"Habalo..." It's Sim-language for "Hello." A person creates a person to live in an artificial world, with an artificial job, doing artificial things (with built in masks to cover nekkidity.) Anyone old enough to remember Bonanza will shake their head and groan, not understanding the metaphysical needs behind being endlessly addicted to a game like The Sims. Honestly, it never really did anything for me, as I found it to be too restrictive. Why only simulate part of your life, when you can live your life to the fullest in the real world? Course, that is rhetorical. I fell much more in love with Spore, where I could build creatures from the cellular level. See my blogs: Spore Blog 1 and Spore Blog 2 for the reviews on that game. Actually, I'll wait while you read those, because they are central to my line of thought. Go ahead...
Anyway, if we go back to Genesis, to the sixth day, God created us in his own image. I wonder how far that goes, how exactly like God we actually are? And to a further extent, how much is God like us? (cue Joan Osborne). He must have known (actually He did know) that Adam would have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (and Eve, too), and thus become cast out. He must have known that our curiosity about everything would propel us to evolving into what we are today, and even farther. It seems ironic, but if you think it, God created us in His own image, but made us flawed. Of course, the reason being, since He made us with self-awareness and free will (in His image), we have the ability to freely err from perfection. If we didn't have this, and we stayed perfectly in Paradise this whole time, there wouldn't be anything for God to be proud of. He would have a whole army of Robots, without any thoughts of greatness or progression. It's simply not the way things go.
So, as we are created in God's image, we become ourselves, Creators. The basic drive for raising families, raising cats, building houses and writing books. The need to create is a powerful emotion, one that overshadows the Devil's need to destroy (but more on that later). We have the same basic desire to be proud of what we create, living or non living. Just as God would be proud of us.
It's this emotion that drives us, in our daily rituals at the computer, to devote so much time to the characters we have online. We build up an elf on World of Warcraft, level after level, adorning him or her with ornate armor, magnificent weapons, and adept skills, only to have it sit on some server for all eternity while we try out the latest edition of Everquest. It seems useless, that we would spend so much of our lives on creating a character that is not real, but as we slay the dragon in the deepest dungeon of WOW, we experience the pride that God would feel about His followers. It matters little how transitory the pride or the character is. It is, of course, a shadow of God's emotions, but, as Plato would point out, we are but shadows of the real thing.
Showing posts with label Spore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spore. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Spore Revisited: Why Can’t we all just Get Along?
In the beginning (what a way to start a review about being God), Spore was supposed to be the next big thing in video gaming, hyped to no end as it was the creation of the Sims creator. For what he was trying to create, would have been completely wonderful. The problem is, that as of this review, with the updates that I had, the game is flawed by certain necessary and predictable assumptions that the designers made about the people that would be playing it.
When I left off last time, I had just finished the Animal stage. The feeling of truly being a part of this species of animal, as if they had somehow come from some part of my subconscious, held through the Tribal stage as well. In this part, I had the ability to sing and dance my way through negotiating peace with the other tribes. I tried, at all times, to be friendly to those around me, killing only those who wouldn't listen to my songs or be impressed by the rain showers or fireworks I had. Oh, and the epic monster I killed at the end because I wanted to. :)
Once I got to the Civilization mode (which is basically exactly like Civilization IV), I loved the idea of creating my own buildings, making them as I would want them, from some vague architectural design known only to the beings I had created. But then, as I started interacting with the other cities (which were of the same civilization as me), I found that there was no way of interacting with them except to take them over. As a peaceful tribe with the ability to make it rain, the computer gave me, as my only recourse, the role of a religious authoritarian society. I had gone from peaceful negotiator to Iranian dictatorship, and I didn't like it.
The assumption that they made was that the people playing the game would feel more satisfied by destroying people or taking them over than they would co-existing in a mutual world. Trade, conversations, etc... all were impossible to do with the programming that the designers had made. Sure, there are ways you could become that, if you had done certain things earlier in the game, but living a peaceful existence, and knowing certain acts of magic or faith, does not necessarily make the desire to take over other places with that faith. Well, and this brings up a certain irony, that most Christian faiths throughout history have thought exactly that, that religion only is justified when it is spread to as many people as possible. This goes to my Libertarian ideas of religion, where my beliefs, my relationship with God is my own, and it is not my responsibility to spread those beliefs to other people. We each travel our own roads.
But I digress... So the designers made what would be a remarkable game into a clone of Civilization or Warcraft 3, both of which I've played and become bored with because it makes it so that the only way you can survive is by killing and taking over your enemies. There's no story involved. And I can't create my own story (or History, as it were.) On Spore, it was almost that way, but the designers of the game took that away from me when they closed the openness of the game at the Civilization level. Perhaps one day I will return to play it, to see what the Space level is like, but for right now, I want to play something else where I can determine my fate without the guidance of trigger-happy programmers. I've got my eye on Fable, which has been out for a while, but I now have a computer that will run it. I think I'll be playing that next, as well as Ricochet and Bejeweled 2 Deluxe just for mind-numbing repetitiveness and visual stimulation. :)
When I left off last time, I had just finished the Animal stage. The feeling of truly being a part of this species of animal, as if they had somehow come from some part of my subconscious, held through the Tribal stage as well. In this part, I had the ability to sing and dance my way through negotiating peace with the other tribes. I tried, at all times, to be friendly to those around me, killing only those who wouldn't listen to my songs or be impressed by the rain showers or fireworks I had. Oh, and the epic monster I killed at the end because I wanted to. :)
Once I got to the Civilization mode (which is basically exactly like Civilization IV), I loved the idea of creating my own buildings, making them as I would want them, from some vague architectural design known only to the beings I had created. But then, as I started interacting with the other cities (which were of the same civilization as me), I found that there was no way of interacting with them except to take them over. As a peaceful tribe with the ability to make it rain, the computer gave me, as my only recourse, the role of a religious authoritarian society. I had gone from peaceful negotiator to Iranian dictatorship, and I didn't like it.
The assumption that they made was that the people playing the game would feel more satisfied by destroying people or taking them over than they would co-existing in a mutual world. Trade, conversations, etc... all were impossible to do with the programming that the designers had made. Sure, there are ways you could become that, if you had done certain things earlier in the game, but living a peaceful existence, and knowing certain acts of magic or faith, does not necessarily make the desire to take over other places with that faith. Well, and this brings up a certain irony, that most Christian faiths throughout history have thought exactly that, that religion only is justified when it is spread to as many people as possible. This goes to my Libertarian ideas of religion, where my beliefs, my relationship with God is my own, and it is not my responsibility to spread those beliefs to other people. We each travel our own roads.
But I digress... So the designers made what would be a remarkable game into a clone of Civilization or Warcraft 3, both of which I've played and become bored with because it makes it so that the only way you can survive is by killing and taking over your enemies. There's no story involved. And I can't create my own story (or History, as it were.) On Spore, it was almost that way, but the designers of the game took that away from me when they closed the openness of the game at the Civilization level. Perhaps one day I will return to play it, to see what the Space level is like, but for right now, I want to play something else where I can determine my fate without the guidance of trigger-happy programmers. I've got my eye on Fable, which has been out for a while, but I now have a computer that will run it. I think I'll be playing that next, as well as Ricochet and Bejeweled 2 Deluxe just for mind-numbing repetitiveness and visual stimulation. :)
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