Evolutionary Life

Voices of the Emerging Movement for Conscious Evolution

December 2006

Spore:

The Revolutionary Evolutionary Game

by Shane Dowd, 21

I watched the demo-video of the video game "Spore." I was actually very, very impressed. Spore appears to be 6 different games jam-packed into one massively impressive open-ended evolutionary story that is only limited by the player's imagination. It looks like it could be an awesome evolutionary teaching tool because it is so interactive. If it wasn't called Spore it could be called Sim-Everything because that's basically what it is. Definitely something to be excited about!

and Lion Kimbro

There's a computer game called "Spore" that should be very interesting to the people involved with evolutionary spirituality.

Make sure that you see the video of it, on Google Videos. It will load immediately, no long wait time.

In case you're reading on, because you need some justification to see it, it demonstrates:

•   Cellular life,...
• ...growing to multi-cellular life, ...
• ...developing to live on land, ...
• ...collecting together into tribes, ...
• ...actually, it goes much further than this, but I don't want to spoil it. Just watch the movie already.

Oh, you're still reading this!

Okay, then I need to still tell you some more things, to get you to go see it.

• It's also features "fitness," showing some of the ideas in evolution. (That said, it also features design.)
• The game's an effective teacher; It uses the game to motivate you into learning how to use the editing tools, to paint your world.
• That is, it's an incredibly creative game as well, players spend a lot of time just tweaking things, making them nice, making them how they want them.
• The game is a landmark game in game development, because near everything is "programmatic." You could say that this game is evolutionary in terms of game development: The ideas expressed here in this game are going to spread far and wide and will touch most every game produced in the future. This is not just a new game, this is a whole new world of ways to manufacture games. Yes, the game development community is well aware of this game, and there is no professional computer game developer that does not know about this game. (Just ask one.)
• Somewhat indirectly, the games is also about open content. There are many movements happening right now, evolutionary spirituality being one of them. Open content is another movement, and this game taps into both of those movements.
• The game is also an experiment in meaning making. The game starts very directed, but moves into a space where the player constructs their own meaning for the game.

Just watch the video already!

It'd be a huge shame if the evolutionary spirituality community was not up on this game.

Computer simulation is an important element in our future evolution. We developed minds, and they too run simulations: "What will happen if I do X? What will happen if I do Y?"

That this game was made, completely independently of the evolutionary spirituality groups, can be taken as a sign that now is the time for this movement. When you are talking with the younger generation, you can point them to things such as this game, and use it as a vehicle for your conversation.