Computer game "Spore" has Darwin doing stupid creature befriending dance in his grave!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 7 months 3 weeks (www.sciencemag.org)

The makers of the computer game "Spore" promise a real evolutionary experience: Start out the game as a microbe just trying to survive and travel all the way through the history of evolution into a species capable of a modern, civilized society! Depending on the choices the player makes early on in the game, the later species can have a seemingly limitless range of fascinating, monstrous forms. Not only did this sound like fun to most scientists, but--wonder of wonders--the game makers even promised real, accurate science behind the whole thing! And the implications for science education: Teaching kids about evolution while they played a computer game? The little rugrats wouldn't stand a chance!

Scientists were thrilled. Then they saw the game. Not only is Spore full of inaccurate science, but it reinforces some of the most destructive misconceptions that the public has about evolutionary biology.

Upon playing the game, researchers were outraged--amused, but outraged. Probably the most angry are the scientists that appeared in the National Geographic documentary about the making of Spore. The placement of these scientists clips and speeches seem to endorse the patterns found in Spore, but in reality, they had all been told that they were contributing to a straight documentary on evolutionary biology.

But these are scientists we're talking about. Rather than sit and sulk, Science magazine John Bohannon--known for co-organizing a conference inside WoW--assembled a crack team of experts to play the game from beginning to end and prepare an epic rant of uberfanboy proportions!

Spore divides the history of evolution up into five sections: The first two, "Cell" and "Creature," were given to Guelph University evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory and the American Museum of Natural history's Niles Eldredge. "Tribe" and "Civilization" went to sociologist William Bainbridge of the U.S. National Science foundation. For the last section, "Space," Bohannon called NASA and they let him borrow Miles Smith from Jet Propulsion.

There were a few generic critiques about the gameplay itself--Gregory liked the look of the Cell stage but Bainbridge thought it was too cutesy, like a copy of Pac-Man. Overall, the team found Cell to be inaccurate but entertaining.

The Creature stage hit more problems. First off, Spore was going for an E-for-Everyone rating, which meant that there could be no blood or gore, not even when the creatures were preying upon each other. And the scientists did not seem too impressed with the "befriending" dance-off minigames. What really killed Creature, though, was the in-egg "shaping" that the player performs to tug each generation in a different direction. How can a game claim to be about evolution when changes in species come not from selection and their environments but by a conscious being's deliberate actions?

Ironically, the intelligent design guys also think that the science in Spore too inaccurate. Michael Behe of Lehigh University says, "[Spore] has nothing to do with real science."

"The problem is that the game features virtually none of the key ingredients of evolution as we understand it," says Gregory. "There's no shared common descent between species, since every single creature in Spore can trace its lineage back to a different single-celled organism that arrives from space." Spore also lacks biological variation. "When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you." Nor does it have natural selection. "There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest." Your organism does evolve, says Gregory, "in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things evolve in the real world."

In addition, the game perpetuates my own pet peeve: teleology. The game forces the player to "evolve" into a sentient being as if that were the only possible endpoint. In reality, evolution has no endpoint and sentience is only one of many ways in which a species can become successful. We're great but we're not that great.

From my perspective, the problem here is less that these guys built a computer game that uses inaccurate science and more that they built a computer game that uses inaccurate science that it claims is accurate science. People already know (or are supposed to know) that they can't rely on TV and movies and novels about geisha or Anne Boleyn or the Catholic Church for real information about real things. That's a systemic problem that our culture has not yet happened to find a way to fix. But the makers of Spore aren't just going with the flow; they're actively deceiving people, not just letting them deceive themselves.

Keywords: video games computer games console games Spore lying false advertising science and culture ethics education education science and history teleology evolutionary biology