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.
3 comments:
Hi Rachana,
good observation. though, now that i have had a bit of distance from academia, i sort-of of have become doubtful myself from the "knee-jerk" condemnation of teleogy....not in the sense of, ughm, believing in crazy shit like the differential valuation of cultures and people but by thinking in terms of the entire passage of humanity through biographical as well as historical time as, indeed, some sort-of unfolding. It would be silly of me to say that the "spore" is more "primitive" than the bloom, they are just differently manifested expressions of the same underlying concept....and, yes, there might be a definite range of blooms that can be realized within our time on this planet. I agree that "Spore" gets the proportions of time wrong, but maybe, i don't know, it gets the plasticity right, its infinite flexibility as seen from the lmtd viewpoint of a human being, even a gamer/techno-geek.
and to make one other point: anthropologists have indeed put together all types of incredibly valuable ideas, insights, experiences and so forth but the reason we daily are confronted with the fact that their messages seem to have fallen on deaf ears or dumb educational systems is that perhaps, unlike such games like "Spore" they have fallen way short of making available their ideas about the world in more immediate, experiential and perhaps even intuitive ways, the way video-games and the like do....god knows there's a billion more reasons for the lack of cultural enlightenment in these dark days and ages.... anyway, great piece you wrote. excellent & clear argument in my view, unlike my critical ramblings ;)
...take care, evolve well, themba
I think all these simulation games have the same problem, of implying something horrifying about the nature of humanity.
In many ways, its as much a mistake to think that "simpler" life-forms are "less evolved" as it is to think the same of societies. (Although obviously the first mistake is merely academic, while the second on is of considerably greater moral and political import.) Any way of talking about evolution that implies choice, intelligence, or progress from worse to better is deeply misleading. I have thought for awhile now that biologists are partly to blame for some of the misconceptions about evolution, because whenever they write about it, they anthrpomorphize the process as some kind of God of Selection who kills the weak and rewards the strong with more strength.
In some ways, it's even worse when you play Civilization, or especially Alpha Centauri. By far, the easiest way to win at those games is to conquer all your neighbors and be the only remaining society. Allegedly, there is trade, negotiation, peace treaties, alliences, and so forth, but really there is only conquest and real politik.
Your goal is to kill every other city and military unit in the game. Everything you build for your citizens is only to keep them happy so they don't revolt, and reproducing, so you can build more cities, and thus more soldiers. Every scientific discovery you make is for one reason only: build a bigger gun. Every contact with another society, every trade or negotiation, is only to keep them off your back until you're ready to invade, keep them from attacking you so that you can set the terms of the battle.
In Alpha Centauri, you have access to "nerve gas pods" that help you win combat (and slaughter your enemies' civilian populations), and "planet buster missles" which literally turn your enemies' cities into lakes.
The only punishment? Trade sanctions. They add up really quickly too, so that if you commit even a couple attrocities, you can essentially never get back out from under them. Do you know what the difference between 30 turns worth of trade sanctions and 300 turns worth of trade sanctions is? Its the difference between there not being anyone else willing to trade with you and there not being anyone else on the planet.
It's a fun game, but sometimes while you're playing, you have to sit back and ask yourself "Oh my g-d what am I doing? Am I a monster?" Sometimes I watch the news and see how certain world leaders are acting, and I think that they're not really engaging in diplomacy, they're just playing Civilization.
this is a great post, Rachana. I think that our video-gaming industry could learn a great deal by reading your post.
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