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[Angelo]

This is pasted from my blog. I wrote this last October, roughly a month after Spore was released, so try to take the info concerning Spore under that context since it's probably outdated (i.e. no announcement of an expansion at that time). A large percent of it is actually about comparing Maxis' major games with each other, but through that comparison I try to make a point about successful and unsuccessful (in my opinion) ways to implement creativity in a game. Shiny pics included to break the wall of text.


Still playing Spore?

Spore is a PC game released last month and this post is mainly addressed to enthusiasts who've been anxiously waiting to get their hands on it, expecting a new Sims in terms of creativity and replayability. Now, if after playing for a week or two you start wondering if there's something wrong with you because you're starting feel you're running out of things to do, in other words to get bored with this "limitless" game, then this is for you.

This post isn't a review nor a DRM-hate post. But since I'm at it, I'll express my opinion on that issue in short. Someone asked in a forum how would we feel if the burglars complained to us for installing a antitheft alarm system on our house. I replied that the example was irrelevant, since the antitheft system wouldn't disturb the rightful visitors of our house. In Spore's case however, it's like we installed an machine carrying out obligatory rectrum examinations to whoever enters our front door. Considering that the burglars wouldn't enter through the front door and the visitors wouldn't enter through the windows, who is at loss?


One of my Sims 2 Houses

Back to the subject. I don't know about you, but I keep my Sims 2 installed on my hard drive since it came out and once or twice a year, I place my social life in standby mode and plunge into a demonic state of house building and plug-in hunting. Those who do the same know what I mean... the time crawling through new plug-ins to download is comparable to the time you actually play. Anyway, I play for about a month, get bored, stop and repeat the process after about a year. Another game I do that with is SimCity 4. It's this creativity that builds up over time, month after month, that just EXPLODES when you see a well designed house or a complex interchange while you drive, making you want to build something as beautiful as what you saw ASAP!


A Sims2 club I made


My Sims2 3 take on a 3-story apartment building

Both games were made by Maxis. Coincidence? Of course not. Clearly, Maxis knows how to nail replayability. Therefore, Spore, designed with the same frame of mind by the same people, should easily have all the features that make a game make the players come back to it regulary, even years after they first played it. Does it?


Random shot from one of my SimCity4 cities


Sunset at above the city

After playing through Spore long enough, I have my doubts. In Sims, the thing that makes me come back is that the game provides the necessary tools to transfer with a high degree of accuracy, a construction from my imagination to the game. Same thing for SimCity4. Furthermore, addons made by both games' very active communities add to that toolbox, constantly raising that degree of accuracy with which I can materialize my ideas inside the game. The scope of these constructions are relatively large, and making a house or a town exactly how I want it can take several days or weeks, and it still wouldn't be perfect enough. My task also consists of not only making one building/city, but to create a realistic, seamless group of those objects that look good together and that work. At least that's how I draw enjoyment from these games.


A region shot showing two interconnected cities

Now which of these abilities does Spore offer me? Let's see... I can shape creatures, make some buildings out of building blocks and some vehicles out of parts. Now, the shape creature part is like Create-a-Sim, only the sim is like dough and you can mold it to whatever you like. In sims this proccess takes at most an hour if you're really anal. Same thing for Spore, since someone who's played a video game before can finish the first two stages in perhaps less than an hour. Actually it's not bad. It's pretty good , considering the fact that you still wanna fiddle with it even after you realize that the different placement of the same part has no impact to its abilities. After the 2nd stage you're no longer be able to modify it, except for some difficult-to-snap-on-your-creature "clothing". From then on though you'll never see your creature up close again since the gameplay takes place in a more macroscopic scale, except for some dialogue windows which show a moving portrait of your creature, which will probably turn you off since the clothing you "snapped" on it will most likely twist in weird angles, bend and clip through your creature as it makes bodily expressions.


My terrible Spore creature

Next we have the buildings. This doesn't need half as much analysis as the creature part, since it's clear that after the otherwise entertaining process of constructing them, they attain a less than minor role due to the fact that again, you don't have an incentive of zooming into them; something that adds to that problem is the low resolution textures they have in the game after you exit the creation screen. As for me, I want my creations to have a feedback mechanic, to show me if they work or not, so that each time I have a problem to solve. That is, how can I make the thing I have in my mind, with a given set of tools, be actually functional when transferred in the game. The same applies to vehicles. My first war vehicle looked like a hedgehog, with cannons extruding from everywhere. I expected a fountain of bombs flying around it each time it fired, but little did I know. The most purposeful design actually is that of the spaceship, since that's what you'll be looking at most of the time, not the creatures nor the buildings. So you have to make it nice.


My attempt at a Spore human

Finally, let's expand on the subject of the space stage, which is the actual game. Because, let's not fool ourselves, the other stages are there to teach someone who hasn't played a game before, how to press the buttons. From a creativity aspect, the space stage has the least to offer. Terraforming? The tools effects are so random that you'll probably crack the FBI database codes before you make a river the way you actually want it. Secondly, you may be playing for days and still be missing more than half of the terraforming tools, since you have to go and find them among 49876497 star systems. From a gameplay aspect, there are undoubtedly many things to do. But after some time you'll feel you've done almost everything. Terraformed planets, destroyed colonies, completed missions, conquered/bought systems, defended planets and reaching the center of the galaxy. They're sure to keep you busy for a certain amount of time. If you're a completionist, you'll start new creatures, each with a different evolution combination for getting all different abilities. You'll then proceed to complete all achievements for each of your creatures. Surely, doing all this will keep you busy for several weeks. After you do everything though, possible but time consuming, you'll stop playing. The point is whether you'll come back to play again after a year or so.

The sharing of content doesn't add to replay value in my opinion. Sure, it's fun to have a universe populated by other people's creations, but it's not an incentive to replay the game in the future, like you would with the Sims or SimCity. Also, unless you consider user creations as "mods", Spore doesn't have any obvious modding possibilities like the other two games have, that being another thing undermining the replay value.

These were my thoughts on whether Spore succeeds in offering the level of replayability Maxis' previous games offered. In my opinion it does not. Do you see yourself coming back to play Spore in a year or two from now?

[Craig Stern]

Um...did I miss the part where you talk about creativity in games? Because this seemed like a comparison between Sim City and the Sims vs. Spore.

[Angelo]

Um...did I miss the part where you talk about creativity in games? Because this seemed like a comparison between Sim City and the Sims vs. Spore.

It's around the middle of the post. But you are right, a large percent of it is actually about comparing these games with each other, but through that comparison I try to make a point about successful and unsuccessful (in my opinion) ways to implement creativity in a game.

I updated the introductory paragraph to reflect that.

[Paul Eres]

although i liked simcity for the original snes, i never got into the sims and haven't tried spore. in general i find that being creative in one's style of playing and imagining a game is more interesting than actually creating things in the game. i.e. i think games like starcraft etc. inspire more creativity than sandbox games or even games like mario paint; the creativity is more in how you play the game rather than in what you make with the game. games like seiklus and glum buster also inspire creativity due to activating the player's imagination and describing the game in such a way that the mind has to fill in the missing blanks.

[Luke]

Well, creativty could be declined in so many ways that we could go forward together.

Personally I appreciate when creativity is generated by emergent behaviours.
You all will probably remember that the mine in Deus Ex was used to climb walls, but conceived only to detonate.

Nature is magister vitae on spawning emergent properties.
One of my favourite, though not properly "natural", is an example of static emergence.

It's said that a phenomenon is statically emergent if its implementation doesn't relay on time. Consider cloth as a collection of threads woven together. A thread is understood in terms of length, but when they are woven together the resulting cloth has a new property: it is able to cover a surface. This process converts a collection of 1 dimentional components to a 2 dimensional object.

This is the kind of creativity I'm pushed to recreate in my works, with all respect to the other forms.

What do you think?

[Paul Eres]

What do you think?

emergent behavior is fine, and fun when it happens, but i don't think it's special enough to revolve one's games around generating it; there are plenty of other values in games besides emergent behavior; besides, it's curious to *try* to intend unintended gameplay: i mean, does that even make sense? intend unintended gameplay?

[Luke]

I've read Paul Erdos... time to go to sleep

In most cases is true, but definetely I can't say there's enough good examples out there to settle and relegate emergence on the corner (not that you actually have said this, I'm just elaborating).
The best examples I know are fortunate and unintentional, while more often simulating emergence is done by hiding properties or, as you cleverly have put it, "try to intend the unintended".

For me Emergence is "macro effects originated from micro-level causes". It's about defining higher level laws despite the fact that everything can be reduced to fundamental forces.
I have introduced this point also because Angelo cited and compared few sim games, and a game only about emergence fits really well in this genre, though I've not advocated that it should be always the main source of creativity.

I think about models of biological arms races. Imagine a plant that comes under attack from an insect. The plant may figure out how to grow bark. Then the insect could figure out how to bore through the bark. The plant could react by producing a compound that is nocive to the insect. Then the insect could develope an anti-toxin defense. And so on.

You, as the player, have to direct the course of evolution.
So, actually, it's something different than trying to intend unintended gameplay; it's more having an enormous amount of low level informations to generate high level solutions without prejudice.

Obviously I'm extremely far in my work from even resembling something similar.

[Captain_404]

What do you think?

emergent behavior is fine, and fun when it happens, but i don't think it's special enough to revolve one's games around generating it; there are plenty of other values in games besides emergent behavior; besides, it's curious to *try* to intend unintended gameplay: i mean, does that even make sense? intend unintended gameplay?

I think so, absolutely. And there is a place for it in games, specifically those that are creation oriented. (ie: level editors)

I've got a sort of part-time job making flash games for a site that requires every one of it's games be level-editor driven. To me it's an interesting challenge as it often clashes with gameplay ideas I have, putting the user in control is a scary thing. I've found, however, that if I make a game that suits my needs as a game designer and it makes only the kind of levels that I want it to the game quickly becomes dull for the player. You need to program the game almost with a certain sloppiness, so that over time people find those subtle mistakes in your coding and exploit them to create some really interesting gameplay mechanics.

And it's not really about the player 'breaking' my game either, it's more about them making it work a in a new, unexpected way.


So I guess if you're making a game that doesn't encourage the player to create their own space in the game, you might not want to encourage this sort of unintended gameplay, but when you want the player to really carve out their own space within your game and create something that's their own, you need to provide for unexplored territory in your game.

It's hard to explain, but yes, it is possible to code a game in order to intend unintended gameplay.

[Kneecaps]

I'm pretty sure that every strategy game requires some type of intentional unintended gameplay as well.  Otherwise, strategy games would more or less be a larger web of rock paper scissors.  Also, multiplayer games that have emergent properties tend to be more successful over a longer period of time, since new tactics/techniques can be found by players instead of having to be explicitly made by the developers.

[Sam]

I think the concept of emergence is very much related to Angelo's opening post.

In Spore you have quite a flat creative space, which doesn't reach out and effect other areas.  My creature's design is entirely decorative - it flies just as well with a light body and huge wings as it does with the body of a cow and tiny wings in the place of ears.  So there's no consequence in gameplay for your design decisions, which lessens their importance to you as the player.  Unimportant trivial decisions aren't exciting to make, so we get bored.

The creature creator is amazing, though.  The creation of technology to produce reasonable animations and textures for such variety of creatures is to be marvelled at.  But so much of it just doesn't matter in the game world.  My 12 legged spider creature has great slinking animations and stripped fur that matches this planet's flora perfectly, but it doesn't make it a better hunter.  Sticking a tuft of grass anywhere on the body does make it better at hiding, though.

There is a useful exception to this in Spore - the very first "rock pool" stage.  You design your creature and move it about in what is effectively a 2D space.  How your creature interacts with the world depends entirely on what you've attatched to the creature and where.  Put spikes on the front, and you can tear other creatures open.  Put spikes on the back and they're virtually useless for attack, but can save you from persuing predators (if your spikes are longer than theirs.)

Sadly they don't take the design of the rock pool stage as far as they could.  Your propulsion systems work just as well wherever they are on the body (forshadowing the way that all parts work in the main creature stage), and huge spikes cost just as much as tiny spikes.  And of course they fail to carry the "your design actually matters" principle forward into the rest of the game.

The design aspects of most of Spore seem built on the princple of "make it look however you like!  It'll work fine!  Be creative!"  I think this makes it suffer from blank canvas syndrome.  Give me a blank MSPaint window and I can create anything, but I tend to be inspired to create nothing.  Give me some rules and constraints to work within and push against, and I start to feel creative.  Doubly so if those constraints make sense within the greater mechanics of the game.

Can you make a beautiful creature - which can reach up and graze on trees?
Can you make a vast Dwarvern fortress - which is defensible against goblin hordes?
Can you make a city - which doesn't degenerate into a slum?

[Zest]

There was a platformer on the PS2 a while back called Graffiti Kingdom, that had an interesting take on the whole thing: You collected parts for your creature that could be used to change the level to traverse it. You could give it wings, ice breath, etc. But does anyone know if it's any fun? I've seen some of the creations, and they're pretty cool-looking, but is the game itself fun to play?

[FatHat]

What do you think?

emergent behavior is fine, and fun when it happens, but i don't think it's special enough to revolve one's games around generating it; there are plenty of other values in games besides emergent behavior; besides, it's curious to *try* to intend unintended gameplay: i mean, does that even make sense? intend unintended gameplay?

I actually think emergent behavior is incredibly important, although I would agree that explicitly designing for things you don't intend might be silly :-)

In my opinion its actually reasonably easy to create the sort of environment where emergent behavior is possible. Off the top of my head, I think the ingredients you need are:

• A source of randomness/mutation in the world or the actors
• Actors that are governed by simple consistent rules
• A way for actors to lastingly affect/change their environment over time

That's a bit simplistic, but my point is that emergent behavior isn't that hard... we just don't bother to do it. I think there's a lot of potential for cool gameplay in it, though.