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[Micro102]

what ever happened to the lawsuit? EA should be sued into bankruptcy.....everyone sue ESA so they hire 1000 lawyers

[Sordid]

Oh, oh, I just remembered something! That one Evolution Vs Intelligent Design discussion in Creative Projects a while back made me think over the Spore concept again. After looking at it for a short while, I realized what was wrong with the concept - it's not Evolution, it's Intelligent Design, more or less actually "playing God" as some were saying. EA labelling it as a "game of Evolution" is one big lie.

Well so is any claim about an "evolution game". Evolution = random mutation + natural selection. Spore allows you to influence the mutation, effectively turning the process into genetic engineering. Now there are other 'evolution' games where you can't influence the mutations, but you can influence the environment the creatures live in. But that's the same thing, then it's artificial selection rather than natural, so instead of evolution you get breeding. True evolution doesn't really leave much room for any kind of gameplay.

[Micro102]

its not evolution because you control them all, and because the mutations mean nothing, a human controlled small bird with a beak and 1 leg could kill a computer controlled 50 foot demon with claws.

and your mutations dont mean a thing after tribal phase (dont even think they mean a thing during it either) and after that it gets worse because now things are based on percentages, meaning 1 part will give your vehicle just as much ability as a vehicle with tons of design and work put into it

then space stage, o look how you make your ship  doesnt mean a thing now.

spore is not an evolution game its....i dont have a word for it

[Sean Mirrsen]

Its Intelligent Design. It looks and works like a god sim.

You can influence evolution through affecting the environment - that makes a game about evolution while keeping the evolution, the creatures adapt to whatever you put them through (or die). Spore has evolution in name only - you construct the creature to fit your needs.

They could have just as well made a MMORPG out of it, complete with level grinding. It'd at least be an original take on the concept then.

[Rhodan]

Spore is still about Evolution, it just doesn't do the evolving itself, it just tells us about it. Just like you can have a book about war and noone really dies while you read it.
The story in Spore is that of a little cell that works its way up through the food chain.  You happen to be able to make choices about what the cell ends up looking like and what kind of actions it takes, but the story behind it is still that of evolution.
A very linear story with only a few outcomes, but almost every game has only a few outcomes for its story.
The back of my Spore box has "Create, Explore, Evolve and Share" written on it, with a little explanation below each.
"Evolve" just says that you get to go through all phases of evolution.   The same phases most living things we've met so far are going through.

I wish there was some actual evolving in there, like perhaps other creatures adapting by themselves, but gameplay-wise evolution isn't very fun unless you add some Design.

[Micro102]

i wouldnt even call it intellegent design, nothing matters in it really. you cant make a wrong choice in developing your creatures and changing anything else has no value, the game will still be the same

[Sordid]

You can influence evolution through affecting the environment - that makes a game about evolution while keeping the evolution, the creatures adapt to whatever you put them through (or die).

Didn't I just explain why that's not evolution either?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Consider Majesty. It's a game where you can't directly command your subordinates, instead nudging them towards doing a task. Sure, you can't outright tell them to go disembowel that minotaur over there, but you can set them a prize and they'll eventually go for it - it doesn't make it less fun, it's just not as responsive.

There's a game out there called NERO. You have to teach a group of brain-impaired neural-learning robots to work as a team and kill stuff. They start from trying to run through walls (fruitlessly) and attempting to approach their target while running backwards (it's about that time you wish you could give them ass-mounted blasters), but eventually they "grow up" and evolve into badass killing machines. That's evolution of logic, you don't program them directly and yet you get a result. Starting to do it is tedious, but the end result will likely not be disappointing.

There's only one real problem with games about evolution - people think it's slow and uninteresting. True, it's slow and uninteresting - at the start. When you actually start getting results is when the work pays off. Us DF players can surely relate to that, seeing as we raise lowly peasants into dragon-punching legenaries on a regular basis.

Sordid, evolution is random mutation + natural selection. The creatures will keep randomly mutating and try to adapt to the world you affect. It's still evolution. You just replace the random natural factors with yourself. If a game - a real game - was made about it, you'd have limited resources and would gain them only when your creatures successfully increase their numbers. Making a game of evolution is possible, especially with the kind of demoscene technology Spore uses. It's just that it's too niche of a product to be feasible in our world.

[Sordid]

 

The creatures will keep randomly mutating and try to adapt to the world you affect. It's still evolution. You just replace the random natural factors with yourself.

For the second and last time, in so doing you turn evolution into artificial breeding. For evolution to be evolution you must not interfere on any level at all.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Oh, come on. Everyone's view on evolution should be considered. Have you considered the effects of whatever wiped out most of life on Earth some 65 billion years ago? Of course, any game with human interaction can be called "artificially manipulated". Except if you think about it, the creatures in the world don't know about it. Make this game, and put an RNG at its controls - you have a true evolution scenario. Put a human at the controls, and nothing changes, except the changes in nature that guide evolution now have a purpose. Call it artificial breeding if you like, but unless you're specifically mating different species to splice their genes, it's only guiding the evolution. Evolution, the process, still takes place. The creatures adapt to their surroundings. Evolution, the process that created life on Earth, happened without human interference, but it was still tampered with - we can't tell if it was by malign intent or cosmic chance, but stuff was falling onto the Earth for eons. Can you tell whether the brick that hit your car last week was deliberately dropped or happened to become loose due to an earthquake 20 years ago? You can't, but the effect is the same - you learned not to park your car under flimsy-looking brick archways.

[Rhodan]

If there's an ultimate, external goal, it's not evolution anymore.  It's just survival of the fittest.
Stuff happens all the time, and the stuff that manages to happen in increasing numbers happens more often and keeps on happening.  That's why the first self-replicating molecules were such a huge success.  Not because they were better, just because there were more of them.  They didn't want to survive or live, they didn't even know what that was, they just did because, well, they self-replicated all the time.  No one set any goal for them, they just happened.
Then after a while some of them replicated faster or with less resources than the others, and they happened to outlast them.  Then others began replicating by taking shortcuts and just assimilating other replicators.  It all just happened, because all the times it didn't happen weren't very noticeable.

Only a few centuries later they began to develop ways to evolve more efficiently, like sex and genes, but only because the ones that had those traits lasted longer.  The reason creatures want to live these days is because all the ones that didn't died.
That's when it gets interesting and you get dinosaurs and cells and cyborgs and monkeys.  Their goal in life is to survive as a species and as an individual, but this goal evolved along with them.  No one set this goal, and this goal is not a law inherent in the universe or even in Life.  It's a goal some things have set for themselves, because the ones that didn't died.

If you make the goal external, you don't have true evolution.

Whether some external force influences the creatures only matters if said force is from outside the universe itself, or is deliberately steering things.  Otherwise you could say the evolution of mice has been severely tampered with by cats.

[Note: I don't know anything about the actual timespan, so the centuries mentioned could be anything]

[G-Flex]

Evolution is still evolution even if the conditions are unnatural.

The only difference is that they're evolving to adapt to "artificial" situations instead of "natural" ones. Quite frankly, it doesn't matter which from the perspective of the organism itself. A pigeon flock doesn't give a shit if the bridge it's nesting in was built by humans, put there by God, or the result of natural geological processes.

Sure, you are GUIDING evolution by putting those things there, but it's STILL an evolutionary process. It gets a little hazier if you start actually cherry-picking which creatures live or die, because then the entire "survival of the fittest" aspect goes out the window and environment ceases to matter.

[Rhodan]

But if you're altering the environment, you're the one deciding who's fittest.
What's the difference with just picking the ones you like most?

Anyways, if I go outside and selectively breed some cows to give more milk, is that unnatural?  Sure, I influenced their species, but I myself am a naturally evolved creature.  Have lions selectively bred antelopes to be faster?
If someone from outside our universe, someone who is not affected by our universe's laws, makes alterations, then we have been tampered with.  Sure, this might already have happened, but that just means that during this period of interaction, we were not truly evolving.

[Sordid]

Oh, come on. Everyone's view on evolution should be considered.

No, only the scientific view of evolution should be considered.

Call it artificial breeding if you like, but unless you're specifically mating different species to splice their genes, it's only guiding the evolution.

Evolution is by definition unguided. That's the whole point.

But if you're altering the environment, you're the one deciding who's fittest.

Exactly.

Anyways, if I go outside and selectively breed some cows to give more milk, is that unnatural?  Sure, I influenced their species, but I myself am a naturally evolved creature.  Have lions selectively bred antelopes to be faster?

They did, but they weren't trying to. That's the difference there. There's no intent in evolution, no premeditation.

Evolution is still evolution even if the conditions are unnatural.

The only difference is that they're evolving to adapt to "artificial" situations instead of "natural" ones. Quite frankly, it doesn't matter which from the perspective of the organism itself. A pigeon flock doesn't give a shit if the bridge it's nesting in was built by humans, put there by God, or the result of natural geological processes.

Sure, you are GUIDING evolution by putting those things there, but it's STILL an evolutionary process. It gets a little hazier if you start actually cherry-picking which creatures live or die, because then the entire "survival of the fittest" aspect goes out the window and environment ceases to matter.

Not really. You didn't put the bridge there for pigeons to nest on, that's just a byproduct. You're not guiding evolution there so much as unwittingly nudging it in one direction or another. There is a difference there.

[Sean Mirrsen]

If you selectively breed cows to produce more milk, you can call it unnatural selection. Since humanity is in total control of cows, these special-bred cows will become the norm, and we will have witnessed an act of selection. It's unnatural, but whether or not it's evolution depends on the way you achieved the result. If you used genetic engineering, it's not evolution. If you selectively picked and bred specimens you know to posess the necessary genetic deviations, it's evolution.

There's nothing wrong, evolution-wise, with one species increasing the chance of two specimens of another species breeding due to some beneficial aspect of the specimens. Lions did it with their prey - only the fastest and smartest survived. You did it with cows - only those with the most milk were picked for breeding. As long as the process that alters the creatures is natural, evolution works. The lions had no intent on making the prey faster, but that's only because they have no method of hunt other than "chase and grab". If the only method to get milk was to "chase and grab" a cow, both we and cows would evolve speed. It might have been that way a few thousand years back, btw. Think of a group of ape-humans obtaining a pack of cows. They keep milking cows until they give no more milk, then kill them for meat. After some time of this, the percentage of cows with more milk would increase, because of evolution. Was there intent here? Nope, just surviving. But how are we different? You can say all you want that you breeding cows with more milk is pure intent - and yet if this intent serves no purpose, the cows will be killed all the same. Only if they are truly superior, they will survive and begin a new species of cow. That's survival of the fittest.