Spore sociology

From Scienceguild

by Bill Bainbridge

(To go back to the Spore report card, click HERE.)

Grading

I have to rate the cultural anthropology part (essentially the Tribe phase) as C-

There really are no tribes here, because tribes are an outgrowth of kinship, and there is no real kinship. Other tribes seem to be other species. Tribes, and the relations between them, cannot be understood without kinship. The same is true for mythology, norms, and even the economy on the tribal level. Had Spore lived up to the publicity that it was a game based on evolution, then there would have been biological reproduction, families, and the basis for much of what cultural anthropology studies. The grade would be lower, except that there is a cultural-anthropological basis for the exchange of gifts which Spore illustrates.

In contrast, I rate the sociology as B+

Given how brief the civilization phase is, it includes much of relevance to real sociology, such as the division of labor, public opinion, and the fact that religious movements exploit unresolved human dissatisfactions. There is also a hint of social stratification in the tribal phase.

The Wikipedia article on the development of Spore says that the civilization phase is largely derived from the very successful series of computer games named Civilization:

"In April 2007, Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined EA Maxis to work on Spore. Soon after, some video game sites theorized that this news indicated that the release of Spore might slip to 2008. A projected 2008 release was revealed three weeks later at an EA conference call, corroborating the speculation that a significant amount of development was still left to be completed. In a GameVideos interview with Garnett Lee, Wright explained, 'I credit him with, basically, you know, being able to present [the Civilization phase] that has that many, ah, strategic possibilities but not have it being overwhelming from a gameplay mechanic sense.'"

Scientific Basis

Spore claims to be at least partly-science based, as evidenced by an advertisement on its home page in early September 2008, publicizing a National Geographic television program as "a deeper look at the science behind Spore." Earlier Will Wright games have also sought to establish connections to science and scholarship notably through bibliographies included in the instruction manuals for SimCity 2000 and The Sims.

Bremer, Michael. 1993 SimCity 2000 User Manual. Walnut Creek, CA: Maxis.

Bentley, Tom. 2000. The Sims (user manual). Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts.

Despite superficial impressions to the contrary, a close look at Spore shows that the intellectual connections are not to the science of biological evolution, but rather to theories about social interaction from ethology, cultural anthropology, economics, and sociology.

In the creature stage of the game, carnivores gain DNA by eating other animals, herbivores do so by scavenging corpses, and then the player decides which of this DNA to add to the creature's genome. This bears no resemblance to the processes of random mutation, sexual combination, and natural selection of real biological evolution. To be sure, it is possible that natural transduction (genetics) by viruses and bacteria consequentially transports genes from one species to another, but this is believed to happen only very rarely and is not the primary mechanism of biological evolution. When two Spore creatures mate, they do not apparently possess different genomes, nor is their offspring's genome a random mixture of the parents'.

However, there is no technical reason why real processes of biological evolution by natural selection could not have been built into the game, for example using the genetic algorithm method, a biomimetic form of computing that has existed for well over three decades.

Holland, John H. 1975. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Indeed, it is easy to imagine a game that had the player shape evolution by adjusting the natural environment of the world, for example modeling allopatric speciation - the separation of one species into two facilitated by limited gene flow between two areas and somewhat different environments in those locations - by setting up distinct regions and constricting movement between them.

Mayr, Ernst. 1963. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Mayr, Ernst. 1976. Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

For later stages of the game, the genetic algorithms could be treated as a multi-agent system, for example in modeling the emotive and religious social behavior of the tribal and civilization stages.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2006. God from the Machine: Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition. Walnut Grove, CA: AltaMira.

It is unclear whether a game genuinely based on evolution by natural selection from random variation could become popular. H. Porter Abbott argues that human thought organizes things in terms of narratives - stories in which protagonists face obstacles and take actions in pursuit of goals - and the scientific theory of evolution cannot compete with religious stories because it is unnarratable.

Abbott, H. Porter. 2003. "Unnarratable Knowledge: The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection," pp. 143–162. in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Like how in the Bible, God created Heaven and Earth, Will Wright's "god games" assume teleology, the notion that events have purposes.

The ethology of communication in the creature phase of the game places great emphasis on chemical communication by means of a pheromone, as the player's character turns its hind end toward another creature it wants as a friend, and emits an odor in its direction. Examples in nature of this form of chemical communication among higher animals usually take place between members of the same species, but Spore shows it taking place across species, as well as during mating rituals. Indeed, Spore's separate nests, tribes and cities are different species incapable of interbreeding.

In both the tribal and civilization stages of the game, relations between the player's group and other groups are negotiated economically, militarily, or through emotional and expressive appeals. In fact, the primary way that the human species developed ever larger social groups, from the earliest tribal stage at least through the kingship system that has lasted in some parts of the world even until today, has been through family kinship. Spore shows no appreciation for the complex kinship structures so important in social anthropology, as for example analyzed in The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.

The player can begin the process of building an alliance with another group by bringing it gifts, and this reflects the importance of a gift economy emphasized by classical anthropologists.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.

Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift. New York: Norton.

This is not incompatible with building larger societies via kinship structures, and Lévi-Strauss pointed out that exogamy - marriage outside the group functioning to link groups - could be conceptualized as the exchange of gifts that took the form of brides. However, gift exchange seems quite secondary to biological kinship in the development of human societies, perhaps playing a greater role when really large societies came to rely more heavily upon fictive kinship, such as the king being considered the father of all. In modern societies, economic market exchange plays an especially great role and has implications for all other forms of exchange, but kinship and exchange carried out inside kin groups were more significant in earlier states of human development, and are ignored by Spore.

Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Blau, Peter. 1964. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: Wiley.

In the civilization stage of the game, one of the ways a player may conquer another city is through religious conversion, and attempts are more likely to succeed if the inhabitants of the city are unhappy. Indeed, one subtle tactic is to squeeze off the economic flow into that city, thereby stressing the population, then bombard it with religious propaganda. This reflects the common finding in the sociology of religion that intense religious appeals work best with deprived populations, who turn to religion either because they have no alternative course in their desperate situation, or because religion is fundamentally a compensator against the inescapable deprivations of human life.

Pope, Liston. 1942. Millhands and Preachers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Cohn, Norman. 1961. The Pursuit of the Millennium. New York: Harper.

Smelser, Neil J. 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press.

Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. 1987. A Theory of Religion. New York: Toronto/Lang.

However, there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of so-called "disembodied appeals" - religious messages transmitted impersonally - and religious conversion almost always operates by means of pre-existing social bonds, spreading via social influence through the network of friends and family of people who are already devout members.

Shupe, Anson D. 1976. "'Disembodied Access' and Technological Constraints on Organizational Development," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 15:177-185.

Lofland, John, and Rodney Stark. 1965. "Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective," American Sociological Review 30:862-875.

Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. 1980. "Networks of Faith," American Journal of Sociology 86:1376-1395.

With respect to social solidarity, religion has generally been regarded as a mechanism for sustaining the unity of a group that already exists, rather than being a really effective means for expanding the scope of a social group.

Durkheim, Emile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin.

Clearly the grade for Evolution is F, especially so because the game's publicity exploits the cultural prominence of the theory of evolution by natural selection from random variation, but the game itself contradicts about every principle of real biological evolution.

Having edited an encyclopedia of human-computer interaction (HCI), I feel I should give the game a grade for HCI: C-. While some features of the game are very attractive, at least to some gamers, as a whole it is a mass of contradictions. I can hardly do better than to quote the review by Gary Hodges in The Village Voice:

"You might imagine there's some consistent, central gameplay conceit that binds the experience together; in fact there isn't. Each stage confronts the player with new rules, new objectives, and new concerns. The gameplay, though, is old—really old, as in cribbed. The Cell stage is virtually identical to flOw or Feeding Frenzy; the Tribe stage is a rudimentary real-time strategy game a'la Command & Conquer. Most mind-boggling is the "Civilization" stage, so similar to the Civilization series of games you'd think it was automatic grounds for a lawsuit (assuming you had the cojones to sue Electronic Arts). With this in mind, Spore looks less like a revolution than a compilation of five relatively shallow games linked by the ability to customize your character's appearance in each. Which it is.

"After the strangely hurried pace of the first four stages, the Space stage (see 1990's Star Control) brings Spore to a screeching halt, forcing the completion of endless fetch-quests while harassed by near-constant nuisance attacks from unfriendly extraterrestrials – something that severely dampens the wonder of being able to pull back, Powers of Ten-style, from a lone citizen on your home planet to a view of the entire Milky Way galaxy. Moments like that give you glimpses of what Wright had in mind when playing Spore… and then you go back to delivering cargo from planet A to planet B."

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-17/screens/alas-spore-isn-t-the-leap-you-ve-been-led-to-believe/

How Could Spore Be Improved?

Every potential change in Spore would have costs, and the main one would be lengthening the time to complete each of the phases. Apparently, the Spore developers wanted to reach a large audience, including many people who would be only casual players, but let's imagine a Spore II with a sufficiently enthusiastic audience to devote time comparable to the 400 or so hours required to reach the top level of World of Warcraft.

This would require a different pricing plan. A short game for a wide audience is simply sold in stores for a set price, whereas a long-duration virtual world typically involves a long-duration subscription (e.g. maximum $15 a month for World of Warcraft with discounts for multi-month payment) or the purchase of in-world currency as is the case for Second Life or Entropia. One reason people are mistaken to believe that World of Warcraft is a children's game (players tend in fact to be adults), is that children's games are generally bought for a set price by their parents, or out of allowances that do not permit future spending commitments. This is not to say that pricing defines Spore as a children's game, because most console games (Playstation, XBox, Wii) are purchased at a store, but the pricing system is compatible with parents buying it for their kids.

Some of the human-computer interaction (HCI) problems could be handled by allowing the user to customize the graphic user interface much more than is possible now. As a veteran gamer, I would like to be able to hide selectively different parts of the interface that did not give me information I needed right at the moment, and I would like to make most of the information display much smaller. It takes time to learn the right way to customize a particular interface, and lengthening the gameplay would place a higher priority on having the interface just right for each phase.

Each phase has a different interface, and one reason for lengthening the time in each phase is to give the user more time to learn how to use it. One good plan for Spore II would be to have significant transitional experiences in which the creatures evolved in some interesting way, for example from tribal to civilization in which they would develop written legal codes, bureaucracies, formal education of the upper classes, and indeed well-defined social strata. This could be done in 5-hour "instances," sub worlds that temporarily narrowed the range of choices and challenges to accomplish particular goals. These instances could use an interface intermediate between the earlier and later phases, or in some way morph the interface as the user progressed over the 5 hours.

The major change needed in the tribal stage is the introduction of family relationships - kinship is the fundamental fact of cultural anthropology, and without kinship you don't have social structure at the tribal phase, nor indeed do you have culture. This would imply greater freedom to switch back and forth among various avatars, alternately playing different roles in the family, or much more sophisticated behavior by the non-player characters (NPCs) requiring a degree of artificial intelligence. OR, and this is the really crucial design decision, going to full multiplayer mode requiring players to cooperate in families. Adding kinship would also be required to retrofit real evolution by natural selection from random variation in the creature phase, whether or not Spore II were massively multiplayer.

An otherwise laudatory first review on the G4 cable TV channel complained that the alliances a player develops during the tribal and civilization phases do not persist into the next phase. Again, a longer duration game would allow real building of society on the basis of earlier stages, rather than merely stringing together separate games as is the case now.

Related to this is the unrealistic fact that the separate nests and villages of the creature and tribal phases are really separate species. This may allow for a variety of "cute" creatures - although I must admit that like many other avid gamers I loathe cuteness - but it prevents the intermarriage between social groups that is fundamental to social structure at the real tribal phase of human development, on which the less familial structure of industrial societies is based. It would not be difficult to make at least some of the other nests be the same species and add exogamy, the requirement to mate outside your own nest.

I found it difficult to do the space phase when I saw how unrealistic the planets were - like those in the children's book The Little Prince. Of course, science fiction generally ignores some of the harsh realities of the cosmos, such as the mass ratios required for rocket transport, the vast distances that must be traversed, and the near-impossibility of terraforming other planets to make them habitable. For example, the TIE fighters in Star Wars zoom around at high acceleration, but "TIE" stands for Twin Ion Engine, and ion engines (while efficient) produce miniscule thrusts and thus almost imperceptible accelerations and no ability to launch against a gravity field. So, it might be unfair to expect Spore to use correct physics and astrophysics, when other games and science fiction virtual worlds do not. But, still, I wish they would.

Think about how strange real small planets would actually be. To hold their atmospheres, they would need huge gravity, perhaps possible only in a universe where the gravitational constant was much higher. In such a universe, the Big Bang might collapse quickly upon itself, precluding biological evolution! Perhaps more interesting, if Spore II had small planets with high gravitational constant, then small objects would powerfully attract each other, so your spaceship would naturally bang into your enemy's, probably annihilating both!

A excellent example of a space-oriented online virtual world is Tabula Rasa. It does not attempt to explain how we could technologically fly to planets around distant stars, but it does a good job of depicting natural environments of two alien planets, along with their life forms and very different intelligent natives, in the context of a reasonably coherent narrative.

More important from the standpoint of the social sciences, Tabula Rasa explains the motivations that could drive us - or other intelligent species - to undertake interstellar travel. One is simply that an alien species has destroyed human life on Earth, and we have become exiles. Another is the story of the Cormans, a utopian movement that wanted to revolutionize Earth society but wound up fleeing to one of the planets when that proved impossible, prior to the alien attack. Another is the Brann species who succeeded in creating a utopia on their home planet, which required them to exile criminals to another world, presumably because simply killing them would not be humane. Another is the Foreans whose technology unintentionally destroyed the environment of their home world, and who became devout environmentalists once they migrated to a new world. Another is the Bane, who employ superior technology to destroy other intelligent species because their lust for conquest drives them ever onward in an orgy of murder. Finally, the wise Eloh voyaged across the stars to share with other species their knowledge of the Logos principles that are the basis of existence and give the possessor great powers for good, but only if guided by wisdom. This catalog of motivations for space exploration is substantively very important, because our own civilization seems to lack any drive to transcend its current limitations, and today's real-world space program lacks focus, support, and ultimate purpose.

This raises the question of how Spore relates to morality and transcendence. It does seem to teach a few lessons about cooperation and making friends, that may be valuable for children. It does not promote real appreciation for science.

Tabula Rasa, in contrast, is part of a social movement. Indeed, many of the virtual worlds are today's analogues for the utopian experiments of the 1960s - whether communal or artistic. Both Tabula Rasa and World of Warcraft support environmentalism, for example. Tabula Rasa notably encourages real space exploration.

At the very moment I write this, my Tabula Rasa avatar is on the International Space Station. Really! Richard Garriott, creator of Tabula Rasa and key innovator in massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs, he coined the term, for better or worse!), including the pioneering Ultima Online and more recently Lineage which is second most popular today after World of Warcraft. The son of Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard Garriott always wanted to travel in space, and he paid a reported $35 million to fly to the space station, carrying a memory unit holding all the Tabula Rasa avatars plus the genetic codes of several people and messages to the future written by thousands.

So, despite all my suggestions for how to improve Spore, my fundamental suggestion is: forget it! Instead, subscribe to Tabula Rasa, and encourage the development of other, future virtual worlds that promote real science, stimulate real scientific and technological progress, and strengthen the current weak social movement to transcend the harsh limitations of the current real world.