However, what it is not is a game about evolution. In fact I would say that it's actually a very good advert for the Intelligent Design brigade: the way you 'evolve' your creature is by choosing body parts from a palette of available things (mouths, arms/legs, weapons, etc) to suit the surroundings you find yourself in; your behaviour sets your creature type (herbivore/carnivore, aggressive/friendly, etc.) which in turn partially determines the other creatures the software has you interact with, but basically you are the intelligent designer and there's no kind of random chance involved at all. This hasn't stopped at least one kook writing an amusingly frothy blog about it, while almost entirely missing the point (and getting sidetracked by all the X-rated, and now presumably banned, creatures that people have been creating). None of this detracts from the game itself, which is very good, but the publicity that EA have generated around the fact that the game somehow involves evolution is either suspect marketing or just plain bad science.
My question for the real scientists here is: could you design a game that did involve what we think of as evolution? What would the goal be, and how would the user affect the game? Could you make it fun? Spore already has the landscape generation and EA have huge corpus of other creatures available for use.
Endnotes:
The Wikipedia article on the development of Spore is fascinating, particularly the section on procedural generation and the papers linked to from the end (who knew computer graphics involved so much bastard-hard calculus these days...); there are also early Spore prototypes available for download that are interesting in this regard. EA currently have 20344133 different user-created Spore creatures and other objects, from a couple of months of the Creature Creator prototype and a fortnight of the game being available. You can load creatures from the website by downloading the .PNG picture file; the procedural data for the creature itself is steganographically encoded in the top bit of the alpha channel.
12 comments:
Firstly, well done for breaking the taboo on posting if you aren't Alec/Soph/Liam.
I have no time for games, nowadays, sadly. I hope to change this, but unlikely this side of Christmas...
Evolution as a game. Hmmm. Well, the tradition of 'God' games presupposes the existence of a creator. But you could conceivably avoid the whole intelligent design stuff by allowing yourself to set the starting conditions and see what evolves? You could limit yourself to interventions at a quantum randomness scale? Erm... you could set the starting states then give your creations a habit of evolving towards sentience and free will and see how long it takes for them to break stuff?
Presumably you would also have to decide what to do if they all start denying you exist. If you make your existence too explicit presumably its game over as you disappear in a
puff of logic (cf Adams, D.).
Oh, and I, uh, didn't understand your last sentence. Stega means roof, I think. Roof pictures?
Yes, I was thinking more about setting up starting conditions (planet type, landscape, other creatures) and then seeing what would evolve. But it's less of a 'game' than a curiosity that way, I suppose.
Sorry. 'Steganography' is hiding secret information in pictures; secret messages, watermarks, or data in side-channels (as in this case). The top bit of the alpha channel is seen as noise in this case, so for every 8 bytes in the picture data you get one byte of creature data; given that it only take about 8k to define the creature procedurally this is plenty.
Ahh yes. Stegos is roof. Hence 'covered lizard' - stegosaurus. So this is covered/concealed writing.
I like. So unlike a code, where you know it's amessage and you can;t read it, this is where you don;t even know it's a message.
Particularly like the technique of Blog-Steganography.
(wikipædia...) Messages are fractionalyzed and the (encrypted) pieces are added as comments of orphaned web-logs (or pin boards on social network platforms). In this case the selection of blogs is the symmetric key that sender and recipient are using. The carrier of the hidden message is the whole blogosphere.
That's
Fun!
agree.
My question for the real scientists here is: could you design a game that did involve what we think of as evolution? What would the goal be, and how would the user affect the game?
No: games are inherently teleological and involve an intelligent player. The best you could do would be a sort of "set it up and leave it running" effort as m'colleague suggests, but that's not so much a game as a screen saver.
You could have a game like Pandemic where the objective was to battle against an evolving threat - either a disease or an alien of some sort - which reacted to your countermeasures. Isn't there something in Star Trek that does this? The Borg?
Agreed - and do you think that teleologicalness (teleologic?) is part of what makes people misunderstand evolution? Both our natural tendency to think teleologically, and the ease of setting that as a task or question.
I remember (well-meaning) teachers or lecturers, initiating discussions like, 'The stomach contents are strongly acidic as they enter the duodenum. If you ran the digestive system, what would you do to counter this so that different enzymes could start to work?'. Or explaining features with 'The plant wants to get as much sunlight as possible...'
This naturally makes people start to think in terms of design. Is part of the reason ID is so seductive that people find it very, very hard to get their heads round what natural selection really means?
Of course... this is the point Dawkins was trying to address in The Blind Watchmaker, that living things have the very strong appearance of being designed for a function, and thus it's very tempting to assume a designer.
Teleology, incidentally, is the noun you are looking for. From the Greek telos, a goal. From which we also get telic, an adjective meaning "purposeful, with a clear objective in view".
The choice of "TELIC" as the codename for British participation in Iraq thus caused a great deal of "huh" among the more literate members of HM Armed Forces...
"Teleology, incidentally, is the noun you are looking for."
I guess you're right, it's just that I was wanting something that implied a bias towards teleology, rather than just happening to do it.
And agreed about Dawkins, but it's not just the way things appear to be designed, it's that the language people (teachers) often use unconsciously(?) misleads us in the way we think about it.
Incidentally - this 'huh' response - that was from you and exactly home many other ancient greek speaking members of HM armed forces?;-)
Well, pretty much just me, actually.
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