Spore As An Educational Tool

Spore is a widely-popular game released in 2008, and many educators have considered using it as a method to teach their students about evolution.  However, this has caused some controversy as to how accurate the game is in comparison to the real-world scenario.  Video games are known for their inaccuracies, so is it a good thing to be showing theories that are skewed in favor of making a game playable?  Evolution is a multi-faceted theory that no one can duplicate precisely, but that does not stop people from finding new and sometimes accurate ways to demonstrate it.

Evolution has been a concept within video games for years.  In 1996, the games Pokémon Red andPokémon Green were released in Japan, and shortly afterwards took the video gaming world by storm.  Since then, they have been followed by three more generations of games, as well as numerous spinoffs.  This game was one of the first to feature the concept of evolution.  In this game, certain creatures could “evolve” once they met certain conditions, such as being exposed to a certain stone, being traded to a friend, leveling up, or increasing its beauty (Bulbagarden, 2009).  Obviously, this is not a true evolution because it occurs to one organism at a very rapid pace as opposed to happening gradually over many generations.  However, there are some similarities.  The evolution is triggered by certain stimuli, such as exposure to a type of stone.  One could argue that this is similar to how radiation can cause genetic mutations.  Another example is when a Pokémon levels up to a certain point.  In order for it to hold its own against other Pokémon of the same level, it needs to become more powerful, and thus evolves.  In some cases, unnecessary stats are lowered instead of increasing because they are not necessary, such as when the cocoon Metapod evolves into the butterfly Butterfree and has a lower defense stat as a result.  Butterfree are faster and have more attack power, thus they are able to defeat their enemies before taking too many hits, so defense is no longer needed.  Eevee is considered to be the most accurate in terms of evolution; it reacts to nine different stimuli and rearranges its cell structure accordingly to become one of seven forms (two of its evolutions have multiple ways of forming depending on which Pokémon game is being played) (Merrick, 2009).  Despite these similarities to evolution however, it is still happening to only one organism, and thus is a metamorphosis.  Despite these inaccuracies, teachers have been known to teach their students about evolution through examples with Pokémon (Kimberly, 2008).  Several other games have been produced as a result of the successful Pokémon franchise that has included the evolution aspect to some degree, such as Digimon.  In 2008, another evolution game, Spore, entered the market.

Spore was built off of several ideas.  Created by Maxis, the creator of The Sims and SimCity, it takes the ideas of creating characters and cities and applies it to biology.  The popularity of the Sim series and the complexity of Spore led it to be the most pirated game of 2008 (1.7 million downloads from BitTorrent alone) despite it being released so late in the year (SourceForge, 2008).  The popularity of the game caught people’s attention, including that of scientists who study evolution.  During the storyline, a meteorite smashes into the planet, and a small microbe is dislodged and begins to explore the waters.  As it grows and gains new parts, it travels to land, builds up a tribe, develops technology, takes over the world, and proceeds into outer space.

Despite criticism, Spore has its moments of biological and social accuracies.  According to most scientific theories, life did start in the water, and after billions of years proceeded towards land.  The differences between carnivores and herbivores are also fairly accurate in that it is difficult for an herbivore to eat meat or a carnivore to eat plants.  In the game, when an herbivore eats meat or a carnivore eats plants, they comically throw up.  However, in real life, there are always exceptions.  Hamsters, for example, are usually considered to be herbivores but will on occasion eat crickets or other small insects.  Cats are primarily carnivores, but they will eat grass to help their digestive system (PawsOnline, 2009).  Nesting and migratory patterns are fairly accurate because as a population grows it will need to expand its territory outside of one nest.  The ability to gain new parts, while unrealistic, demonstrates at least the player’s ability to adapt to the surroundings as more and more powerful beasts are created.  The idea of the tribal stage is also somewhat truthful, as the ability to create shelter would enable animals to survive, as would traveling in packs and hoarding food.  After the tribal stage, however, the game starts to become more and more inaccurate as it becomes more civilized (Maxis, 2008).

Spore may claim to be based on evolution in general, but the reality of it is that the game is based off of one specific evolutionary pattern: Homo sapiens.  Admittedly, we have never encountered another species that has become technologically advanced, and thus the game designers did not have much to base their game off of once they reached the point of civilization.  However, the following of the human evolution pattern begins almost immediately.  Who is to say that advanced forms of life can only live on land?  Dolphins and whales are prime examples of this; they have advanced forms of communication that is well-adapted for their water environment.  Nonetheless, once the organism becomes more advanced, it can no longer return to the water as it risks being eaten by a giant fish.  Eyes also are one of the most important parts to a species within the game; without eyes the creature cannot tell where something is even if it has a plethora of other parts that enable it to sense its surroundings.  Humans may rely on eyes as our primary sense, but not all animals do.  For example, hamsters cannot see very far and lack depth perception, but they can hear when there is danger nearby.  Once civilization starts, it is assumed that there can be only one “superior species”, much likeHomo sapiens were once the rest of the Homo genus was wiped out.  The idea of travel is also consistent with humans, starting by land, then by sea, and finally by air.  The methods of gaining other cities are also accurate: religious persuasion, riches, and military have all been steady influences on many of the world’s borders (Maxis, 2008).  These concepts are also demonstrated in the movieThe Planet of the Apes, in which the “intelligent” humans wipe themselves out, leaving behind only “dumb” humans who act like apes.  Meanwhile, apes continue to develop in intelligence and technology, but remain unchanged physically, and eventually take the place of humans as the most “superior” species.  Their technology is almost exactly the same as that of earlier humans, and they even speak and write in English as opposed to some other dialect that they would have created themselves (Wilson and Serling, 1968).  The Planet of the Apes is yet another demonstration of how humans create science fiction following only our own patterns instead of considering the plethora of other scientific patterns.

Spore, as previously mentioned, also contains several aspects that are most certainly not biologically accurate.  For starters, the player begins as a microscopic organism, assumed to be unicellular (hence “cell stage”), with one problem: the cell has eyes.  Eyes themselves consist of many cells, thus the organism could not be unicellular.  This contradicts the common theories on how life started, as it is generally accepted by the scientific community that life began on the unicellular level.  The organism grows massively as it eats, but never appears to gain more than one cell.  Its reproduction patterns also are inaccurate: most unicellular organisms are asexual.  Once the creature is ready to move to land, it spontaneously sprouts legs before even getting to shore, as well as moving directly from the microscopic scale to a very complex macroscopic organism.  Once again, the mating is inaccurate, as according to the game a funky dance can result in a small egg appearing and suddenly rapidly inflating without any physical contact with another species (Maxis, 2008).  This is understandable in order to keep the game at an E rating within the ESRB guidelines.  However, this can actually be explained in rare cases such as certain breeds of salamanders that are asexual but still require the opposite gender to cause the egg to begin developing.

The gaining of new body parts is also highly inaccurate.  In real life, an organism would develop parts according to mutations, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection.  In Spore, new body parts are unlocked by defeating or befriending certain animals, discovering meteorite chunks, or by examining dead bodies.  The latter is especially odd, as the idea of natural selection is supposed to select for traits that will help survival, however the parts that the creature gets are from another organism that did not survive.  The method of changing these body parts is also inaccurate; instead of developing them in response to the environment, they can be added at any time and the changes occur instantly.  This could be explained by a lot of freak mutations except for the fact that when the player’s creature is “reborn”, its entire species has already changed.  In the SimBio activity, this error also occurs in a similar way; the new mutation very quickly dominates the entire population instead of leaving some with the old trait remaining to gradually go extinct or mix with the new trait (SimBiotic Software, Inc., 2008).  In the tribal and later stages of Spore, this sudden gain is perfectly reasonable, as it is not body parts that are being gained, but technology that only requires a brain in order to learn how to operate it (Maxis, 2008).

Isolation is a factor that never plays a role in the game.  Despite the player’s creature’s tendency to undergo spontaneous mutation, all nests with that creature have the same mutation at the same time.  However, the separate nests never mutate by themselves, as shown in the SimBio activity, where it is demonstrated that separated populations will eventually develop separate characteristics (SimBiotic Software, Inc., 2008).  The only time that a creature that is of the same common ancestor of the player’s species looks different is during civilization stage, when each civilization has a distinct color marking that spontaneously changes when they become part of another civilization (Maxis, 2008).

One of the most common theories about evolution is that every living organism came from a common ancestor, spawned in the waters billions of years ago as a unicellular organism of basic structure.  Conversely, in Spore the player’s creature arrives on the planet via a meteorite and lands in an ocean filled with other organisms, all seemingly with different ancestors.  The player’s creature never does branch off into separate species, with the exception that it is possible during the tribal stage to encounter the same creature in its creature stage (Maxis, 2008).

The time scale of Spore is also skewed.  Much of life on Earth has been limited to unicellular organisms in the ocean, yet this only makes up a small portion of the timeline in Spore; in fact, assuming the player plays the storyline normally and does not dwell on a specific stage, the longest stage is the space stage, which humans have just reached after billions of years of evolution.  The time in the unicellular stage is necessary during evolution in order to develop the complexities necessary for multicellular life.  Again, this shortened cell stage could be explained by the meteorite origin, assuming that the cell had developed somewhere else in space previously, as well as being explained by the fact that if the cell stage was extremely long, the game would probably be a lot more boring (Maxis, 2008).

The space stage is probably the most skewed of all.  During the civilization stage, the most advanced flight technology that the creature has access to is a fairly primitive airplane.  Suddenly, when the creature’s civilization takes over the world, it has access to a manned spaceship that not only can make it to outer space as well as fly around on planets, but it can explore an entire galaxy (Maxis, 2008).  Using the human comparison, man has been flying manned missions to outer space since 1961 and lunar landings since 1969, but have yet to even travel outside of Earth’s orbit.  Theories have been thrown about on how to travel to other solar systems, but none have even come close to being put into operation yet.

One common bias that appears in most science fiction works is the assumption that all macroscopic life can be broken down to plant, animal, or fungus, and animals are the “most advanced”.  This plays true in Spore, as the player’s creature is most definitely an animal.  The game also plays with the stereotypes of animals, making most of them mammals—often considered to be the most advanced animal—with the occasional reptilian/amphibian trait and the rare insect part.  The only fish to appear is the giant one that eats the creature if it wanders out too far in the water.  Bird parts are available, such as feathers and wings, but they are only used for gliding, not flight.  Any thought about a new classification of organisms that are not plant, animal, or fungi that might be discovered on a different planet is nonexistent; every planet has animals as the dominant species.  In evolution from a common ancestor, the most advanced organisms are those that have survived, whereas the less advanced ones are those that became extinct.  Spore, on the other hand, states that the more stages a species has gone through (cell, creature, tribal, civilization, space), the more advanced it is (Maxis, 2008).  While this may be true on the technological level, it is not the case when evolution is concerned.

Another key component is that evolution appears to stop in Spore once the tribal stage begins, which is not the case in real life.  Using the human example, humans have continued to change throughout the centuries of existence at least as far as microevolution is concerned.  Humans have been growing taller on average, and vaccines have made humans more susceptible to disease since modern medicine can cure many things, thus allowing the “weaker” humans to survive.

Spore and other evolution-based games can be used as educational tools; however, it is important that the instructormakes clear what parts are scientific and where there are inaccuracies.  While evolution remains a theory and thus cannot be entirely replicated, there are several ways in which one can find ways to demonstrate this theory to the common audience, and Spore is one of those ways.  It may not be the most accurate method, but it can generate interest in the subject of evolution.  This interest could spawn new discoveries in the world of biology, which could lead to more games likeSpore being produced, thus creating a cycle.

Works Cited

1. Bulbagarden. "Evolution." 10 January 2009. Bulbapedia. 15 January 2009 <http:>.</http:>
2. Kimberly. "Pokémon in the Classroom." 2008. We All Live in a Pokémon World... 15 January 2009 <http:>.</http:>
3. Maxis. "Spore." September 2008.
4. Merrick, Joe. Serebii. 15 January 2009. 15 January 2009 <http:>.</http:>
5. PawsOnline. "Feline Grass-Eating." 2009. PawsOnline. 15th January 2009 <http:>.</http:>
6. Planet of the Apes. By Michael Wilson and Rod Serling. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Prods. Arthur P. Jacobs and Mort Abraham. Twentieth Century Fox, 1968.
7. SimBiotic Software, Inc. "SimBio Virtual Labs." 2008.
8. SourceForge. "Spore the Most Pirated Game of 2008." 06 December 2008. Slashdot. 15 January 2009 <http:>.</http:>