Without a Traceroute

Spore, the highly anticipated new game from Will Wright (the creator of SimCity, SimAnt and The Sims) launched on Friday here in Europe and tomorrow in North America. I was/am incredibly tempted to buy it. I saw it at the store here on Friday, but it’s €49.95 and the menus are all in Dutch. I was still tempted, but I think it would be a better idea to order it online, pay $49.99 USD and get an English-language version. EA actually has a direct-download option, where you could download the game online, but it comes with a lot of irritations I really don’t want to deal with.

You can only download it using their special download manager, which you then have to keep installed in order to have it check for authorization in order to keep playing the game. If you download it, there’s no provision for a refund in case the game doesn’t run well on your machine, or you just don’t like it for some reason (unlike the DVD hard copy version which can be returned for up to 15 days after purchase). Furthermore, if something happens to your harddrive (or you just need to delete the game for some reason), you can only re-download it for up to 6 months after the initial purchase. If you’re willing to pay an additional $5, you can extend that to two years.

In any case, it’s probably good that I don’t buy Spore right now. It would be pretty lame to waste my amazing time traveling playing a computer game. Still, I am sorely tempted, and this will probably be one of my first purchases on returning to the US.

The game has been in development since around 2000, and the release date has been pushed back again and again. The Sims holds the record as the most profitable video game ever made, so that bought Will Wright a considerable amount of freedom in terms of dictating when he wanted his game to come out.

It has been the subject of an enormous amount of hype ever since it was first announced, and there’s almost no question that it won’t live up to all of it. Nevertheless, Spore is revolutionary in a number of ways that will almost certainly change the way computer games (and possibly other fields like 3D animation or simulations) are approached in the future.

The most important thing to understand about Spore is that ALL of the content in the game is generated proceedurally. The best way to understand what this means might be to compare a recipe to a finished meal. Most computer games are the equivalent of a finished meal: the way your character looks and moves (usually absent some minor customization) is already pre-programmed, the music and sounds were already recorded in a studio somewhere; the game developers sat down and coded all of the interactions your character is capable of, and what should happen when you do those things.

In contrast, Spore is much more like a recipe, or a framework for a game. Rather than programming what the characters look like, and how they behave, Will Wright and the Spore developers have left that entirely up to you (and the thousands of other players). The game includes a series of intuitive editors which allow players to construct their own characters from a near-limitless set of options. Want to make a twelve-legged alien with two heads? Go for it. The game then figures out (based on its internal recipe) what to do with the ingredients you’ve given it. It will figure out how such a creature should walk, and run, and jump and eat. If you want to see for yourself how this works, you can download a free trial of the creature editor, or watch one of the thousands of youtube videos.

Not only are the characters and animations procedurally generated, the music in the game was developed by Brian Eno (who also did the Windows 95 startup sounds, among other things), and it is also entirely procedural, based on player input in the editors. For example, if you make a more aggressive, carnivorous creature, the music will be “scarier”.

The other part of Spore that’s revolutionary is the level of community interaction. Even though Spore is a single-player game, the content that makes up the world you play in is the content that’s been created by all the other players. So, for example, if the game needs a carnivorous predator to round out the ecosystem on your planet, it simply fetches one another player made. Here, too, the procedural nature is an advantage, because the data to represent the creature is only the “ingredients” (a few 100 kB), and all of the actual animation is done on-the-fly by the game. Good news for people with slow connections, and for EA’s servers.

If you really want to get a good sense of just how vast the scope of Spore is, and why it’s awesome (and you’ve got a lot of time to kill), here is a very long demo given by Will Wright to a game developers’ conference in 2005: