Introduction: Spore and Its Offspring

At the 2008 Game Developer's Conference, designer Will Wright offered a model for thinking about fictional worlds. Attempting to account for such phenomena as the Star Wars universe, the series of Godzilla films, the internet activity surrounding the show Lost, and so forth, Wright suggests that these extended stories comprise "nouns" and "verbs"--a set of characteristic persons, objects, and locales and a set of potential actions that together delineate an expected range of activity. In each of Frank Baum's Oz books, for instance, a certain set of characters (Gilda, the Wizard), locations (Emerald City), and objects (the road!) yield continuity, while the set of possible actions is circumscribed. Tornadoes, wishes, and poppies work in eminently predictable ways. And together these "nouns" and these "verbs" establish what it means for a story to be an Oz story.

It is worth noting that the words "nouns" and "verbs" are more than metaphorical for Wright. His most successful product is the video game The Sims, in which players create their own simulated cities, placing simulated houses, appliances, pets, and even persons as they see fit and then causing them to interact. "Nouns" are placed in the world by one set of menus and the "verbs" they undertake chosen by another. (The game is of course complicated than this: In addition to items and activities chosen by the player, some are automatically generated by the program.) In effect, The Sims is a computerized doll house, only expandable to the scale of a city. The strength of Wright's metaphor is that it uses this fairly literal account of his simulation games to explain the expansion of a given product to multiple platforms and media: the endless sequels, prequels, upgrades, tie-ins, and alternative versions of late capitalism. To the question of what explains our conviction that these different texts in different forms and genres are related, are in some sense the same thing, Wright answers: they share the same set of "nouns" and "verbs."

Wright only mentions his current project, Spore, on a single slide, but it is clearly fundamental to his thinking. The website for that game describes it as "an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space." (1) Players will begin by controlling a single-cell organism and, through several stages, eventually progress to controlling a civilization of that creature's "descendants." Each stage is also a study in genre, influenced by the action of other video games.

So Wright's metaphor at its most basic tells us how we are to read the different stages of Spore (Tide Pool, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, Space) as the same thing: some sort of equivalence among the "nouns" and "verbs" of these different stages. Indeed, the double metaphor of evolution and "epic journey" insists upon noun-lineation and a sense of noun-identity. And in interviews, members of the Spore team often describe the amount of effort put into making the various editors that allow players to design their own creatures, buildings, space ships (and other nouns) all feel similar: that is, to define "to edit" as a central "verb" of the game.



(Image: Genres of Spore. Slide from 2007 D.I.C.E. summit presentation by Wright's creative team from www.gamespot.com. Click to enlarge)

To this point, I have been discussing Spore as if it is a single game. In fact, the product will launch first as an interactive website, a video game in six or seven versions, a mobile phone game, and shortly thereafter, the ability to purchase customized figurines. We can expect an authorized book for each version of the game, new and old media advertisements, fast food tie-ins, appearances on various television programs, reviews, blogs, and fan forums. And eventually sequels. If the game is highly successful, Electronic Arts--Wright's employer--may authorize a movie, an animated television show, or a cartoon. Are all these things, in some sense, Spore? And if so, in what sense? How are they related?

A first approach would be to follow the money. In that sense, these different things share two qualities: Electronic Arts will make a profit, directly or indirectly, from each of them and Electronic Arts has decided to call each of them (or at least most of them) by the same name: Spore. We could even posit a couple of direct benefits of doing so. Electronic Arts, for example, can maximize the productivity of their labor (planning, coding, distribution) by re-using it as much as possible across multiple platforms and can increase their sales with mutually reinforcing advertisements.

Later in this essay, though, I will discuss certain fictional worlds that are not singly authored, even by a corporate entity, and others that do not deliver a profit to their authors or owners. In the meantime, I will merely point out these same economic principles--re-use of labor and branding--are used by, for example, car manufacturers and consumer goods concerns to a different effect. There is an imaginative cohesion to Spore or Oz that does not obviously reduce to the profit model of Electronic Arts.

(Of course, economic considerations are not limited to the concerns of the owner/author. A cultural materialist reading of these products might begin by pointing out that the progressive version of evolution they entail is in fact not an evolutionary model at all, at least in the scientific sense. Instead, it is a familiar narrative of late capitalism, in which one's life is dedicated to the accumulation of money, items, or status. Moreover, despite the supposed open-endedness of play, the goals of each stage, as stated on the Spore website, are familiar Western wish-fulfillment narratives: to "conquer the planet," to "colonize" or "terraform" other worlds, and ultimately to achieve "galactic dominance." To explain the similarities of these different Spores, though, I believe such a reading would have to turn towards the same formal concerns I will proceed to address.)

The idea of branding, though, suggests a second approach to these products: their shared style. The Spore website abounds in examples of the visual vocabulary of the Spore products:



(Images: Spore demonstration creatures Blorthog, Toucan Pam, and Bladonkfrom www.spore.com/screenshots.php. Click to enlarge.)

The style of Spore owes much to the plasticity, texturedness, and glossiness of contemporary computer-generated animation movies and the ugly-cute aesthetic of recent children's animation. Sianne Ngai's recent work on cuteness (2) suggests that we might consider this cuteness of style as metonym for the ideas of malleability and responsiveness at the heart of the core Spore texts. She writes of "the aggressive desire to master and overpower the cute object that the cute object itself appears to elicit." Aggressive desire, of course, describes as well the tenor of the proto-capitalist, pseudo-evolutionary narrative outlined above. What this sort of reading cannot explain, however, is the relationship among different Spores. It necessarily assumes that the subject of its inquiry is constant, while in fact, the different products will probably differ in appearance.



(Images: Mike, from Monsters, Inc., Pumba, from The Lion King, and Toucan Sam, logo for Fruit Loops brand cereal. Respectively from www.pixar.com, www.disney.go.com, and www2.kellogs.com.)

To use an evolutionary biology metaphor that would be inconceivable within the world of Spore itself, the different products appear, like Darwin's finches, to be the results of an adaptive radiation. Each is specialized for its own niche but all show their similarities to the other. In fact, working along precisely this axis of comparison between ideational constructs and organisms, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins has coined the term "meme" to apply to the smallest "unit of cultural transmission or imitation" (3). Spore, though, is not particularly about ideas--one would be hard-pressed to find a Spore meme, in any strict sense.

Turning the metaphor to lingustics and philosophy rather than evolutionary biology suggests one way out: the various versions of Spore share a set of family resemblances. (Note to self: I don't think I need to go to Wittgenstein or Lakoff here. Maybe later, if I get caught up in frames.) What Wright's metaphor points out is that these family resemblances are patterns, rather than content or style per se. That is to say, Wright's formulation of the "nouns" and "verbs" of fictional worlds, mediated by the additional linguistic metaphor of "family resemblances" offers a formal way to talk about the sort of expanded groups of related artistic products common in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And, that is to suggest a formal way of talking about artistic reception as a whole.


(Image: Darwin's drawings of the beaks of finches, from www.bbc.co.uk.)

The remainder of this series of essays will explore these family resemblances. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that considering a handful of the dozens of contemporary "franchises," "fictional worlds," or "story universes" will help to provide a formal vocabulary useful in the investigation of the problem of reception (across genres, time periods, and subjectivities) as a whole.




(1) http://www.spore.com/about.php. Accessed 3/9/2008.
(2) Ngai, "The Cuteness of the Avant Garde"
(3) Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. PAGE NUMBER?