Kotaku has a fascinating article about the link between Montessori education, Will Wright, and Wright’s games (the Sims and SimCity franchises, and Spore). Will Wright attended Montessori school when he was a kid, and the article features several quotes from him where he draws the connection between his early education and his game design ethic.
The article is interesting and thoroughly researched, but for me the biggest take-away point was all the ways in which Spore falls flat. Wright describes his ideal game as an infinite playground where players, in interacting with the game, learn about the nature of life. He mentions that the failure space is often the most fascinating part of his games. (As opposed to a traditional game, where death just sends you back to the beginning of the level, and the player grinds through endlessly until they finally break through to the next level. Which is just the same as the first.)
Spore fails dramatically in both of these areas, and I think that’s why it’s been so poorly received by so many people who form the Sims’ core audience. As for the failure space - when your Spore creature dies, it dies, and you start all over again. I find it puzzling that Spore does the one thing that Wright identifies as “unsatisfying gameplay.”
As for the infinite playground aspect, Spore is nothing like that. Even though it has levels that range from “primordial soup” to “vast universe,” the world outside your playing zone is essentially empty.
At one point in the Tribal level, I zoomed the camera all the way around the entire world and found… nothing. Until I finally looped the planet and returned to my own little guys, of course. And I was unable to colonize those remote areas, but was stuck at the base that the game had generated for me when I graduated to that level.
The same thing happened in the Creature level. When I sent my Creatures to venture off the map, they found endless terrain which was empty of everything but grass and trees. Could I start a base out there? No. Once I fell off the migration path, I had to either return to it or starve to death.
Your activities are similarly limited. In the Tribal stage, you can either charm your neighbors or kill them. There is no live and let live, no way to assert a diplomatic truce, or move far enough away that your neighbors won’t bother you. And the only way to get “stuff” is to either kill or charm your neighbors, so unless you engage in either of those two activities, you’re stuck with the same single digeridoo hut.
With all of the levels, once you have reached stasis by either conquering or charming the required number of enemies, the game hustles you along to the next level. I found this evolutionary pressure to be one of the most frustrating parts of the game. I had been thinking that “now I’ve gotten everyone under control, I can have a bit of fun.” But the game’s swizzle stick clock, spinning and flashing and giving you a forward-pointing arrow that you can’t overlook, seriously distracts from any fun you might have once you’ve “won” the level.
It occurs to me that this frustrating experience may indeed be the lesson that Wright is trying to teach us. That life is an endless loop of either fighting or charming, endlessly repeated, with no time to sit back and just have fun.
Whoops, I just depressed myself.