Spore and real educational gaming

While I've never really been reeled in by one of Will Wright's masterpieces, I've played all of the notables, and I have a great amount of respect for him as a designer. Because of this, I shouldn't be surprised at everything Spore does right, but I can't help it. Thus far, the game is both accessible and compelling, and succeeds at being big and small at the same time. I'm still just getting my feet wet on what Wright has achieved here, but even just making it to the creature phase has won me over completely. The meticulous design stays out of the player's way while doing everything you need and the amount of personality in such a customizable game continues to astound me. However, I ended up at a point far beyond just appreciating its design.

I've always been a console gamer first. PC gaming and I have never really gotten along. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't exactly cut my teeth my first computer was a piece of crap 286 running DOS 3.3, and I stuck with that thing up until I got a Pentium 3 with Windows 95. While I loved heading into the Dungeon of Doom and even occasionally went hunting, even the best games that I could run on that sorry thing paled in comparison to the polished and accessible worlds that were open to me on the NES and SNES. By the time I got my mitts on copies of SimCity or Civ, I was already too far gone. I made time for landmark games like WarCraft II and Quake and loved every minute of them, but there was no question where my true interests lied. There's no question that many of the great achievements in PC gaming history were sadly wasted on me, even though I'd played them all.  However, over the years I have come back from time to time. This week, I've come back again, this time for Spore.

Wright's philosophy, where instead of making a world out of play he makes play out of the world, has an interesting side effect. During the cell stage, which takes place on a 2-dimensional playfield, the graphics render much larger creatures on planes below my little cellular playground as shown in the screenshot at the top of this page. With one simple move, Wright puts my micro-organism's life into perspective. Likewise, as your organism grows, the other organisms that were once just as big as you are now almost too small to see, reminding you of whence you came. The game mechanic is simple, just an offshoot of the basic Katamari mechanic, however, the conclusions it leads you to about the nature of life are sound. Once the creature phase sets in and the player is trying to deal with realistic challenges of surviving on a pre-sentient world, the lessons and conclusions that it has you drawing are downright educational! But that makes no sense, Spore is on the retail shelf, for full price, and aimed at adults, it's got to be mostly entertainment, right?

Most traditional "educational games" follow a simple formula. Find cute ways to present a lesson to you, and reward you for solving it. They're no more than a creative form of the old academic game show that so many teachers resort to to make learning seem fun. However, in the golden age of these "edutainment" atrocities, one game stood apart. The game was The Oregon Trail, and chances are you've heard of it even if you're not a member of my generation. The game's simplified presentation of a journey west in the mid-1800s may not have been totally historically accurate, but most players took one real lesson from their 4-color CGA journey. Going west was hard.

In struggling to make their way past the dysentery and indians, these kids were given a picture of life into the childhood of America that was more or less rooted in reality. Through a challenging and well-designed game that is designed with entertainment as a primary goal rather than a wrapper for your math lessons, Oregon Trail had a more lasting effect on its audience and provided more educational impact than any of its "traditional brethren." The same can be said of Spore, as no amount of paleontology lessons, no amount of illustrated examples teaching me the purpose a stegosaurus' spikes can substitute for the thought patterns Spore coaxes out of me by giving me the all the tools and telling me to figure out how to survive.

The idea that games can provide valuable skills and education, like, say, an advanced sense of strategy isn't a new one, but suffice to say this is only the beginning. In the end, instead of making games out of education, creators should apply Wright's philosophy to their own work and figure out how to derive education from games. Spore has my synapses firing, and I can't wait to head back for more. If you grab Spore, bring your thoughts and put them right here. I've got a feeling this won't be the last time you hear from me on this game.