Back on September 11, 2008, I wrote about the new Spore game and expressed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.  After the incredible hype approaching the release, the media has been pretty silent.

PBS’ “Online NewsHour”, however, did post this article in October: “New ‘Fun Biology’ Video Game Lets Players Tinker with Evolution”. It seems like PBS put “fun” in quotes because they know it isn’t really fun. The author, Quinn Bowman, goes on to reference my blog entry:

Educational value

Educators are mixed over whether Spore belongs in the classroom.

Professor Peter Rillero of Arizona State University wrote on his blog, which focuses on using technology to teach science, that the mechanics of the creature creation in Spore did not accurately reflect how evolution works.



“The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired?” Rillero wrote.

”

But then Bowman adds this quote:

“However, University of Florida associate professor of geology Joe Meert said games like Spore ‘are a natural place for students to gravitate to.’ 

’Even the things that (Spore) gets wrong, it could be a teachable moment. Here’s something the game gets wrong.  Why is it wrong?’

Dr. Meert seems like a fascinating and good guy and he is someone who wants the public to understand evolution. So with some reluctance I say his comments remind me of College of Education field offices telling interns with crummy mentor teachers, “Well at least you will learn what not to do.” Spore tried to show itself as a great science education tool. We have to recognize first and foremost, that it is not. Teachers should have great mentors, our children should have great science education resources. 

I don’t go around boring my friends and family talking about scientific inaccuracies in the media around me.  I would not expect history educators to criticize Call of Duty’s portrayal of WWII history. Unless of course, the game made claims that it was a great way to learn history, and started touting all of the historians that had been consulted in developing the game. Spore, on the other hand, deserves to be criticized.

Not only was Spore incredibly hyped, it wanted to develop the idea that it would promote an understanding of evolution. This was evident in the September 9^th TV Show: “Build a Better Being” produced and aired by the National Geographic Channel through a partnership with Spore. Getting famous evolutionary biologists to talk about their work, and then showing scenes from Spore, could have encouraged many to falsely believe that the evolutionary biologists were supporting it.

This is far from the case, and the journal Science reported complaints by scientists involved in the documentary. “I literally never heard about Spore until I saw myself on television in this infomercial about the game,” says Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard University. “It’s an outrage (as quoted by Bohannon, 2008).”

Other Voices of Concern

Fortunately, I am not the lone voice in criticizing Spore. Here are some other views that are critical of the “evolutionary science” in Spore.

T. Ryan Gregory and Niles Eldredge describe Spore in this way:

It is, in reality, a relatively standard real-time strategy game with the same basic unlocking of features, upgrading of levels, and choices about aesthetics and function as with vehicles or buildings in other similar games. The units happen to look like organisms, the features that can be added are mouths, eyes, and limbs, and the currency is called “DNA”, but really that does not make the game anything more than superficially biological.

John Bohannon wrote in “Flunking Spore”:

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.

Manure

How does the game’s creator Will Wright respond to the controversy? Well despite the scientific inaccuracies in Spore, he concludes:  “It’s manure to seed future scientists” (as quoted by Highfield, 2008). Some quotes are so good they don’t need further commentary.

Enjoyment

Of course there is also the issue of how enjoyable this game is. Here is a clip from the New York Times (Schiesel, December 2008):

BEST DISAPPOINTMENT: SPORE If Electronic Arts has learned anything from its experience with Spore, it ought to be that a software company should just let its games do the talking, rather than relentlessly hyping a game for years before its release only to deliver a one-note electronic toy in the end. Spore would not have fizzled so quickly if expectations had not been so ludicrously inflated to begin with. Perhaps more important, it showed that maybe even a game god like Will Wright, the game’s creator, can stand to be reminded of the basics once in a while. Spore was great at letting the player create something from nothing. But in the end it just wasn’t that interesting to play with. Making cool stuff is a great part of video games, but the play, more than in any other media, really is the thing.

Promoting Spore

Yet, many people are willing to promote Spore because it has science in it and is therefore thought to be educational. It is not difficult to find quotes like this:  “With its educational subject matter, Spore is the kind of game any parent should be pleased to find their child absorbed in” (Alderman, 2008).

Conclusions

Since all of the pre-release and release hype, not much has been written about Spore. Pretending to be good science and actually promoting accurate science are different entities, and many in the media will take superficial views. There is a good chance that the media writers also hold serious science misconceptions, so they don’t even know when something is inaccurate. Therefore, it is up to scientists and science teachers to help the public understand which products are good educational tools for promoting science education.

References

Alderman, Naomi. (September 8, 2008). Spore: the game where only the fittest survive. The Guardian, Feature Pages, p. 3.

Bohannon, John (October 24, 2008). VIDEO GAMES:
’Spore’ Documentary Spawns Protest By Scientists Who Starred in It. Vol. 322. no. 5901, p. 517
DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5901.517a

Highfield, Roger. (September 9, 2008). How evolution inspired a computer game. The Daily Telegraph, Science, p. 27.

National Public Radio. Talk of the Nation, September 12, 2008. Spore’: Does Evolution Really Happen Like That?

Schiesel, Seth. (December 21, 2008). The Zombies Look Better Every Year. The New York Times. Arts and Leisure Desk; VIDEO GAMES; Pg. 24

Snider, M. (September 9, 2008.). Social networking goes gaming. USA Today, Retrieved December 24, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

The reviews are coming in about the new game SPORE, and they are less than inspiring. Along with its restrictive DRM policy and the weak reviews, I am not going to purchase this software for me or my sons. While I did use and write about Creator Creator, my writing about SPORE is not based upon first-hand use.

The review are in….

Chad Sapieha of The Globe and Mail writes: “…dull and repetitive play makes evolving your own species more frustrating than fun.”

Lou Keston of the AP press writes: “No single element of ‘Spore’ is revolutionary in and of itself. Each of the levels feels like a simplified version of a game you’ve played before.”

Matt Peckham, in his blog for PC World, describes it this way: “…the game’s still a few chromosomes short of a genome.”

Seth Schiesel of the New York Times, writes, “Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.”

Chris Kohler of Wired wrote about the top ten things he learned from playing SPORE. Number one on his list, “Spore is kind of boring.”

And speaking of learning, is this a tool for science education?

While science was theoretically the driving force for SPORE creator Will Wright, the descriptions of SPORE do not indicate this will help people learn science. When the science is discussed it sounds more like misconceptions, rather than accurate understandings, are being fostered.

For example, notice how the science is described in these two reviews:

Thierry Nguyen of 1up.com states, “If you really need a quick one-line summary of what Spore is, I guess I’d describe it as ‘intelligent design via minigames.’”

Matt Peckham describes early parts of SPORE this way: “Consuming bits of matter builds up your DNA, which you can then spend on new parts available inside a simple design tool that pops up whenever you choose to mate.”

The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired? Hopefully, the travel in outer space and the ecosystem building are more accurate. But for me, I am in no hurry to find out. 

Image Notes

1. I was in New York City last week, and decided to visit the neighborhood where I was born (lower East Side). I took this picture of the giant SPORE ad then. The text reads “Mitosis Happens.”

2. The image below is from the Activity Object “Natural Selection” from Adaptive Curriculum. 

Resources

Evolution Facts and Misconceptions, Adaptive Curriculum.

Evolution Resources, Kevin Miller