bohannon 2008 flunking spore

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A series of reports

on connections

between science,culture, and the

arts from Science

Contributing

Correspondent

John Bohannon,

who, in true gonzo

style, will

participate in the

events he covers.

All articles in

the series

All illustrations by Katrien Kolenberg

Sciencewww.sciencemag.org

Science 24 October 2008:

Vol. 322 no. 5901 p. 531

DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5901.531b

THE GONZO SCIENTIST

Flunking Spore

John Bohannon

When I first heard about the computer game Spore, I couldn't think

of a cooler way to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.

“Begin your odyssey at the dawn of life as a simple microbe just

trying to survive,” reads a Spore marketing blurb, embarking on “an

epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life

through the development of civilization.” Not only was Spore to be

packed with evolutionary biology, but the game's science promised

to be solid right down to the molecular level. 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.” A DVD of this show is even included in the “galactic edition” of

the game. Wow! In an $11 billion game industry dominated by dull and bloody “first-person

shooters”—not to mention a country where five out of 10 people do not accept

evolution—a blockbuster game like Spore that communicates science to the public is

sorely needed.

So over the past month, I've been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the

game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution,

Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn't just that Spore dumbs

down the science or gets a few things wrong—it's meant to be a game, after all—but

rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong. I also tracked

down the scientists who appeared on television in what seemed like an endorsement of

Spore's scientific content on the National Geographic channel. They said they had been

led to believe that the interviews were for a straight documentary about “developmental

evolutionary” science rather than a video promoting a computer game (see the news story

in Science 's 24 October issue). “I was used,” says Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the

University of Chicago in Illinois, who worries that science has been “hijacked” to promote a

product. How did things go so wrong for a game that seemed so good?

What's Ahead

Pimp My Organism (Video)

Playing (a) God

From Tribes to Space

Spore's Report Card

Pimp My Organism

In the game's opening video sequence, a meteor streaks past a sunlike star and crashes into the sea of a barren

planet. A fragment of the space rock splits open underwater, revealing … you, a fully formed single-celled

organism! (Fans of the theory of panspermia will recognize this artful dodge of the question of how life evolved in

the first place.) Thus begins the Cell stage. With the help of a wiggling flagellum and a variable number of googly

eyes, you dart forth into the primordial soup.

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Spore is actually five games in one—a series of

stages called Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization,

and Space. The team of scientists grading Spore's

science divvied up these stages based on their

respective backgrounds. Focusing on the first two

stages were T. Ryan Gregory and Niles Eldredge,

evolutionary biologists at the University of Guelph

in Ontario, Canada, and at the American Museum

of Natural History in New York City, respectively.

William Bainbridge, a sociologist and co-director of

Human-Centered Computing at the U.S. National

Science Foundation, took on stages three and four,

Tribe and Civilization. The last stage, Space, wentto Miles Smith, an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. However, because

each stage must be mastered to proceed to the next, the entire team had to slog through the early stages of the

game.

“They've done a nice job with the look of the Cell stage,” said Gregory, who was clearly enjoying it. But Bainbridge

was having the opposite experience. “I hate it so far,” he groaned. This surprised me because, of all of the

scientists on the team, I expected Bainbridge to be the most tolerant of a computer game with science education

pretenses. He spends vast amounts of time exploring the science of games, as I learned while co-organizing a

conference that took place inside a game with him earlier this year. But for Bainbridge, Spore is too simplistic. “It

seems like a cutesy children's game.” Eldredge had a similar reaction: “Just from the graphics, I hate it.”

Many reviewers agree with Bainbridge and Eldredge, dismissing Spore's Cell stage as a clone of the 1980s arcade

game Pac-Man. It's true that your movements are limited to a two-dimensional plane—in spite of supposedly being

submerged in three-dimensional water—and your goal here is also to gobble up food and avoid predators. But likeGregory, I was impressed by it.

One aspect that lifts the Cell stage above Pac-Man inanity is how it represents microscopic life. “I quite like the

way it changes scale when you grow,” said Gregory. There you are, swimming desperately away from enormous

organisms that are trying to eat you, when you gobble up a stray piece of food just in the nick of time to trigger a

growth spurt. The transition looks just like under a microscope, smoothly zooming up to a larger field of view.

Larger shapes loom just out of focus. (I generously imagined the two-dimensionality as the result of the microbes

being squashed between a microscope slide and a cover slip.) “Now all the organisms that had previously been

your size and preying upon you are suddenly smaller, so you turn around and eat them,” Gregory said. “I like that.”

Those other organisms are another aspect that sets Spore apart from simple video games. When we created our

species—my first was the Omninibble, created with the username DarwinRoolz —we found ourselves in tide pools

teeming with other single-celled creatures, all of them created by other players. In contrast to “massively

multi-user” games such as World of Warcraft, Spore bills itself as the first “massively single-user” game. Wheneveryou create a new species in Spore, it automatically uploads to the Sporepedia, an online server maintained by the

game's manufacturer, Electronic Arts. By default, a random sample of species from the Sporepedia seeds your

planet. If you want, you can custom build a planet inhabited only by species created by you and your friends. So

although you're never pitted against any of the millions of other Spore players, you do encounter their creations

under your computer's control.

Plus, your own creation evolves over time. Eating food not only repairs damage to your health but also generates

“DNA points” that you can use to upgrade body parts. (Think of Pimp My Ride with organisms instead of cars.)

Depending on whether you choose carnivory or herbivory at the start of the game, your cell comes equipped with

either a parrotlike beak or filter-feeding fronds. But changing lifestyles is as easy as cashing in DNA for a new

mouth—or if you prefer, multiple mouths—along with extra flagella, defensive spikes, poison-spewing vesicles, and

other organismic add-ons.

We all finished the Cell stage in about an hour. “It's a pity that it was done just as I was getting into it,” saysGregory. Once you've accumulated enough DNA points, the game tells you that you're ready for the next stage of

evolution. With a click of the “evolve” button, you attach a pair of legs to your organism and off you go, waddling

out onto land and into the Creature stage.

Playing (a) God

If the game had stopped at the Cell stage, it would have fared better. But once Spore hits the Creature stage, it

takes a nosedive in both science and game quality. Using a woefully clunky interface, you steer your creature

across an unremarkable (and unmistakably Earthlike) landscape in search of other species. Once you find them,

you have two options. You either attack them, in which case the goal is to drive them to extinction (at least on that

planet), or try to befriend them. The latter consists of an even more mindless mini-game within the mini-game:

Imitating the other species' social behaviors by choosing one of four options—singing, dancing, posing, or

“charming”—in the correct sequence.

The game's makers are clearly aiming for the highly lucrative family and education markets. “Since the game's

release we've received a lot of interest from various schools and universities around the world,” a Spore

spokesperson wrote me in an e-mail. “So that's a good sign that there's a lot of interest in [the] academic/education

community.” To earn an E (for Everyone) by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, all of Spore's potentially

sharp edges have been sanded down and buffered with child-safe fluff. Rather than nature red in tooth and claw,

you get goofy dance-offs and bloodless cartoon battles. Rather than looking realistic, Spore's creatures look

ready-made for the plush toy industry. And then there's the sex.



All species reproduce sexually in Spore. That must have posed

quite a challenge for the development team's kiddy police. I can't

fault them on this count because the compromise solution made

me laugh out loud. Once you return to the nest and hit the “call

mate” button, another of your species approaches with a flurry of

Valentine hearts. What follows is a soft-porn vision of how cartoon

characters come to be. Easy-listening lounge music pipes in as

the pair coo and gyrate in slow circles, never touching, before one

of them suddenly squats on the nest and—from no apparent

orifice—pops out an egg.

This brings you to the Creature Creator, a biological toolshed in

which you can squeeze and stretch your creature's skeleton into nearly any shape, as well as choose upgradesfrom a menu of body parts. The Creature Creator really does make you feel like a god, shaping your creation as

you see fit. (You're not a special god, though, because all the other creatures that you encounter in the game have

been lovingly crafted by millions of other gods.)

Bainbridge, already way ahead of the rest of the team with several creatures under his belt, was fed up. “I loathe

Spore,” he announced. But Gregory and Eldredge remained upbeat. “Niles's and my creation is Punky Quillibra,

and it is a fierce predator,” Gregory reported. (The name comes from the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which

Eldredge developed with Stephen J. Gould.) “If you must know, yes, those are antlers on its back,” he added.

“They look dumb, but they give him level-5 charge—so say that to his face!” But in spite of getting a kick out of the

Creature stage, Gregory and Eldredge saw it as the final nail in the coffin for Spore's claim of having anything to do

with evolution.

“The problem is that the game features virtually none of the key ingredients of evolution as we understand it,” says

Gregory. “There's no shared common descent between species, since every single creature in Spore can trace its

lineage back to a different single-celled organism that arrives from space.” Spore also lacks biological variation.

“When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you.” Nor does it have

natural selection. “There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest.” Your organism

does evolve, says Gregory, “in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things

evolve in the real world.”

To make his point, Gregory transformed Punky Quillibra into a species that he calls the Saltator, after the concept

of saltation. Using the Creature Creator, he changed every feature of the beast—swapping its two reptilian limbs

for six insectoid ones, hands for a pair of spiked balls, and even the tail for a pair of butt-mounted antlers—all in a

single generation. “Clearly, the only thing that determines an organism's morphology in Spore is what the player

thinks looks cool,” he said. (Before Electronic Arts began filtering it, the Sporepedia was filled with creatures

designed to resemble human genitalia.) “And even that doesn't matter because you're ultimately forced to evolve

into a terrestrial vertebrate with sentience, which is completely teleological. That's not real science,” says Gregory.

The “goal” of evolution is not to produce walking, talking vertebrates, because the process is undirected andunintelligent.

You might think that Spore's fatal flaw would be that it supports intelligent design rather than Darwinian evolution.

(That's what I initially thought.) But it turns out to be not even that interesting. “Spore is essentially a very

impressive, entertaining, and elaborate Mr. Potato Head that uses the language of evolution but none of the major

principles,” conclude Gregory and Eldredge.

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.”

As Gregory and Eldredge argue, if Spore's biology is based on any theory, then—surely, by coincidence rather

than scholarly effort—it is Lamarckian evolution. According to that early 19th century notion, organisms gain traits

through effort during their lifetimes. As Behe points out, this makes Spore strikingly similar to the cartoon

Pokémon. “Weird creatures are stored in colorful balls and released when the human Pokémon masters want them

to fight. If the Pokémon beat enough other creatures and gain strength, they 'evolve' in a puff of smoke into a more

powerful creature, sort of resembling the original but with more abilities.” This seems to have been Spore's

biological model rather than anything from science.

From Tribes to Space

If the Creature stage is merely boring, I agree with Bainbridge that the next two stages, Tribe and Civilization, are

cringe-worthy. In the Tribe stage, your species gains sentience and culture. That sounds promising, but all it

amounts to is the very same game structure as before but killing and befriending tribes rather than species. From

this point onward, your species' biological evolution is frozen in whatever random Picasso portrait of limbs and

eyes you last produced. Instead of the Creature Creator, you get to dress up your tribal species with items from a

kind of minstrel anthropology wardrobe. It was too hard to decide between the American Indian-style feathered

satchel and the North African fez hat, so I stuck both onto my newly “tribal” Omninibble.

The fourth stage of Spore is a watered-down knock-off of

Civilization, the brilliantly addictive game that has consumed hundreds of hours of my life. The pieces on the game

board are now buildings and vehicles rather than organisms, and the goal—stop me if you've heard this before—is

to destroy or befriend the other civilizations on your planet. (On the plus side, the Building Editor allowed me to

create cities composed entirely of egg-shaped towers that resemble alien Easter egg baskets.)

You'll breathe a weary sigh of relief when you finally reach what Spore's creators clearly cared about the most: the



Space stage. It's not that this final game within the game offers

anything new in terms of structure. You now control a spaceship

—which I designed to look like a submarine golf ball—and the

goal is to extend your empire of planetary colonies across the

galaxy. (Yes, attacking or befriending other spacefaring species

along the way.) While grading this final chapter of the game,

Smith was most impressed. “If Spore has one great message,” he

concluded, “it is that our own existence is connected to that of the

universe and to the forces that have shaped it.”

You start by launching into space from the surface of your home

planet. That brings you to a view of your ship in orbit within a solar

system. With a roll of your mouse's scroll wheel, you zoom out to see your star system in the context of dozens of

other star systems. Zoom your perspective farther out and the spiral galaxy itself looms into view, with many otherdistant galaxies visible all around. That's 20 orders of magnitude with the flick of a finger! I spent hours just

whizzing around to new star systems, zooming down to various planets, and using my Abduction Beam to fill the

ship's cargo hold with terrified aliens. But I'm easily amused.

Spore's Report Card

The team's ground rules for grading Spore's science provided plenty of wiggle room. To make the mark, Spore had

only to reflect science intelligently, not fully simulate it. There's plenty of educational science-simulating software

out there but nothing that you'd want to play with your children. According to its own marketing, Spore promises a

scientifically sophisticated adventure, an “epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through

the development of civilization and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.” Spore only had

to show a good-faith effort to engage players with real science.

I created an online Spore Science Grading Page where you can read the team's full critique. Spore's biology

grades rolled in like a slow-motion train wreck. For organismic biology—genetics, cell biology, reproduction, and

development—Gregory and Eldredge smacked Spore with a D-. The game flunked evolutionary biology outright

with an F. According to Gregory and Eldredge, “Spore has very little to do with real biology.”

Although Bainbridge hated Spore as a game more than any of the other reviewers, he gave better marks for its

science. For the cultural anthropology in the Tribe stage, Spore scraped by with a C-. “There really are no tribes

here, because tribes are an outgrowth of kinship, and there is no real kinship,” he concludes. “Had Spore lived up

to the publicity that it was a game based on evolution, then there would have been biological reproduction,

families, and the basis for much of what cultural anthropology studies. The grade would be lower, except that there

is a cultural-anthropological basis for the exchange of gifts which Spore illustrates.”

Line drawing of a blob monster with lots of tentacles and eyeballs.”

Bainbridge gave Spore's sociology a B+. “Given how brief the

Civilization phase is, it includes much of relevance to real

sociology, such as the division of labor, public opinion, and the

fact that religious movements exploit unresolved human

dissatisfactions. … One of the ways a player may conquer

another city is through religious conversion, and attempts are

more likely to succeed if the inhabitants of the city are unhappy.”

It's not clear what religious players of Spore will make of that.

Smith gave Spore's Space stage its highest scientific marks. “I

was never expecting a computer game to be rigorously

formulated based on the laws of physics,” said Smith. But

because it takes many of the typical science fiction shortcuts,

such as faster-than-light travel, he gave Spore a C on the laws of physics. Spore earned a C on astrobiology as

well, because intelligent life is so common that you trip over it in nearly every star system. Spore's rendering of the

galaxy's structure earned it the one and only A.

The bottom line: In spite of its marketing, Spore clearly has little in common with science, especially evolution.

That's a pity, because with very minor tweaks, the game could live up to its promise. Gregory and Eldredge's

critique provides several good ideas, such as incurring a developmental cost for making radical body-plan

changes. Another easy improvement would be to weave relevant science into the fabric of the existing game. In

the game Civilization, for example, you learn a great deal about the history of ancient cultures through a series of

pop-up mini-articles. When you stick a limb on your creature, wouldn't it be nice to have an optional pop-up window

that explains the real (and fascinating) science behind limb evolution?

Spore flunks, but there's still hope for its future. Once released, games often improve over several generations

through downloaded software patches and new editions. Let's hope that noncomplacent families and science

educators provide some selective pressure. Then Spore itself might evolve.

The editors suggest the following Related Resources on Science sites:



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bohannon 2008 flunking spore

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