ABSTRACT
This chapter is about a game that isn’t finished yet. As I write, Maxis/ Electronic Arts’ Spore is reportedly “complete,” but is still being refined in testing stage, in preparation for its release in 2008. However, thousands of people around the world have seen previews of it in various forms, from trailers and screen shots on the web to personal demos by its creator, Will Wright, a charismatic star among game designers.1 Other celebrities, such as the actor Robin Williams and the experimental musician Brian Eno, have helped to demonstrate the game (Eno is composing its generative music soundtrack).2 It has been the subject of numerous articles and lectures and has won several key industry awards already, just based on the demos and videos and lectures and word of mouth. I’ve chosen to discuss Spore in advance because it makes such a compelling case of how a video game can change the conversation and influence the future of the form just through previews and advance press. In fact Spore’s pre-marketing-the unprecedented intensity of its preview representations, and the conceptual discussions and theorizing by Wright and others-mirrors the kind of evolutionary dominance that is the central theme of the game. Spore has claimed the competitive position of leader, as the “future of video games,” without anyone ever having played the game as a whole. As I researched this chapter and the months passed with delays in the release schedule (as I write, it’s slated for mid 2008), it became clear that I would not get to play Spore before the book was published; it also became clear that even in pre-game mode Spore was already dominating its niche in the media environment, modeling (in theory) a concept of gaming that was already having an influence on how people thought of the meaning of video games. So this chapter is about Spore’s “pre-game” stage, a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Though I base what follows on preview materials, and the final game may of course differ in crucial ways from what I’ve so far been led to expect (you who are reading this will know), my focus is precisely on what we are being led to expect from Spore in this pre-release stage, and that’s nothing less than a
theoretical model of one future for video games: as the generative output of an ongoing process of collaborative “editorial” world-building.
