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Quite similar in spirit to Quirks but much more detailed and
serious was Will Wright's SimLife: The
Genetic Playground, released in 1992. Creatures,
a British game released in the U.S.
by Mindscape in 1996, actually employed artificial life principles based on an
understanding of genetics and evolution to let the player breed generations of computer-controlled
creatures.
Two sequels to Creatures
took that theme and (of course!) evolved it into more complex forms. There have
been dozens games based on ideas of genetic engineering, including all the
games based on Jurassic Park
and its sequels. And Will Wright's recent magnum opus Spore, released in 2008, is rich with game elements inspired by
scientific understanding of evolution.
Spore is contemporary,
ambitious, and successful -- and so deserves some extra examination. At its
heart the game could be said to be not about evolution, but in fact about
intelligent design -- after all, the creatures in the game are gradually
improved and perfected not by random chance as Darwin
would have it, but by the choices a Deity-like player makes. And yet I also
think this is evolution in intelligent design's clothing.
It's not hard to see that if everyone playing
made random choices while modifying their creatures, they might individually
often fail, but over time a complex world would result.
Are the players each really "intelligent designers",
or merely the equivalent of cosmic radiation? Even deeper philosophical and
cosmological questions are left as an exercise to the player, which is
ultimately I think the most interesting thing about Spore as a source of discussion.
 EA/Maxis' Spore
I think Will Wright is too good a
designer to let literal truth get in the way of fun -- but even so the game
does more to educate players at a nearly subconscious level about how the
processes of natural selection can work, and he does so in a way more enjoyable
than many textbooks or classes.
I have known Will since his early SimCity days and even during the creation of that game he was an
avid reader on principles of evolutionary biology, and some of the ideas underlying
his work, regarding new concepts as colonizing a possibility space, and
visualizing games as inhabiting virtual landscapes were heavily influenced by
cutting-edge evolutionary biology studies and Chaos Theory.
Unnatural Selection
Darwin and his
ideas have influenced game development on other less direct levels. I have
found that game designers often use their understanding of evolution and human
history to explain the popularity of certain types of games, or to modify them
to make them more popular.
For instance, a huge number of games use the
metaphor of lives, either directly in a FPS or RPG where you have a character
that risks death, or more abstractly as in platformers and casual games that
give you a number of lives to expend in a quest for your goal.
Even abstractly, life and death struggles key into our more
basic survival instincts and get us to care about the decisions we make in
game. In fact an MMORPG like World of Warcraft is just full of
elements that would have been familiar to and crucial to survival of our
primate ancestors.
Elements like life and death struggle, tribal allegiances, division of
labor among specialties so your group or tribe can flourish, and wilds to explore filled
with dangerous creatures are all things we have been hard-wired by evolution to
care about deeply.
This sort of understanding of human evolution also helps
explain the fascination that children have with animals. For all of human history,
learning about which animals can harm us and which ones are friendly or useful
is a major survival trait, and it's no surprise that children have evolved to
care about those questions.
The ones who didn't have the predisposition to
learn were probably often eaten before having their own children. But it may be
surprising to realize that this is a large factor in the commercial success of
games such as Pokémon and Animal Crossing.
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That game is of course E.V.O ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.V.O ).
Also relevant to the discussion is indie game Venture Africa which features autonomous AI animals and indirectly teaches about natural selection through its gameplay. Developer Pocketwatch Games did an excellent job at blurring the lines between education and entertainment with the title and received several complaints from religious intelligent design types about the game even though there is no overt messaging within it.
It's also worth noting that (un)Intelligent Design is far more popular than evolution: from Syndicate to The Sims, the emphasis is generally on the player choosing the path of the gameplay, story and in-game behaviour. There's a good reason for this: evolution is by nature random, which makes it hard to debug or finetune. Black and White is one example of a game which promised a lot from the concept of AI, but ended up being heavily toned down thanks to the unpredictability.
Something more interesting would be to look at the way games themselves have evolved: from Space Panic through to Super Mario Galaxy, 3D Monster Maze to Half Life 2: there's a clear path of evolution, complete with high levels of cross-fertilisation and mutation. Only the strongest genes survive into the next generation, and the cycle then begins anew...
In many ways a plant type is like a class of car. Just as Ford Mustangs are of the order of sports car sedan, within the class of automobile, a potato is of the order of tuber, of the larger class of plant.
I
This practice of iteration is far more rapid than in the lifecycle of a game archetype and is an excellent example of how Darwin's theories are modeled in our business.
Nonetheless, an excellent article Noah.
Some other specific responses:
DK, I agree that what Darwin had to say about sexual selection was in fact even more interesting in many ways than survival of the fittest, precisely because it seems so counterintuitive. There are a lot of intriguing things we could discuss about game design through that particular lens - everything from how, in the mid-80's, it became "fashionable' to advertise modem play on the game boxes even though a majority of people buying the games didn't actually have modems - turns out they equated modem play with state of the art games, even though it was irrelevant to their own situation. A similar thing happened a few years later with CD-ROM games debuting, features that are seen as "sexy" are important in deciding to buy a game even if they are functionally irrelevant - even the fact that I can use the term sexy in that context shows how relevant Darwin's ideas are.
JVII, I agree that merely drawing parallels is pretty useless, but I disagree that this is the case here. I think there is a lot we can learn from the way biologists classify living things when we attempt to classify game genres, which, like living things, often have contradictory qualities that make it hard to discern their origins until one looks into their ancestral past. Or to put it in very concrete terms, when working on an adventure game design for a recently-released game (Mata Hari) I thought hard about what features of old adventure games were "adaptive" and helped them succeed in the competitive world of commercial games, and which features were the equivalent of an appendix, perhaps once part of a useful function but now just carried along for the ride, consuming resources.
RZ, I have to take exception to your comments. You seem to imply that Darwin is best revered in the US, which is just not true - take a look at http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13062613&s
ource=features_box4
for example. Darwin didn't invent or discover evolution, but did put together a coherent way to explain the mechanism behind it, and that (as well as some of his other ideas like sexual selection) is certainly why I appreciate him.
MG, thanks! You do point out two more areas where ideas of evolution are even more directly linked to game development - in fact I expect that agile development/scrum/rapid iteration practices could benefit even more than they already have by applying ideas from evolutionary biology.