Will Wright's Spore is More "Friendly" Than Previous Maxis Titles

What is Spore?
Spore is an innovative new type of game, in which many choices that players make will influence the behavior and culture of a fictional species of creature that the players invent themselves. The major allure of this open-ended game play is how much control is given to the players. In Spore, the player chooses his own direction, evolving a creature from its origins as a cell all the way up to a space-faring civilization.

YouTube and E-mail Built In
This extends far beyond the mere game itself though. Spore was designed from the ground up to be ahead of prior Maxis offerings by leaps and bounds in the social department. For example, Spore comes integrated with the ubiquitous video hosting site YouTube. This means, not only can players effortlessly record their unique creations in-game, but with just a few more clicks, they can have that short movie uploaded to YouTube without even having to exit Spore. In addition to video, there is also a camera for still shots built-in to the game.

After you have taken some pictures or videos of your Spore creature, you can send them to friends just as easily as you can to YouTube: simply click on the e-mail button and type the recipient's address, and then leave any message you would like. Think that's cool? There's more.

Sporepedia
Spore features a level of social interaction unheard of in any other full-featured PC game. There is a web site called the Sporepedia that is used to store and organize tiny .png files. These files are basically very small pictures of creatures, and will also include vehicles, buildings, spaceships, and more. The Sporepedia is made to help people share their creatures and other creations with each other easily. Everyone has their own profile and it's easy to search for certain creatures or look through a list of people's creations. Right now, there are more than 3 million creatures online!

The Sporepedia also will store timelines highlighting the evolution of players' creatures. For example, if a Spore player has a creature who ate another creature, the timeline would store that information in the creature tab. If the creature died, that would be another point of information. The timeline is an elaborate new way of remembering exactly how the story happened from the point of view of the player. If he forgets what happened, it's as simple as examining the timeline to remind himself, and he can share it with others just as simply..

Massively Single Player Game
Will Wright has effectively coined the term "massively single player online game" for Spore. Instead of the traditional MMO game, such as World of Warcraft, Spore takes the massive online part and translates it into a single player experience. When people make a creature in Spore, that creature is sent to the Sporepedia database, where it could potentially be downloaded by someone else's game as a creature in his world. Let's say someone made a little creature called the Furball. This Furball is now available for other players' games to download if they need a little creature in their ecosystem. The advantage of this is that you have unlimited replayability in Spore, because you will never get the same exact Spore world twice, and you can always manually ban a certain creation of someone else's if it's a little too... phallic. (Some people really do have sick minds.)

Sporepedia is also inside your game. If you are playing and decide you would like to have a building that looks like it came from an old Western movie, chances are you can find it. To share your creatures, it is as simple as clicking the share button. The creature will be added to your Sporepedia profile, and then other people can see it, comment on it, and even rate it up or down depending on what they think.

The Future of Game Networking
This level of social integration in a game is completely without precedent. There is an astounding amount of ease with which someone in Spore can completely customize their experience. Sporecasts are a good example: if someone really wants their game of Spore to have only furry creatures like the Furball, they can look for a Sporecast that features furry creatures, and then it will show up like that on their planet in-game.

And after they are done customizing, Spore players have an effortless means of sharing their experiences, their creatures, their timelines, and even their entire planets! As Spore's release date gets closer, I will talk about the direction Spore might be headed in terms of expansions and additional content.