One of the weirdest and most difficult things in video gaming is classification of a game. While it might seem silly and arbitrary (and it is in the long run) sometimes a game comes along that simple can't be described on paper.
After all, games pop up all the time that defy categorization; one of the best examples was released just this week, Grand Theft Auto IV. Since Grand Theft Auto III came out, so many labels could apply - third person shooter, action game, racing game, role-playing game - that a whole new subgenre was invented for it, the free-form action game.
Magazines and online publications don’t find categorization trivial, however. Not only do they need organization, but they need simple genres for the all-important, revenue-making yearly awards they hand out; When Grand Theft Auto III is nominated for something, it’s always been given the genre award of Best Action Game.
It’s not so easy with Spore, Will Wright’s magnus opus SimEverything game.
Well, most websites usually classify a Sim game as a strategy game, since there’s always strategy involved, and “simulation” in games basically means vehicular stuff like Flight Simulator, air combat, tank combat, you name it. The Sims, for instance, won Best Strategy Game of the Year 2000 from a few sites including then-Computer Gaming World. So it would be logical to assume Spore is a strategy game, right?
Not so fast.
The Wikipedia entry for Spore states:
At first glance, Spore is a teleological evolution game, or a god game. The player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal.
Spore is obviously a god game, a subgenre of strategy simulations, or what Wikipedia fussily states as a “construction and management simulation”. You know, the genre SimCity and Caesar belong to. However, that in itself belongs to the simulation genre as defined by Wikipedia, under which what magazines call simulations are called “vehicular simulation” - which itself is a major genre separate from simulations, as magazines would have it.
Getting dizzy yet?
Now, it would be right and proper to consider Spore a god game then, because, hey, you’re a god, and Spore acts like an intelligent design game, since you’re making all the decisions and overriding evolution - sorta. I say “sorta” because you’ll pay the price if your not-so-intelligent design gets your creature extinct. So there we have it - Spore is a god game.
Except…
Except Spore also has several phases of gameplay, all of which have their own style of play. The tide pool phase has been described by Will Wright as Pac-Man, while other publications have noted a similarity in its gameplay to flOw. Indeed, the god gaming aspects remain, since you pick and choose your microbe’s parts, but the gameplay itself is basically eat-or-be-eaten.
The creature phase has been described as Diablo by Wright, but like its Nintendo DS cousin, it seems to be a life simulation as well, in which you take the place of a creature and help it live its life. So, not only are you God, changing your creatures parts and guiding its destiny, you’re Adam, too. If you really want to get philosophical, just think that God created Man in his own image, so now you have an ouroboros loop in which you’re playing a game as God creating a sapient species in turn being God creating that sapient species which in turn is being God, ad infinitum. So far, we have god game, arcade game, life simulation, and action RPG.
But wait! There’s more.
The tribal phase now turns into what Wright calls Populous, the first god game ever made, created by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog development company. That in turn leads to the civilization phase, which was described as SimCity, Risk, and Civilization - all maintaining the aforementioned god game elements. That all leads up to the space phase.
Here, things get really crazy.
Now, the space phase has been described as SimEarth, Destroy All Humans!, Master of Orion and even Space Invaders when your UFO decides to shoot at alien cities. Already you have a variety of disparate genres in one phase, and it doesn’t end there, because in the space phase, you have the software toy, better known as the sandbox mode.
The sandbox mode basically plops your UFO in the middle of the great big galaxy and says, “Hey, go ahead and do whatever you like! Go crazy! Drop monoliths on alien planets, and see what happens when they get civilized! Crossbreed alien species! Drop cows on airless moons and watch them pop! Create planets! Destroy planets!” Obviously, you’re in the role of God, but there’s many gods out there, since everything you do in all of the other phases are uploaded and distributed to everyone else’s computer - an asynchronous multiplayer in which your galaxy is an alternate reality version of the same galaxy everyone else has. Where you might have blown up some player’s planet, another may have conquered it, while another has made peace and allied themselves with it.
If you want to tally it up, Spore is a god game / strategy sim / life sim / economic sim / action / arcade / roleplaying game / real-time strategy / grand strategy game. But that wouldn’t fit on the side of a box, so I contacted Maxis VP Patrick Buechner, and basically asked, “What’s the deal? What is Spore?”
Buechner prefaced his response, “It’s difficult to classify Spore into any one traditional game category.” (No kidding, guy!) He went on to say that it is a god game with basic strategy sim elements, and that “each of the evolutionary levels has a different control dynamic.” Patrick restated some of what has already been discussed, that each phase “runs the gamut from arcade action at Cell, avatar controls at Creature, The Sims-like controls at Tribe, RTS at Civilization and back to avatar at Space”, and that ”Will sums up the whole content exchange and discovery experience as Massively Single Player.”
So we’re back to the basics: Spore is a god game. But, Spore seems like so much more. I’ve found from cruising all of the content that’s been released for public dissemination like Wright’s demonstration videos, the fan forums, the previews and articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and calling it just a god game seems… limiting. Like Grand Theft Auto III and IV, it seems Spore is a category all unto itself - the ultimate god game. Not because it puts you in the role of a diety, but because it allows you to create your own experience - a software toy with rules and game mechanics.
Perhaps SimMirror would be a more accurate title, in a way, because Spore is a reflection of the person who plays it. Gamers will create Spore in their own image.
