THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

For the past two days, I’ve been playing with the Spore Creature Creator.  Did I say "playing"?  I meant "researching."  All in the name of Science, of course.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding?  This is a bundle of ridiculous joy, a Frankenstein lab with Play-Doh bodies, Mr. Potato Head parts, and Pixar life.  You start out with a blobby body that you can contort, shrink, and pummel into whatever shape you want, and then you slap on legs, mouths, eyes, arms and other appendages until you have a creature that runs around, dances, and has offspring.  The children are adorable, all extra large eyes and tentacles, and they mimic their parent’s behavior.  When you’re done, you save your creatures and share them to the Sporeapedia where they’ll eventually become the bestiary of Spore’s sprawling universe.

The best part of the SCC is how easy it is to use.  I wasn’t kidding when I namechecked Play-Doh and Mr. Potato Head.  Making monsters is as intuitive as those simple games.  Move your mouse over the body, the skin goes transparent and the vertebrae highlight.  Spin the mouse wheel, and the muscles around that vertebrae expand. Slap on some legs and arms, move the mouth around, and suddenly you’ve got a creature that blinks in amazement and smiles every time you change its body.

There’s enough depth to keep the statistic nut inside you going for days.  Do I make an herbivore that can sing well to find a mate yet has a weak charge?  Do I add more legs and faster feet?  Or do I just do crazy with eyes ’cause it looks really cool?  The game itself isn’t even ready, and already there are four hundred sixty thousand user-created creatures (and there will probably another fifty thousand by the time I actually finish writing this post).

 What gets me is how easy it is to get attached to these wee beasties.  While a lot of this is due to the fluid animation and charming gestures the creatures make (when was the last time you saw a giant spider do a sumo wrestler’s shiko?  Or, y’know, bat its many eyes at you in a come hither glance?), but most of it is thanks to the magic of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that as a figure becomes more lifelike, a person’s positive emotional reaction will actually dip.  It’s easy for me to get attached to these goofy creatures, but show me the models from The Polar Express, and I get the creeps.  Mr. Incredible and my Striped Faffasquat don’t approach anything near photorealism, and you know what?  That’s fine.

While the creatures and their backgrounds aren’t real, their look still feels right.  I think that’s because Will Wright and his team have realized something that manga creators have known for ages: a simple character in a complex environment means people can easily immerse themselves.  Instead of getting faffing about  with pointless gabble about how 3d their world should be, Maxis is probably going to make something that is pretty to look at, just real enough for people to accept what’s going on (with things like shadows and gravity and movements that don’t look like cardboard cutouts), and then there will be a sudden drop in productivity as people around the world spend their waking moments leading their creations out of the amino acid muck and up to the stars.

One more thing to keep in mind is that Spore is a game, and games are meant to be fun.  That may sound like an obvious idea, what how many times have you heard some sim queen stamp his virtual feet and pout that virtual worlds aren’t games?  Isn’t that another way of saying that they’re not, y’know, fun?  Call me biased (and I know I’m biased, since my professional and geek roots are in games), but if given a choice between developming a pardigm-shifting method of personal interaction or teaching a three-footed horned giraffe how to walk, sign me up for the giraffe cages, dude.  I’ve long yelled (much to the office’s chagrin) that if people building virutal worlds aren’t raiding the ranks of video game developers, they’re missing out on a gold mine of experience.  Immersion, ease of use, fun: these are what you get from a good game.  Along with the giraffes.  Man, they’re cute.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.