After the immense hype that has been generated about Spore over the last few years, its difficult for me to really sum it up here. It was finally released around the world this weekend and after installing it and exploring just a tiny fraction of what it has to offer, I have to say its quite amazing.

Spore is the latest in a long series of games designed by one of the worlds leading game design guru’s Will Wright. His work has explored and developed generative and procedural gaming, especially in relation to simulations and AI. Most famously he created the Sim games, starting with ‘Sim City’ in 1989, moving through many incarnations and scales of Sim games ( ‘Sim Earth’, ‘Sim Life’, ‘Sim Ant’ etc ) and eventually forming ‘The Sims’ and its MMO version ‘The Sims Online’ in 2002. This was in many ways one of the significant predecessors to Linden Lab’s Second Life.

Wright originally wanted to call Spore a different name ( Spore was its codename during development ). He wanted to call it ‘Sim Everything’. This name actually summarises its aims quite well really ! I won’t go into too much detail here explaining it. Rather I will link to the award winning trailer that was shown at E3.

Spore isn’t a MMOG, but it is a MSOG ( massively singleplayer online game ). I wouldn’t say it constitutes a virtual world at all really. However all of the creatures you create in it, are shared with the whole Spore community. This increases variance and diversity within the ‘game ecology’ exponentially and is an interesting new take on a ‘user generated world’.

Considering the vast scope of Spore there are so many things I could write about it, but one particular aspect has particular relevance to this blog – its wonderful procedurally generated score ‘designed’ by Brian Eno.

Spore contains a number of different evolutionary states – Cell, Creature, Tribes etc. It also features a ‘creature creator’. During this stage you can customise and evolve your creature. However your actions during this stage also alter the music as you edit. Here is a video demonstrating this from the Game Developers Conference 08 in San Francisco in February this year : 

Whilst that is impressive, that type of work has been done before in many games. Notibly recently in Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy, alternate melody generation was used in the selection screens for roll over sounds with the Wiimote. Here is a quick video I made to illustrate this :

Spore however takes this much further in later stages. The city planner stage has numerous intricate procedural music features. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the ‘anthem’ generator. Which enables users to create their own musical anthems which later become incorporated in the main in game music during key moments. Here is a member of the Spore development team describing this at GDC08 :

User’s anthems can be shared, along with their creatures, and become part of the wider massively single player online experience. It’s too early to tell how this will play out musically, but as far as I can tell this weill eventually mean the creation of a sort of evolving massively multi user created soundtrack based on numerous anthem elements being shared and becoming incorporated in the wider MSOG experience. This is quite a staggering possibility. The customisation is explored even further during the spaceship stages.

So how could this relate to soundtracking virtual worlds ? Well, a non linear procedurally controlled and generated approach like this could help to explore new paths for soundtracking not only single player games, but more complex multi user environments.

Music in most multi user social environments, like virtual worlds, is generally either streaming net radio ( either provided offically – like in vSide or MTV Virtual Laguna Beach – or unofficially – Second Life ) or is live performance ( or is simply not there ).

There are however many music and sound artists working in Second Life and other virtual environments exploring the types of interactive generative music possibilities these environments allow. It’s certainly something which I have tried to explore, especially with the Parsec project. The wide body of work by many artists including Angrybeth Shortbread, Adam Ramona, Komuso Tokugawa, Robbie Dingo, Keystone Bouchard and Daruma Picnic has also pushed the boundaries of what is possible with multi user generative music, in lots of different ways.

It’s great to see a soundtrack like Spore emerge, with such extensive funding and development power behind it. Another project which has pioneered mainstream application of micro scoring techniques is Troels Brun Folmann’s score for Tomb Raider Legend. 

To learn ( a lot ) more about Spore and its soundtrack, here is a link to a talk Brian Eno and Will Wright did at the Long Now Foundation in 2006 :

http://fora.tv/2006/06/26/Will_Wright_and_Brian_Eno

The Long Now Foundations is a fascinating organisation, founded by Eno, which hopes to “creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years”. Incidentally they are having a special web cast event on Tuesday evening. It’s the release of ANATHEM, the new book by Neil Stephenson, author of Snow Crash.