The Flaw of Spore
Spore’s problems can be reduced to one fundamental flaw. It is not EA’s aggressive DRM, the game’s failure to be meet impossible hype, or a mainstream target audience. The flaw is simpler and far more egregious: player decisions that have no consequences.
This flaw is seen throughout Spore but let’s get to the heart of the matter. Spore has two halves: a detailed content editor and a series of mini-games. The creature editor is the best single element of the game; it is fun to tinker with a monster and observe how it would move. The flaw is that the two halves do not interact in any meaningful way.
Disconnection is total regarding buildings: whatever the player designs is simply decoration, and even that is invisible during gameplay, as the camera pulls far away. The other editors do offer bonuses for adding different parts to your builds, but this changes the dynamics little. The interest of the editors comes not from choosing parts but freeform 3-dimensional tinkering. However, tinkering does not provide bonuses or otherwise affect the interaction of your creatures with their environment—even though one would expect it to, especially regarding mobility. This robs the player of exploring the world creatively: every creature, every vehicle, functions essentially identically.
Let me be clear: I am not complaining that different creations are equally easy to win with; that there is no strategy to building them. I am complaining that there is no interest in putting your creature into the virtual world of the mini-games, because there is nothing to do with them that is unique. When you finish building a creature in the editor, you have seen all there is to see.
The interchangeable parts offer the only differences between creations, as well as the opportunity to strategize; but this is exactly what’s wrong with them. The editors are open-ended; what we expect in a Will Wright “software toy”: there is no right or wrong way, just exploration. But parts produce the opposite kind of gameplay, where you are encouraged to choose the “best” part, and indeed there is such a best part.
Other Maxis games have offered bonuses of various kinds, of course. But in The Sims there is no way to win, and there are many goals to pursue. Further, the world is complex enough that it can be explored without any stable goals at all. Spore prevents such exploration by its very simple worlds, and its mini-games with singular and straightforward paths to victory. Even the theoretical trade-offs you can make, for instance by being religious or economic, do not alter the dynamics: the player takes the same actions, only with slightly different visuals.
Fundamentally, Spore does not know what it wants to be, or what experience it wants to offer: free-form exploration or linear advancement towards victory. A player cannot ignore one offering and focus on the other, because they work at cross-purposes. Exploration is promised in the creature editor but thwarted by simplistic virtual worlds. The quick fun of a casual mini-game is glimpsed in the first stage, but absent in the derivative and inelegant later ones; while the editors only get in the way. Spore could have been a SimCreature, and it could have been a casual romp through time and vastly different scales. We can’t know whether it was ambitious vision, populism or economics that drove Maxis to attempt both. Regardless, the two halves are not compliments but opposites; and create a game that opposes itself at every turn.
Nov 27, 2009 | Filed in reviews