decision could influence future social skills. Finally, as it is right now, the cell stage simply ends when you hit a certain DNA limit. Why not give the player a minimum and maximum DNA level they can reach and let them decide when they want to leave the cell stage? That way you could either emerge from the primordial ooze as the first species to conquer terra firma, or emerge later with better stats/more parts, but compete in a world where other species emerged before you.

It goes on like that. You could give players actual options during the creature design and not just force them to simply use the highest level parts for their chosen path once each (highest level attack parts for carnivore path, highest level social parts otherwise). Social interactions could be turned into a game of primitive diplomacy instead of a mindless Simon Says game. The vocabulary and grammar of MMORPGs is so large that there must be things you could steal that are more fun than what we have now. Let different body parts unlock different spells. Let me level up body parts and spells.

Next, how about some consequences? Each stage needs to lock in certain aspects, like development of your creature’s biology stops at the end of the creature stage. The decisions you took in order to get through one stage must affect all subsequent stages. Decided to go for huge, scary claws in the creature stage because they gave you tons of damage? Well, you now have a heavy penalty on manual dexterity and tool usage in the tribal stage, there is a limit to the complexity of your vehicles in the civ stage, and in space stage other sentient races react more negatively to your hideous, hideous claws.

This is the game I’d been hoping for. I can’t quite believe that I was alone in that hope, but pretty much every review I’ve read seems to eat up the under-cooked stew of not-quite-good-enough minigames Wright has served up in its stead. What confuses me even more is that he does have this wonderful content distribution model and decides to use it for nothing but aesthetics. Dear Will, aesthetics are the least of your worries.

Crowdsourcing

The game imports creatures from other designers into our game. This is all well and good, but if the impact of this is merely aesthetic, then what is the point? If decisions taken during the design and the play of the creature influenced gameplay more, if say an ingenious stroke of design could make a really novel, challenging aggressive creature, if the creature of a player who, on first playthrough, decided to be social would be much more eager to engage in social interaction with me, then suddenly we’d have something.

A game like Spore will not fail because there aren’t diverse enough models. Surely, more and more diverse models are a plus, but beyond a certain point, numbers fail to impress since there are only so many hours people will sink into this game, and once there are enough creatures in the database that I will not see one twice during however many hours I will play the game for, any improvement beyond that becomes irrelevant.

The aesthetics of the game were never the problem to begin with, anyway. Wright’s team used their own editor to great effect and designed  some awesome-looking critters. I would have been happy with those alone. No, the game obviously has one different weakness, and it’s such a shame that the massively singleplayer online game mechanics were not used to address that weakness: sameyness of content. Let your players’ creations affect gameplay, and suddenly you have a game that will change drastically on each play-through. Better yet, do something that should be the standard for a modern PC game: offer your players real modding tools beyond your awesome but limited editor. Look at Civilization IV! But don’t look directly into because the intensity of its awesomeness might blind you.

Not only did Firaxis deliver a rock-solid iteration of their legendary franchise, they also made it the easiest and most moddable Civ so far. How did the community thank them? By creating massiv, incredibly good mods which increased the lifespan of the game by an order of magnitude. Look at Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization, which simulates the dynamic emergence and disappearance of civilizations throughout the course of history, or the even more legendary Fall From Heaven, which turns the game into something else entirely: a modern day Master of Magic with a super-complex spell system, dynamic alignments, and the ability to summon Hell itself (which will gradually transform the entire world). Firaxis not only supported these people by listening to their feature requests (often obscure, arcane functions they needed exposed to the SDK or whatever these kids are doing these days), but they also embraced the community’s creativity by packaging many of the fan-created mods with their latest expansion (and in doing so creating tons of content for the fans). Seriously, my love for Firaxis knows no bounds.

All these little quibbles I have with Spore would by this time be non-issues, as there would already be mods out there fixing them. The vast majority of mysteriously casual gamers could go on playing their purpose-free Barbie Adventure: Spore while I and the other “hardcore gamers” (how I loathe the term) could be playing some genius’s RealSpore mod which does whatever we want. But while Wright decided to give practically everyone access to the easiest editor imaginable to edit the most shallow of aspects of his game, the actual hardcore modders who are ready to invest countless hours into changing deep aspects of the game are left out in the rain.

Flittering below the surface

As it is, we get a glorious 3D editor with four tiny, broken minigames, and one long, boring space exploration game attached to it. I would really like to see how the people who love the game are playing it. What are they doing in the game when they are not editing?

But the more interesting question is this: would they still love the game if it was changed in the ways I outlined earlier? I cannot honestly see why they would not. Hell, make the game as it is now the easy difficulty mode and only introduce the changes I suggest in the higher difficulties. I realize that nothing I say will convince anyone to make Sporeis, the acutal game where full lines disappear and you lose when you stack the block too high, but therapeutically, this article was very healthy for me.

Spore makes me feel like the eight-year-old boy who looks up a particularly steep staircase and catches a glimpse of panties up a teenage girl’s skirt: I realize that, tantalizingly close to the surface, there is something awesome that I could have years of fun with, but for reasons unknowable I am not allowed to have it.

Maybe I just need to grow up.