I am as excited as anyone else about Will Wright’s next game, Spore (gameplay video). And I’ve been excited for over a year, ever since the first screens came out.
I am also excited about the idea of emergent gameplay. Two of my favorite designers, Will Wright and Warren Spector, are both exploring the emergent and non-linear gameplay in a way that is very different from other games, including each others’. But they also implement the concepts very well, in my opinion, managing to minimize tedium and maximize challenge and control.
So it is with mild disappointment that I hear this in Forbes’ article about the game:
“It’s an epic game,” said Wright, who estimated that it would take a gamer 79 years without rest to play out every aspect of Spore. “The biggest challenge will be making it seem accessible to people.”
I call ‘BS!’ I’m sure he’s arriving at that number through the combinatorics of his genetic algorithms and non-linear storyline. And I’m sure there’s some validity – there must be a lot of variation, and branches of the game go off in wildly different directions, I’d bet.
But consider this gameplay situation: you’ve played branch A for 10 hours and in the last 30 seconds, you take fork #1. Cool, you reached one of the endings. Now, to take fork #2, which is only different in the last 30 seconds, you still have to play through branch A to that point. But you cannot say that it takes 20 hours to play out every aspect of the game just because of some forking down the line.
On the other hand, if it’s true in a ‘common sense’ evaluation, I tip my hat to Mr. Wright and apologize profusely. But at the same time, I doubt the design behind a game that would take years to play out to conclusion, in the same way I doubt the editing skills of an athor whose book is more than, say, 5 times the size of most novels.