Spore (2008 Video Game) - Reception - Scientific Accuracy

Scientific Accuracy

The educational community has shown some interest in using Spore to teach students about evolution and biology. However, the game's player-driven evolution mechanism differs from real world evolution in some key ways:

• The different species that appear in Spore each have different ancestors, not shared ones, and the player's creature's "evolutionary" path is linear instead of branched: one species can only evolve into one other species, as opposed to into many related species.
• In Spore, evolution is teleological meaning the player's creature evolves along a path towards intelligence, instead of evolving solely in response to random genetic changes and pressure from its environment. In real world evolution, there are many possible evolutionary pathways and there is no endpoint except extinction.
• In the real world, an organism's environment shapes its evolution by allowing some individuals to reproduce more and causing other individuals to die. In Spore, the only things shaping the way the creatures change over time are game statistics and "whatever the player thinks looks cool."
• In Spore, creatures have to collect new parts from other creatures or from skeletal remains in order to evolve those parts themselves. In reality, this does not occur, although in some cases organisms can appropriate the genes of other species. Bacteria and viruses can transfer genes from one species of macroscopic organism to another. However, this transfer is limited to single or occasionally multiple alleles; it never involves complex organs like mouths or limbs, as in Spore.

In October 2008, John Bohannon of Science magazine assembled a team to review the game's portrayal of evolution and other scientific concepts. Evolutionary biologists T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph and Niles Elredge of the American Museum of Natural History reviewed the Cell and Creature stages. William Sims Bainbridge, a sociologist from the U.S. National Science Foundation, reviewed the Tribe and Civilization stages. NASA's Miles Smith reviewed the Space stage. The Science team evaluated Spore on twenty-two subjects. The game's grades ranged from a single A in galactic structure and a B+ in sociology to Fs in mutation, sexual selection, natural selection, genetics, and genetic drift. In addition, Yale evolutionary biologists Thomas Near and Thomas Prum found Spore fun to play and admire its ability to get people to think about evolutionary questions, but consider the game's evolutionary mechanism to be "severely messed up."

According to Seed magazine, the original concept for Spore was more scientifically accurate than the version that was eventually released. It included more realistic artwork for the single-celled organisms and a rejection of faster-than-light travel as impossible. However, these were removed to make the game more friendly to casual users. While Seed does not entirely reject Spore as a teaching tool, admiring its ability to show the user experimentation, observation, and scale, biological concepts did not fare so well:

The snag is that Spore didn't just jettison half its science — it replaced it with systems and ideas that run the risk of being actively misleading. Scientists brought in to evaluate the game for potential education projects recoiled as it became increasingly evident that the game broke many more scientific laws than it obeyed. Those unwilling to comment publicly speak privately of grave concerns about a game which seems to further the idea of intelligent design under the badge of science, and they bristle at its willingness to use words like "evolution" and "mutation" in entirely misleading ways.

Will Wright argues that developers "put the player in the role of an intelligent designer," because of the lack of emotional engagement of early prototype focusing on mutation. Intelligent design advocate Michael Behe of Lehigh University reviewed the game and said that Spore "has nothing to do with real science or real evolution — neither Darwinian nor intelligent design," contradicting the argument that the game promotes intelligent design over evolution.