Emotional Account: Spore

I had my roommate “Joe” play spore for a while, and he had a very different emotional response then mine. Joe is not very interested in video games as a whole, and only plays a little bit of Diablo II on his free time. He has not heard about Spore before when I asked him to play the game.

What’s immediately obvious when he first started playing was that he did not bother to read any of the instructions on the screen since he was simply randomly clicking on the screen when the game started. Also, he asked me if it is possible to skip the intro animations. So he was never interested in learning about what is happening in the game.

I explained that he can customize his own creature, he was less than impressed. He would select a part and randomly place it on his creature because “it doesn’t matter where I put it, it’s all the same.”

After about an hour he asked me if he has to keep playing because he was bored. “All I am doing is eating other things.”

While Spore really is not that great of a game, I still enjoy playing it. I think the reason Joe and I have such different response is because of expectation.

Now, I heard about Spore in 2006 and saw the demo video of it and was really excited about all the customization potentials. I basically know what was going to happen in game before it was released. I knew that it was a game of designing my own creature and watching it interact with the world.

Even before the actual game was releases I played around with the creature creator and imagined how my creatures would act and do and I was able to build towards that goal. Joe on the other hand did not know about the game and expected it to a RPG game where you kill enemies to become stronger, and that was exactly what he did.

Both Joe and I agree that even though the creatures are designed by other players and look unique, they feels less real than other online games such as Diablo II where many player characters look exactly the same. In Diablo II you know that each character is being controlled by a real person, where in Spore you know the creatures are controlled by AI.