Spore has been in development for ages, and is built around procedural programming techniques, so that the game can adapt to new content generated by the users.
The players start with a tiny little single celled organism which they drift around in a cute little pac-man style, tide pool environment (if you've played the flash game 'flow', then you'll know what to expect). The aim is to eat creatures smaller than oneself while avoid being eaten by creatures larger than oneself, and gain DNA points to build up your little creature so that you can evolve to the next level. Once your creature is sufficiently evolved you can climb out of the oceans and start exploring the land, while worrying about the usual animal problems of survival, adaption, and gaining DNA points to build up your animal more. Eventually once you've evolved your creature up to the point where it has a lot of intelligence, the game shifts to a new paradigm of tribal warfare.
This stage in development is similar to real time strategy games. Advancement at this stage in the game leads to the civilization stage, which as the name suggests pays hommage to the game civilization. The goal at this stage is to take control of the planet. Final technological advancement at this level unlocks the UFO, which then opens up the final paradigm of the game which is space. The player can then explore the solar system (and eventually the galaxy), colonize other planets, terraform, play with planets weather systems geology etc, play with aliens, and a plethora of other things to do, the options are almost limitless. Every stage has editors. Almost everything can be customised. The game engine intelligently adapts to these changes, such is the genius that went into Spore. To fill your world up, it connects to the server and populates your universe with creatures made by other players. In turn your own creatures may be used to populate someone else's worlds. Even the most ardent of critics can't help but admire the vision behind it.
Setting aside its grand vision, the game itself sounds epic, and an epic journey through the grand stages of development would have been wonderful, but early user reviews complain that it takes less than a day to reach the space stage. Hardly epic at all. It should be noted that in the TED talks presentation about the game, its creator Will Wright refers to it as a toy. This is revealing. Don't expect any compelling gameplay. This is only a toy. Remember toys? Where you had to do all the work? Use your imagination to get it to work? Here it is the same concept, not only do you get to generate the monster, the buildings, the civilization, well everything really, but then... it's just a toy... it doesn't interact... you won't meet anything deadly... you just have to muck about with it... you don't get anything out of it except that which you put in. Its a sand box, love it or hate it. Seems like a game of Spore involves as much imagination, creativity and storytelling as writing a novel, except you don't have anything to show for it at the end of the day: EA own the fruits of your labours, and profit from it.
Back to the DRM issue, and unlike classic games of yesteryear such as Alpha Centauri and Civilization, which could be reinstalled and replayed and enjoyed years after purchasing them – Spore can only be installed three times. Any more than a paltry three installations and it stops working and you then, if you have not yet been offended and insulted enough, are forced to go cap in hand to EA and beg them to reactivate it. This is done by providing them with proof of purchase. This offensive system reduces the purchaser from game 'owner' to game 'renter' (or perhaps more fittingly temporary paying tenant of the spore universe). What happens for example, when 10 years later you feel like you want to play spore, but you can't because support for the game is discontinued and EA's Spore activation server is no longer available?
Anger over the DRM brought the game's star rating on Amazon down to one and a half stars, with many users citing uncompelling gameplay and DRM as the cause of their discontent. Interestingly the same row erupted over Mass Effect, which EA also put on the same Draconian DRM.
The DRM works by injecting a 'root kit' into windows. Those who maintain a moderate knowledge of PC security will recognize the name root kit as being among the most severe class of viruses you can get. Many virus checkers are unable to deal with root kits because they install themselves between the operating system and the hardware, becoming both invisible and impossible to remove. Their location, close to the heart of the operating system also gives them an unprecidented amount of control over the system. Root Kits are so severe, that rather than takling the problem through existing virus checkers, security firms have been offering Root Kit protection as stand alone solutions.
This is the lure of Root Kits to EA, it lets them seize control of your computer so they can regularly check that their software hasn't been 'compromised' in any way. In other words they want to use your computer to check you're not a theif. It is this assumption that all their customers are criminals that angers gamers.
Meanwhile Spore has attracted criticism from a different camp, with the website antispore.com popping up to host an anti-spore blog from an irate christian who accused Will Wright's game of being “propaganda aimed directly at our children to teach them evolution instead of creationism, or 'intelligent design' if you go for stupid PC terms.” And had many people convinced it was a joke at first. But the likelyhood of that case has dwindled with every post.
Next the blogger at anti-spore discovered that immature gamers were evolving obscene looking creatures (see Freeman Postulate #1), and not only took it to mean that the game included that kind of content, but made this a new crusade. This is a bit like trying to ban etch-a-sketches because someone decided to draw genitals on theirs. Nevertheless the drama continued with the anti-spore blogger drawing all manner of wrong conclusions, and (in each subsequent post); counting the number of EA employees it takes to corrupt a child's mind, posting you tube videos of the penis monsters on the blog so that all the readers could see for themselves the terrible debauchery of the game, accusing Will Wright (and the Church he belongs to) of being evil, coining new words such as “Evolutionairyists”, associating their actions on their blog with EA's stock dropping, until at last realizing that the user generated content has to be approved before it gets sent out to other users. Immature content only appears in the game if the gamer decides to make such things, and then whose problem is that?
So Spore rolled out with a bang, and even with all the negative publicity is expected to do well. One cannot however wonder if it would do even better if EA would stop accusing their customers of being theifs...
