Spore‘s about evolution? What are you thinking? It’s not evolution at all! Well, that’s what Tim Dean over at Trembling Hand theorises: When you’re playing Spore, and you periodically pause to ‘evolve’ your organism, you’re not emulating evolution. But you are nicely emulating the way Intelligent Design works … Every time you meddle, it’s the hand of, um, whatever it is the ID crew think is running the show (just between you and me, I think they might actually think it’s God, but it could equally be a player of MetaSpore in another universe) that is shaping the direction of the organism. Not evolution.
The man does have a point. I’m not sure it’s what Will Wright intended, but that is how the game plays out, in a nutshell.
Spore: The Intelligent Design Simulator [Trembling Hand]
Well, maybe we won’t have to change the filters on our office Bullshit-o-meter after all. As we kinda-sorta-maybe suspected, the cleverly named Anti-Spore website Antispore.com was not all that it seemed.
Rather than a blistering attack on Spore’s neo-Darwinist pro-evolution agenda and pollution of our children’s precious bodily fluids — a post to the site today revealed it was in fact an incredibly elaborate Rickroll.
In a post entitled “Understand my beliefs please” the creator of the site laid out a scripture-heavy exegesis culminating in the following nugget of pure genius.
Sooo.. The Kotaku bullshit alarm has been flashing a code amber since we got a tip about Antispore.com, but.. well, we just don’t know.
The site purports to be a protest against Spore and its ‘attack on Christian values’ and consists of several Creature Creator movies of Penis Monsters and other Spore grotesques, alongside posts about what the author claims is the game’s pro-evolutionary agenda and corrupting influence on children.
Oh, and the fact that Will Wright is Evil.
Our first thought was “Ha! A clever satire on religious censorship and the intelligent design debate!” quickly followed by, “hang on, it’s quite deadpan for satire, isn’t it?”
I initially thought it might be some kind of quite funny, reverse-psychology marketing campaign.. but then I got to the bit about the Episcopalian Church being a ‘perverted church’ that endorses homosexuality and it seemed.. less funny.
The irony is that Spore is only nominally ‘about’ Evolution. If anything you as a player are an Intelligent Designer. Do you see? It is teaching the controversy!
Anti Spore -Resisting EA’s War on Creationism [Thanks to Scott Owens for the tip]
