Does Spore Teach Anything About Evolution?

As I relayed in a previous review, Spore is a mass-market game. As such, it tries very hard to not scare away its user base by requiring them to think too much. That is fine; sometimes dumbed-down games are a nice diversion when you want a quick dose of mindless entertainment.

Aside from the pretty graphics and the pleasure of making funny looking-creatures, does Spore actually have any scientific substance to it? Does it actually teach anything about evolution and adaptation? The short answer is no. Spore fails miserably as an evolution simulator. I cannot even classify it as a simulator of anything, unlike its older software siblings SimCity and The Sims (both also designed by Will Wright). Spore is more of a 3-D art program.

I am not a biologist, but I like to pretend to be one sometimes. That is one of the reasons why I was initially intrigued with a game like Spore. I thought that it would offer the opportunity to manipulate and model evolutionary forces. For example, I might want to introduce a climate change into an environment and watch how my creatures changed in response. If I wanted my creatures to have long hair, I might introduce a colder spell. Spore allows none of this. Climate and temperature are irrelevant in the game. Whether a creature is a small, fat round blob that would seem to conserve heat, or a hairless, skinny monster with numerous tentacles, both thrive equally well in Spore’s static climates.

With climate and planetary morphology being largely irrelevant to life in Spore, the hope of it approximating anything resembling evolution is lost. The creatures we make in the game cannot evolve if there is nothing to adapt to. The only factor that determines what a creature will look and act like is the user’s personal, artistic preference. Someone who used Spore as their primary frame of reference for evolution would be seriously misled as to how evolution really works.

What I would like to see is a more robust, science-based version of Spore; a game where many random elements of planetary environments coalesce to influence the organisms there. Allow the user to nudge certain controls and inputs. Have the software insert a bit of randomness and mutation. Then, see what creatures pop out. It would be a completely different game experience each time.

I should not expect a company like Electronic Arts to ever produce such an enhanced version of Spore. It is a corporate giant interested in maximizing profits from the mass-market, and it is controlled by the whims of its stock holders. The in-depth creative game play I crave does not thrive in such an environment. Just like in the evolution of life, environment is everything for the evolution of software.