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GAMING: "SPORE" GETS THE WILLIES

User-generated content is working wonders in the gaming industry. "Spore" is a fine example, except for all of those penis-shaped monsters, writes Tom Standage ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine

Unleashing a plague of penis-shaped monsters onto the internet was probably not what Will Wright had in mind when he started work on "Spore" eight years ago. Wright is a gaming legend, and one of its few bankable stars, but "Spore" has become the video-game equivalent of the long-overdue Guns N’ Roses album, “Chinese Democracy”. Yet somehow, with its arrival last autumn, "Spore" manages to be right on top of one of gaming’s latest trends: user-generated content. Which is where all those phallic creatures come in.

"Spore" is a game of galactic ambition, in every sense. Wright, best known as the creator of "SimCity" and "The Sims", originally called the new game Sim Everything, since it takes his love of simulation to its logical extreme. "Spore" kicks off at the cellular level, as you guide primordial microbes around the screen, looking for food and avoiding predators. Then you reach the creature level, where your creature fights to establish itself in a harsh environment, competing with other beasties and evolving under your guidance. Next comes the tribal phase: you control a village of your creatures as they gather food, fight other tribes and discover new tools. Then comes civilisation, in which you design new buildings and vehicles as your creatures expand their influence. Once they develop the technology, the game moves into space, where your creatures colonise new planets, fend off rival civilisations and generally try to rule the galaxy.

If playing God were not ambitious enough, there is a further twist: much of what players see in "Spore" will have been created by other players, just like on Wikipedia or YouTube. Your creatures can be uploaded into a shared online “Sporepedia”, which populates your world as you play. Isn’t this just outsourcing an expensive bit of making a new game—the character design—to its players? Well, yes. But examples of user-generated stuff online show that it can work well, if there are ways to make sure that the best content rises and the bad stuff sinks.

The problem is that some people will always make stuff that other people find offensive. In June a taster for "Spore", called Creature Creator, was released as a free download. It lets you design your own creature, reshaping its body by pulling it here and there, adding arms, legs and grasping limbs, placing eyes, tusks and so on. Then you can make it jump, dance, roar and sing. The Creature Creator is a joy to use: Wright creates software toys that are simply great fun. So much fun, in fact, that people started creating penis monsters, giant walking breasts, and so on—and then putting video of their creations online. "Spore"’s publisher, Electronic Arts, sniffily threatened to suspend offenders from playing. But the whole thing provided lots of free publicity. And the game allows users to tag Sporepedia items they regard as offensive, to filter them out. There are also mechanisms to reward the creators of successful creatures.

"Spore" is not alone. "Little Big Planet", a new game for the PlayStation 3 in which you guide a character called Sackboy through a series of obstacle courses, lets players design their own levels, share them online, and vote for the ones they like best. Enthusiasts have been designing add-ons and new levels for PC games for years, but the process was too fiddly for most players. "Spore" and "Little Big Planet" make it easier for players to create and share content, and to become more of a community. "Spore" suggests the idea has great potential—as long as the penis monsters can be kept at bay.

Picture credit: y2bk (via Flickr), Electronic Arts

(Tom Standage is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life and business editor for The Economist. His most recent gaming column was about his addiction to "Jewel Quest II".)