The new video game ‘Spore’ is the talk of the town in gaming circles these days. At the heart of this game (created by Maxis of SIMs fame) are evolutionary processes. The game starts with a strange planet where a little microorganism has just landed piggy-backing on a meteoroid. The fate of this little critter rests in the hands of the player who has to choose various mutations, deciding which direction this organism takes in its evolutionary path. The game has been commended by biologists for introducing the concepts of contingency and randomness as important factors shaping the evolution of any particular species.
The problem is that the game doesn’t stop at biological evolution. Tied into this game is a fundamental presumption that societies also follow these progressive evolutionary patterns. Once the organisms in this game have reached a level of sentient intelligence, the players have the option of moving them on a path of supposedly increasing cultural sophistication from “simpler” tribal societies of hunter-gatherers to space-travelling species.
This view of societal “progress” and “evolution” sets our view of humanity back a hundred and fifty years to the time of early anthropologists who presumed that non-European, non-urban cultures were naturally more primitive and less-evolved. These early thinkers placed tribal populations the world over, who were contemporaneous to urban Europe, at an inferior intellectual strata, marking them with labels of “savage”, “barbaric” and “backward”. It was a teleological view of the human species with more "primitive" peoples climbing a ladder of progress towards technologically sophisticated civilizations.
Spore gets things wrong at two fundamental levels. One, its very premise—of placing cultural and technological difference as a difference in rank as opposed to a variation in type—is faulty. Anthropologists in the 20th century have worked over-time to correct these presumptions of their predecessors only to be confronted by techno-geeks in the 21st century falling back on the same fallacy. The second way in which Spore messes things up is by presenting (biological) evolutionary time as being of the same scale as cultural and technological change. Evolutionary time spans millennia; any given mutation requiring unimaginable quantities of time to transform into visible special differences. Technological changes within human communities, on the other hand, are incredibly fast and short-lived in comparison to evolutionary time. For the creators of Spore to speak of technological change in the same breath as evolution gives players a distorted sense of time, with eons of evolution occupying the same scale as decades of technological change.
As a gamer, Spore is incredibly exciting to me. As an anthropologist, it makes me shudder.
