Today’s top story in the New York Science Times is about a new digital game where the action is not blowing things up. In the new game Spore, things evolve.
. . . Spore [is] one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is among the best-selling video game franchises of all time — an impressive achievement in an $18-billion-a-year industry that is now bigger than Hollywood.
Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.
Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. . . .
Today’s top story in the New York Science Times is about a new digital game where the action is not blowing things up. In the new game Spore, things evolve.
. . . Spore [is] one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes [...]
Comments
@ 01:44
Hey Judy
This is neat and definitely a taste of things to come around learning what it means to participate in a group.
There is an excellent book “The Logic of Failure” by Professor Dietrich Dorner which shows many examples of our inability to predict the outcome of our decisions in complex systems such as groups.
We all expect pilots to train on simulators yet we let leaders loose on teams and networks without any experiental training!!
Senge calls them micro-worlds but to date they have been somewhat primative.
Heres a link to the book
http://www.bioteams.com/2008/08/07/leadership_under_pressure.html
Best Regards
Ken Thompson
http://www.bioteams.com
@ 07:48
This seems like a quick cash-in on the hype surrounding Spore. National Geographic is airing a documentary on the same subject in six days.
What the article fails to address is the ability that the Spore model has to represent convergent evolution. If many different creators make different animals with similar trait sets, it will say something about the survivability afforded by said sets.
The article also seems to think Spore fails to address divergent evolution, even though that is the entire purpose of the death mechanic in the creature phase. Upon death the player gains the opportunity to lose disadvantageous traits.
The article gets the release date wrong as well. If this was the Herald Tribune then they could say it gets released on 9/5, but in America it has a 9/7 release date.