izigame.me

Spore: A beautiful, untimely video game that perfectly manifests an ethics of becoming --- that is to say, playing spore is to become worthy of one's fate. Allow me to explain. In the game of Spore, the player begins as an amorphous space goo with no meaningful characteristics. As the player progresses, they choose defining traits according to their play style and fate. How does one build their creature? With love, and compassion for the animal; but also with a sense of purpose. Spore encourages the player to choose adaptations with a mind towards the function of the appendage. For example, one may choose to modify the mouth of the creature for better biting. As the creature slowly develops through this process of evolution, they begin to manifest the decisions they made earlier in the game --- they become worthy of their fate. At the beginning of the game, it is not at all clear why the space blob decides to spare or destroy other creatures. This is the creature in its least ethically developed stage. As the creature progresses however, what it ought to do becomes obvious through its body. Should a creature spare or destroy another creature? Well, does it have level 4 bite, or dance? In this regard, the decisions that the player ought to make in the interest of their own power and duration become obvious as the game progresses.

The end of spore is a tragedy. It is the return to radical potential or possibility. In some sense, the last creature-man, the final form, is the closest to space goo of all the stages. At the end of the game is pointless, decadent, and filthy colonization and a desperate search through empty space for some kind of meaning, for anything at all. It comes in cryptic pieces of past civilizations and distant concurrent ones. The creature at the end of the game is lost and confused, a far cry from the one fighting for survival in Creature Mode or Tribal Mode. Even compared to Civilization Mode, the Space Mode creature's predominant new feature is despondent confusion.

This was the first video game I ever played at five years old. My father was gifted a hard copy when I was two or three, when it came out. I played it on a shitty, slow computer in my parents bedroom mostly by myself. On and off through my early childhood and teenage years I played this game, coming back to it after months or years of intermittently forgetting about it. Now, as a young adult, I've come back to this game. I purchased it for myself to play on my computer at college. This is one of the only games I've played that has simultaneously astonished me and allowed me to inject my imagination into it. This game is about creativity and its about history. So much of my history is wrapped up in it; but furthermore, the game invites you to experience history itself, by giving the player a multi-generational perspective that is nonetheless deeply emotionally invested. I said earlier that the game is untimely: what I meant by that is not that its eternal or that it doesn't feel dated, but that every time I play this game, it speaks to my current condition. The message of this game has not been trivialized by cliche or irrelevance --- it is a classic bildungsroman.

I doubt this review will encourage anyone on the fence to purchase this game. After all, the game is over ten years old, and my perspective on the game is deeply personal. However, I hope that this review will perhaps be seen by other fans of Spore, and provide them with a well-deserved affirmation that this game is a modern masterpiece.