Last week my wife and I attended a Long Now seminar that featured Will Wright, creator of the Sims, and musician and artist Brian Eno. The Long Now's site has recordings of the event, a summary by host Stewart Brand, and a discussion board at Long Now > Projects > Seminars About Long Term Thinking.
In the first half, Will Wright showed powerpoint slides about generative systems, cellular automata, fractals and all that stuff, and Eno chimed in about how he uses generative systems in his compositions. This was all very geeky, and as a geek who works in computer graphics, I'm very familiar with these ideas, so it seemed a bit tired. It's easy to get caught up in this stuff, but to use it to make good art still requires a human touch, I think. It's a fine line, though -- I like most of Eno's ambient music but I know it leaves other people cold. I saw an installation of his about ten years ago that was all screensavers and computer-generated music, nicely presented on brand new Apple G4 Cubes, and this went over that line into coldness for me. I think I need to believe there's at least some human intention behind a piece of work, otherwise I don't feel it's worthwhile to listen. That said, I probably don't appreciate ambient music in the way Eno means it, as music you can enter and leave at any time. When I listen to Neroli I listen from start to finish, but then I'm strange.
The highlight of the evening was Will Wright presenting his newest game, Spore. Spore is like The Sims, but with creatures you design yourself and help evolve. The site describes it as:
From the mind of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, comes SPORE™, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.
The game looks beautiful and very fun, but it encodes an incredibly superficial model of evolution. Your characters fight their way up an evolutionary ladder: Tide Pool Phase to Creature Phase, Tribal Phase, City Phase, Civilization Phase, and finally Space Phase. In the last and highest level, you get to colonize and terrorize other planets. (And presumably design and play superficial computer games to distract yourself from the havoc you're wreaking on the universe.)
Eno asked if you could choose your own path in the game, for instance staying at the level of a virus -- you can't. There were other audience questions along these lines. Wright makes famously "open-ended" games, and Spore, like the Sims games, is very unstructured compared to most games. But you're still bound by the imagination of the game designers. Smart as they are, their worldviews are necessarily limited, and can often be fairly basic and unenlightened. Spore's evolution science looks no more evolved than Spencer's "survival of the fittest" social Darwinism from over a century ago.
P.S. You can read about Spore on Wikipedia too. I love that the entry for "spore" admits that most people heading to that page are looking for the video game, not the biological unit. They know their audience.
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