Games

Spore: A Great Way To Waste Time

By Hervé St-Louis
July 24, 2008 - 14:40

The Comic Book Bin was invited to attend a presentation by Spore creator, Will Wright, this week at the San Diego Comic-Con.  This new original video game by Maxis is due out in September 2008. Part of the presentation would also cover something called a "comic book creator", created by a company called Mash On, for the game Spore. I went to the presentation without any expectations of what would go on. I had never heard of Spore before. As the trusty attendant at the door gave me a brochure about the Mash On comic book creator I was not impressed, and quickly looked at the fastest way of leaving this presentation without disturbing the upcoming presenter.

After the introduction by Maxis’ president, Will Wright took the stage and quickly, my perception about this little video game with cheesy graphics allowing people to create a comic book from a video game changed. Spore will be a great video game once it is released and it will have my full blessing, not that anyone really cares about my opinion of this game.

Wright is a geek. He looks like a geek and cares about mundane stuff that geeks usually care. But Wright is an engaging geek that sold me about a video game I thought would not be worthwhile, based on the cheesy and, I must say incompetently designed brochure endorsed by a company like Electronic Arts. Perhaps Electronic Arts and Mash On should pay more attention to the presentation package they hand out to jaded press representatives who have heard about the greatest next thing all too many times. If it wasn’t for Wright’s quick sale of his person as an element of interest, I would not have found out about Spore today, and that would have been a shame.



But let’s focus on Spore and the positives – and there are many. Spore is the ultimate video game. It allows you to create a world, customize it, customize creatures, vehicles, planets and dare I say, even entire galaxies.

Spore is based on a several editing engines allowing users to create anything and customize almost all aspects of a video game. Spore is at once like The Sims and Sid Meier's series of Civilization video games. You create a world, a society and let it prosper or die of global warming, enacted through careless terra-forming.



Of course, like many video games, Spore contains all the social networking components allowing whatever a user create to be shared with other users on existing networks like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. This is the part of the Spore which bored me, even before the presentation started, and I’m telling you, for what it’s worth. If you’re one of those marketing guys whose job it is to figure out where early thinkers and movers are going in popular culture, it’s time to stop touting Facebook, Youtube and MySpace as selling points to users. If I could utterly destroy my Facebook account and make sure they stop selling my personal information to every marketer and Microsoft, I would.

Social networking is dead and no longer a selling point for a successful video game or entertainment venue. So I say. The more I’ m told about Facebook, YouTube and MySpace integration, the less I want to play with games like Spore, which I think are ground breaking for everything they do, but the social networking aspects.



What Spore does well, is allow users to share what they create. But there is also a problem there. While Wright said convincingly that users could just download the creation that any other user had created, I don’t see why they should do so freely. In his presentation, Wright, showed how he downloaded a ground vehicle that was created by another user and used it on his own planet. Why should users based on another planet have access to designs created off world by another user, another civilization, without first trading these blueprints, the way they would in the real world? Why should all this information be available at the flip of a finger without any efforts?

There are definite advantages for Spore users.  Spore, as Wright says, can be so vast, that during one’s lifetime, it might be impossible for one player to visit all the worlds the Spore universe. It might be too vast to even try to write a history of all that occurs in Spore. As Wright said, the preview release of Spore, allowing users to create species has surpassed the number of species that exist on Earth already. That’s good. Now if the makers of Spore can only get it in their head to stop trying to force feed me their social networking, I might be playing Spore, come September 2008.

Last Updated: November 29, 2025 - 16:51