SPORE is only a lesson in the science of HYPE. That's what she should have done her research about: how hype is being expertly used to sell games.

It's so awful to see how you can promise a game that will "allow the player to blow up the whole world", and people will fill out the blanks with their own imagination, thinking it means that they will be able to do everything up to the point of actually blowing up the world.

Yeah. Hype needs a nerf! It seems like it's become more effective recently than it was in the past. Then again, things like "Blast Processing" did exist decades ago, so maybe it's just rose-colored glasses. There do seem to be more games that advertise that you can do X, Y, and Z awesome things, and then it turns out that you actually can't.

"Crucially, its 'TTP factor' -- i.e. 'time to penis', or 'how long it will take a room full of kids to make something rude with the tools that you give them' is too short for junior high-age educators."

What I find most disturbing here is that educators don't teach; they restrict, filter, and avoid subjects they should discuss with students. Why not simply let students have at the tools and create something "rude"? Why not then sit them down and talk about civility, primitivism, and social mores?

The problem with education today is that the system is set up to prescribe behavior based on what controlling parents want and not to encourage independent thought. I'd like educators to get back to opening minds instead of closing them, especially before they integrate Spore into their lesson plans.

I'm sorry, but the above statement betrays a total lack of understanding of why teachers might be concerned about the Spore's TTP factor. Educators don't want to "restrict, filter, and avoid" subjects with students. Quite the contrary, in fact. However, there are a limited number of hours in each school day, and so it's often important to keep lessons as focused as possible. While it would be nice to have a heart to heart talk about civility with each of my students, it isn't always feasible logistically.

As an educator, I try to encourage creativity and independent thought as much as possible, but at the same time I need to make sure that every student understands the material. Distractions and diversions, while they might be educational in their own right, can often muddle the central point of a given lesson. As such, the TTP issue above isn't so much about wanting to avoid a taboo topic as it is about good classroom management.

Also, I'd just like to mention that I have used Spore in a classroom setting before, but it was with students who were young enough that TTP wouldn't be an issue.

I believe Spore is so ambitious in its scope that, as a "serious game", it becomes a poor model of the many things it is trying to represent. For that purpose, there are previous games that do a better job at each of Spore's phases (e.g., Darwin Pond in the "cell phase").

What shocks me most from this article: there were apparently some people who took Anti Spore seriously. Until schools are teaching reading comprehension properly, how are they going to teach science properly?

"the above statement betrays a total lack of understanding of why teachers might be concerned about the Spore's TTP factor."

I'm only echoing what others have said, namely prestigious Harvard professors and leading thinkers on creativity, such as Sir Ken Robinson. Even teachers' unions are constantly reminding us that educators should be paid more for what they don't do!

That educators restrict, filter, and avoid subjects they should discuss with their students is not debatable. Yes, there are teachers who strive for excellence, but educators are no different than the rest of us. They feel pressure at work, from higher authorities to helicopter parents.

Economist Stephen Levitt describes how this pressure affects the classroom in his landmark book "Freakonomics." Teachers cheat, too. They take shortcuts, too. And the effect of this institutionalization is that which I'm referencing. What educators want is not relevant here; it's what happens that matters.

On reflection it was wrong for me to imply that all teachers are champions of creativity. You're right that there are many bad teachers out there who just don't care, and I agree with a lot of the problems in our education system that Robinson talks about. However, saying that the TTP situation above is symptomatic these problems is just plain wrong. For most teachers it's an issue of having good classroom management, not "avoiding" a touchy issue they don't want to talk about. In fact, TTP wouldn't even be an issue for bad teachers because they rarely deviate from the textbook's lesson plans anyway.

There are a lot of things that teachers can do to improve education in the US, but it's not as easy as certain pundits would have you believe. As good as it sounds on paper, some of Robinson's advice actually goes contrary to most research on child development. Similarly, trying to use a penis creature in Spore to jump-start a lesson in civility seems like it'd be a good idea, but in reality it would only work with a certain subset of student (and more than likely they wouldn't be the ones that need the lesson in the first place). Meanwhile, the rest of the class might potentially lose sight of the task at hand, or worse yet, entirely ignore the point of what we're talking about and decide to make their own genital creature. It all depends on the class makeup, and a good teacher would know ahead of time if the activity is appropriate or not.