Now that the assessable component of this blog is over, I’ll be frank about what has been consuming a large hunk of my time over the past few weeks: GIANT PENIS MONSTERS.
No, it’s not some Freudian fantasy gone horribly awry (or horribly right, depending on how gross you are); it’s SPORE, Maxis Software’s latest successful effort at destroying my soul.
SPORE is like Age of Empires meets The Sims: it’s utter shit, but totally addictive. The game’s Wikipedia entry describes it as “a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse”, but it’s best summed up as a complete waste of time. You begin the game as a single-cell organism, swimming ‘round the evolutionary sludge, chomping down lesser organisms and earning tokens and points that allow you to evolve into some ungodly freak of nature in the user-controlled Creature Creator. The next thing you know, it’s seven hours later: you’re sweaty, confused but strangely satisfied, and you’ve evolved your species into a space-faring civilisation.
Putting aside the ability to create phallus-monsters and other awesome opportunities to let your inner child wreak havoc, SPORE is appealing because of its choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. Each seemingly insignificant decision dramatically changes the available outcomes of the game. For example, if you choose to be a carnivore in the primordial ooze stage, it will affect what you can evolve into in the creature stage, which in turn affects available options in the subsequent tribal and civilisation stages. This presents seemingly limitless storylines and optimum replayability.
Funnily enough, this is also what makes the game mind-numbingly boring. With no real sense of cathartic completion and with its cutesy graphics, SPORE remains a game better suited to ten-year-olds. Maxis has cleverly attempted to overcome this by creating a complex playable online universe into which hardcore SPORE players can transpose their own creations, but I’m not pathetic enough to have ventured that far. Yet.
I don’t know what it is about repetitive and menial open-ended gameplay that gets my motor running. Maybe somewhere in my psyche, I have a buried Messiah complex that fills me with the urgent desire to make entire species bend to my will, and it’s best exercised only in the virtual world. Or maybe I just like wasting time. Either way, Maxis has definitely perfected the formula for the never-ending game: with an expansion pack already due for release this November, they’re making massive coin out of procrastibators like me.
But with over 41 million user-created entries in the SPOREpedia, it’s at least a tiny iota of comfort to know that I’m not the only idiot wasting my time.
