Spork - Staying In

Meet Hotlegs. He's a creature in the video game Spore. Why is he so important? Well I think he's great, but that's because I designed him. If you want you can design your own creatures when you play. Or you could use mine. Or you could use everybody else's. Sound confusing? I'll explain.

Cell stage: eat or be eaten!

The basic idea is to start at the dawn of life, as a blob swimming about in the primordial ooze. As your creature grows you unlock editors and can redesign it. Eventually your cutesy microbeing makes it onto land, and can sprout as many arms, legs, and heads as you like. After clawing a few more notches up the evolutionary ladder, you can form a tribe, then a city, and finally take your creations out into space and explore the galaxy. Along the way the game lets you edit virtually everything in your game world, from the buildings and vehicles of your cities to the spacecraft you fly, and even the national anthem of your civilisation.

The neat trick is that all the other content in the game, from alien species to neighbouring tribes, is seamlessly downloaded from the central database that other players have populated while playing their own games. The idea has caught the imagination of game players already. When a stand-alone copy of the game's creature editor was made available to the public recently, the public responded with a maniacal outburst of creativity and uploaded over two million creatures in the first few weeks. Since then the Sporepedia has swelled to over 30 million creations. So it would be fair to say that you're unlikely to ever see the same thing twice in a game of Spore.

The official Spore trailer gives a pretty good overview of the game

In fact, i'd recommend downloading the free Creature Creator yourself and having a play. It really is good fun. Part of the appeal is the ability to share your designs with others, and the online Sporepedia database can make fascinating browsing. Even the designers themselves have expressed surprise and admiration at just how clever and creative people have been. But at the end of the day, playing with the editor is just plain good fun.

That it's been so well received shouldn't be surprising. The game comes from the same people that brought us the mystifyingly enthralling time-sucker SimCity, and who went on to create one of the biggest games of all time: The Sims. One of the reasons The Sims became a world-beating ubersmash was that it gave the player enormous control over the game world. People loved to design houses and backstories for their Sims, and even used the game to make movies. Spore builds the lessons of this right into the game, and has spun out tools for connecting and sharing with other players, such as the aforementioned Sporepedia and a Facebook app.

Found cities! Conquer the world! Explore the galaxy!

Of course, all this unbridled sharing has come with a downside, and the game's handlers were very quick to pounce on an early outbreak of x-rated creatures in the Sporepedia. Anyone caught upload yet another penismonster will be given a severe slap on the hand. Luckily this was expected to happen, and the devs have sagely built content filtering tools into the game.

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