Head over to www.kirschenbauminterview.blogspot.com to check out my final project for the class.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
SPORE!
Could Spore be a more perfect game with which to end our course?
Doubtful.
Spore pushes the boundaries of a lot of the theories we've discussed so far. How about the admitted intertextuality of the game's many levels? Will Wright has compared each phase of the game to his "landmark" inspirations. The Cellular phase evokes images of "a fluid Pac-Man" as the player guides a small character eating dots in a 2-D environment. Spore Creature, a "first-person eater" has the player navigating a creature through a world of predators and prey fighting and eating for survival, compared by Wright to Diablo and the action-RPG's. Spore Tribal functions like a Real Time Strategy game, an animal version of Command and Conquer; Wright's own SimCity shows up as the player creates buildings and manages the beginnings of Spore Civilization, the world conquest game. Spore's space exploration phase, the broadest, most open, and most infinite phase, imitates god and space combat games.
Consider the 'T-shaped' structure of the game: linearly progressing from level to level until the sandbox level of interstellar space travel. On the superficial level, this combination of styles complicates the question of genre. How do we classify Spore, which has winning conditions for early levels, but no ending? Are we to conceive of Spore as a singular game, or as a network of interrelated games? Spore's player-controlled narrative beginning feeds into an open-ended gameplay universe. However, the emphasis does not appear to be concentrated on any one part.
One of the most impressive aspects of Spore is the in-game content generation system-- creatures, vehicles, buildings, and planets designed by players on in-game editors are distributed into player's games through a transparent content aggregation system. Paratextual elements which normally develop among niche fan communities are placed at the forefront of the game. But the interconnectivity of single players in Spore (called by Wright a "massively singleplayer online game") sets it apart from other games. The game not only aggregates user-generated content, but also learns and imitates the behaviors of all the players, offering players access to nearly infinite gaming possibilities, but not necessarily those possibilities delivered on the game disc.
Wright emphasizes the procedural nature of the game--establishing a set of encoded rules, the game reacts and responds to the inputs of the player producing unexpected and unpredictable results.
Of course, all this is based on the press and footage available on the internet. Even before the game has been released, it's reached legendary status. This unique fan culture around a text none have experienced first-hand presents a strange case of the paratextual fan network. That the game is built to maximize its contact with this fan-created culture promises that Spore could represent a move toward a reconceptualization of video games. Are we looking at video games 2.0?
Doubtful.
Spore pushes the boundaries of a lot of the theories we've discussed so far. How about the admitted intertextuality of the game's many levels? Will Wright has compared each phase of the game to his "landmark" inspirations. The Cellular phase evokes images of "a fluid Pac-Man" as the player guides a small character eating dots in a 2-D environment. Spore Creature, a "first-person eater" has the player navigating a creature through a world of predators and prey fighting and eating for survival, compared by Wright to Diablo and the action-RPG's. Spore Tribal functions like a Real Time Strategy game, an animal version of Command and Conquer; Wright's own SimCity shows up as the player creates buildings and manages the beginnings of Spore Civilization, the world conquest game. Spore's space exploration phase, the broadest, most open, and most infinite phase, imitates god and space combat games.
Consider the 'T-shaped' structure of the game: linearly progressing from level to level until the sandbox level of interstellar space travel. On the superficial level, this combination of styles complicates the question of genre. How do we classify Spore, which has winning conditions for early levels, but no ending? Are we to conceive of Spore as a singular game, or as a network of interrelated games? Spore's player-controlled narrative beginning feeds into an open-ended gameplay universe. However, the emphasis does not appear to be concentrated on any one part.
One of the most impressive aspects of Spore is the in-game content generation system-- creatures, vehicles, buildings, and planets designed by players on in-game editors are distributed into player's games through a transparent content aggregation system. Paratextual elements which normally develop among niche fan communities are placed at the forefront of the game. But the interconnectivity of single players in Spore (called by Wright a "massively singleplayer online game") sets it apart from other games. The game not only aggregates user-generated content, but also learns and imitates the behaviors of all the players, offering players access to nearly infinite gaming possibilities, but not necessarily those possibilities delivered on the game disc.
Wright emphasizes the procedural nature of the game--establishing a set of encoded rules, the game reacts and responds to the inputs of the player producing unexpected and unpredictable results.
Of course, all this is based on the press and footage available on the internet. Even before the game has been released, it's reached legendary status. This unique fan culture around a text none have experienced first-hand presents a strange case of the paratextual fan network. That the game is built to maximize its contact with this fan-created culture promises that Spore could represent a move toward a reconceptualization of video games. Are we looking at video games 2.0?
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