I'm on vacation this week, but before I left I wrote five brief essays considering the five stages of "Spore." Late Friday I interviewed "Spore' creator Will Wright and asked him to share his thoughts on why each stage is essential. You can find his thoughts, shared during a half-hour phone call, at the end of this essay. This first installment of the series covers the Cell Stage. The next four will be published Tuesday through Friday.
My Take:
Cell Stage, the first playable stage of "Spore," is arguably the game's most successful section. It appears to come close to achieving all imaginable possibilities for controlling the phase of life it depicts, in this case that being life that hadn't yet walked on land.
(Read on for the rest of my take and for Will Wright's.)
In Cell, we play as a primitive, unthinking species -- fighting, fleeing or mating. Physical improvement follows the mating. Every new generation of the player's species brings an advance based on what's been chewed on. All the eating generates DNA points and scheduled milestones allow players to advance to grander scales of tide-pool conflict. Enemy creatures that once were too big are now merely evenly matched opponents, and, later, smaller prey.
Since Cell is the starter level, it must be the one that sets the rules for the game, right? Using that logic, the key rule appears to be that the player's actions provide them the options to shape and empower their character. If I make my creature eat an electrified enemy, for example, I can make my creature spit electricity once I intelligently re-design it.
Specialized customization reveals specialized gameplay. The shape and power I give my character determines its next set of available actions. Such a feedback loop isn't that different from gaining experience points in "Mass Effect" or "Fallout" in order to issue statistical upgrades to personal qualities like strength, intelligence and better shields. The "Spore" difference is that all the attributes I grant my cell species are based on physical attributes. It doesn't just matter what abilities I've added but where I've placed them. Life will be different if the painful spikes I add to my creature are placed on its sides than if I place one at its rear. Even the limited sculpting options, which allow the player to determine how skinny or fat the creature will be at any point along its spine, can decide the difference between a creature that gets stuck on a plant while fleeing a predator or one that cleanly escapes. My actions, the character's looks, and the gameplay possibilities are all tightly connected.
The only option that isn't available in Cell stage is extinction. There are no evolutionary dead ends no matter what you create. "Spore" is telling us that, in this most primitive stage of life, wherever there's player will, there is a way to have a better, continued existence. Perhaps this is a game we cannot lose?
Will Wright's Take:
"The Cell Stage is really meant to be the tutorial going forward, where you first lean the concepts of eating and surviving and then going into an editor to design the next version. These are the fundamental concepts in 'Spore.' We wanted it to be very easy to get into and not [have] a lot of interface.
"The important thing ...is determining whether you eat plant material or meat, which determines whether you're going to be an herbivore, omnivore or carnivore. That actually has a pretty big impact on the Creature and Tribe stages.
"When you're playing the Cell Stage that's the primary thing you should be considering: Who do I want to be coming out of it?"
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Next: My take and Wright's take (including secret tips!) for Creature Stage. Check out the rest of the series here.
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