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 fourth installment of the series covers the Civilization Stage. The remaining Stage will be covered tomorrow.

My take:
The Civilization Stage is “Spore’s” deep inhaled breath. It’s a momentary constriction of the game before the vast widening of the last stage. It’s the least “Spore”-ish stage, going by the standards that have been defined by the three stages that preceded it.

This Civ game occurs across the entire planet upon which only a tiny section was seen in earlier stages. But despite this wider view, the scope is smaller. The existence of other species is at its least importance in this stage. The customization of player’s creations also has the least impact in this stage. The goal is to unify 10 cities all inhabited by the same player-created species to the single of cause of building a rocket that will leave the atmosphere.

What “Spore” loses in this stage in terms of being “Spore”-like, it gains by being more of a strategically complex game. Bringing other cities around to the player’s side can involve war, which requires the construction and placement of proper land, sea and air vehicles. It can involve diplomacy. It can involve flexing economic advantage. The speed of a boat-based strategy versus that of an air approach has to be taken into account. The power of financial pressure versus that of bombs needs to be registered. An awareness of what the other cities are doing to each other and how that creates opportunities for the player matters. (What doesn’t matter, except in terms of visual novelty, is what the many types of vehicles and buildings that the player is asked to design in this stage look like.)

Civilization Stage presents a notion to the player that “Spore” may, in fact, be more of a gamer’s game than it first appeared. Of course, some players might be too distracted from all the gameplay to notice. The number of building and vehicle editors suddenly available is striking, as is the discovery that such creations don’t necessarily need to be built, because they can just as easily be snagged from a Sporepedia menu full of other player’s cool stuff. Re-paint someone else’s excellent airplane in the color scheme of one’s own creature with the click of a single, cleverly programmed button.

By the end of Civilization the game is science-fiction. It is no longer an exploration of how life may have advanced in the past. The game now presents the familiar fantasy (or nightmare) of homogenous society under a One World Government launching into the future. It’s time to go to space.

Will Wright’s Take:
“Civ Stage is where you really go into technology. For the first time these characters are driving around in little ships or airplanes. The economic strategy gets more pronounced. You could do simple trading in the Tribe stage, but now you have [more] abilities if you build an economic city. Economic is actually a really interesting strategy.

“At the beginning of the stage, a lot of people don’t realize, there are still tribes on the planet. You can click or send vehicles to these tribes and each is like a little piñata: you might get a free vehicle, you might get some money. You can get vehicles not of your type if you go interact with these tribes. So you might start with a military city, but go contact these tribes and [your vehicle] might turn into an economic vehicle. You still have minor abilities for different strategies than what you had with your starting city. So it’s really useful to go investigate these tribes.”

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Next: My take and Wright’s take on the Space Stage. For the rest of the series, click here.