Oberthaler: What Will Wright gets wrong about evolution

By Katie Oberthaler

Sunday, September 14, 2008

If LOLcatz, Battlestar Galactica and Mr. Potatohead procreated, you’d get the newest video game sensation, Spore. It’s the brainchild of Will Wright, who created The Sims, which turned out to be the best-selling PC game in history.

Spore is similar to The Sims, in that players control the evolution of their creatures. The evolutionary premise of Spore is quite innovative, but when science and pop culture meet, scientific accuracy always takes a back seat to amusement (see “Star Trek,” “Frankenstein,” “The Brave Little Toaster”).

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Photo by Max Rinkel

Spore isn’t trying to teach us evolution — it’s trying to take up space on your hard drive. Here’s what you should take with a grain of salt:

WE ARE ALL REALLY CUTE ALIENS

Life in Spore begins when an asteroid hits earth, depositing multi-celled bacteria that laze about until a player starts adding limbs and allows the bacteria to reproduce. Spore deserves a nod for including a scientifically supported background story, but the “space stork” is only one theory. Other scientists think organic material, such as amino acids and proteins, was grown in the right temperature, light and chemical conditions in some unfortunate prehistoric time when computer games couldn’t stunt their productivity.

NO NEED TO SAVE THE WHALES

Spore is infused with a humans-as-divine-beings mentality. While the creatures don’t resemble us, the game assumes that our conditions as land-dwelling, group-cooperating strategic thinkers led to our survival. This is why the game is so popular: It feeds our egos by allowing us to control life.

As June bugs have proven, you don’t need much of a brain to resist extinction. Surviving on land doesn’t guarantee better survival, either. Whales, the largest aquatic mammals, actually developed from land animals. Evolution requires a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality. Organisms survive if they can use limited resources in a small area, not if they can conquer the universe.

IF YOU SUCK AT LIFE, MOVE PAST GO

Spore allows you to skip entire stages completely after you have played the game once. Unlike in Spore, species don’t seek out new ways to succeed unless their environment or genetic makeup demands it. In Spore, advancing from level to level is expected.

SEEING GOD BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Saving your thatch hut from burning to the ground in the tribal phase depends largely on what type of arms, legs and eyes players give their creature at the start. Like the real world, creatures with the best-fit characteristics flourish. However, Spore doesn’t notice that evolution isn’t a decision. Organisms don’t choose how they look. Biodiversity arises from genetic mutations and environmental pressure. Giving players a God complex ignores the basic mechanism of evolution — natural selection, not divine power.

But the point of Spore isn’t for the Board of Education to dispatch librarian patrol over all K-12 computers. Players can overlook the simplified representations of evolution because Spore isn’t a learning tool: It is science appropriated for entertainment.

If Spore didn’t have the God complex built in, we’d be doing the same old thing — making secret ugly Sim characters out of our siblings.

Oberthaler is a Wichita junior in English.

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