__So, I've been playing this video game, Spore. As I'm sure many of you know, it was a pretty big release just a few months ago. Critical reception was kind of mixed, considering the build up, yada yada yada. I didn't think it was that bad. Mostly, I really like the last level of the game: Space.
__Basically the game is a simulation of evolution, with the player completely in charge--like an intelligent design sort of thing. You can design your creature, the society that it builds, and, in the last and most extensive stage of the game, you go to space. You can colonize uninhabited planets, establish a trade empire, or start wars with other races. My spaceship is pictured to the right. You'll notice that it looks like a dragon. This is intentional.
__The game goes to great lengths not to tell you what to do, to just let you do whatever it is that you feel is the most fun (the game was designed by the mastermind behind The Sims, Will Wright). There is, however, one exception----In the "Goals" section of the "Spore Guide": Will you perhaps seek out deeper meaning in a que
st to the center of the galaxy?
__To fully grasp what it means to "go to the center of the galaxy" in Spore, I'm going to have to show you just how fucking big this game is. The picture on the left is of the planets that I've conquered or made alliances with. It includes numerous intergalactic civilizations, and hundreds of inhabited and uninhabited planets big enough to be explored individually, at length, and dozens of different creatures, both sentient and non. It's an area that's already cumbersomely large, falling apart within 5 minutes if I travel to some other part of the game.
__Now the picture on the right is the entirety of the "galaxy" in Spore. That little speck right nea
r the top of the swirl (the one marked by the "home" icon), is the area that we saw in the previous picture. At this point, it's so small that one can't make out any of the individual stars systems. Without the upgrades in transportation that one can buy later in the game, it would take, in real time, days to get to the center of this galaxy--not to mention a few hundred thousand "Spore Bucks". It's seriously an enormous undertaking. PLUS, once you get near the center, you find out that there's a secret civilization that populates the entire middle of the map ("The Grox"), that you have to make war on before you can proceed to find out the secret at the center of Spore.
__It's a terrifyingly large simulacrum-----large enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Large enough to make me refer to doing missions as "working odd jobs", large enough to have made me miss a week of school work two months ago. Large enough, in fact, to make me a little bit scared of finding out what's at the middle of the galaxy, actually. At this point, I would say that there's a bit of selfhood that I lose every time I play this game; at least temporarily.
__I've been at an impasse for months now. I decided that I wanted to find out what lay at the center of the galaxy sometime near the middle of October, and yet I still haven't done it. Part of my hesitation is purely practical. I have schoolwork to do, and waging war on the Grox seems like it would take at least an entire day, maybe two. But I have deep sort of angst about what I might find there, after I'd ignored all of my responsibilities to beat this game. What sort of thing would I find there? What's the ideological centerpiece of the game that I'm allowing myself to be swallowed by? __Well, I have my suspicions:
__Every culture that you run into in the game is assigned a philosophy---and nearly half of the aliens that you meet are religious zealots who worship someone named "Spode". The hints start piling up at some point, and you're finally led to believe that no one less than God Himself is at the center of the Spore's galaxy. ---------Frankly, if I'm going to meet Him, I want to be prepared. Recently I found out that, if I eradicate the populations of 50 different planets, I'll earn the "Conqueror" level 5 badge, and gain access to a bomb that can destroy an entire planet. I'm at 23 planets right now. Once I get the chance, I'm going to buy two of them. In Spore, my mission from now on is to kill the Almighty.
Whatever it is that I find at the center of that swirl is going to be the "message" of this video game. It might not be God, in the theological sense, but it's the force around which the rest of the game's action revolves. If I want to destroy the simulacrum's ideological heft, I'll have to absorb myself in it completely.
__.....anyway, consider that a sort of a thesis statement for what I want to do with this blog. To really get a handle on the outer limits of discourse, or pop's permeation, you kind of have to love it. So, like in Spore, the only way to kill the god at the center of culture is to soak it all in. Movies, TV, journalism, poetry, junk food, bad tatoos, weird video games, philosophy, comic books from the 60's, Kanye West. Let's talk about all of it! We'll share in the terror and vice of modern culture together, and you can watch me slowly lose the ability to form an original thought. Sex On Christmas is a reference to a Beat Happening song, by the way.
__Basically the game is a simulation of evolution, with the player completely in charge--like an intelligent design sort of thing. You can design your creature, the society that it builds, and, in the last and most extensive stage of the game, you go to space. You can colonize uninhabited planets, establish a trade empire, or start wars with other races. My spaceship is pictured to the right. You'll notice that it looks like a dragon. This is intentional.
__The game goes to great lengths not to tell you what to do, to just let you do whatever it is that you feel is the most fun (the game was designed by the mastermind behind The Sims, Will Wright). There is, however, one exception----In the "Goals" section of the "Spore Guide": Will you perhaps seek out deeper meaning in a que
st to the center of the galaxy? __To fully grasp what it means to "go to the center of the galaxy" in Spore, I'm going to have to show you just how fucking big this game is. The picture on the left is of the planets that I've conquered or made alliances with. It includes numerous intergalactic civilizations, and hundreds of inhabited and uninhabited planets big enough to be explored individually, at length, and dozens of different creatures, both sentient and non. It's an area that's already cumbersomely large, falling apart within 5 minutes if I travel to some other part of the game.
__Now the picture on the right is the entirety of the "galaxy" in Spore. That little speck right nea
r the top of the swirl (the one marked by the "home" icon), is the area that we saw in the previous picture. At this point, it's so small that one can't make out any of the individual stars systems. Without the upgrades in transportation that one can buy later in the game, it would take, in real time, days to get to the center of this galaxy--not to mention a few hundred thousand "Spore Bucks". It's seriously an enormous undertaking. PLUS, once you get near the center, you find out that there's a secret civilization that populates the entire middle of the map ("The Grox"), that you have to make war on before you can proceed to find out the secret at the center of Spore.__It's a terrifyingly large simulacrum-----large enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Large enough to make me refer to doing missions as "working odd jobs", large enough to have made me miss a week of school work two months ago. Large enough, in fact, to make me a little bit scared of finding out what's at the middle of the galaxy, actually. At this point, I would say that there's a bit of selfhood that I lose every time I play this game; at least temporarily.
__I've been at an impasse for months now. I decided that I wanted to find out what lay at the center of the galaxy sometime near the middle of October, and yet I still haven't done it. Part of my hesitation is purely practical. I have schoolwork to do, and waging war on the Grox seems like it would take at least an entire day, maybe two. But I have deep sort of angst about what I might find there, after I'd ignored all of my responsibilities to beat this game. What sort of thing would I find there? What's the ideological centerpiece of the game that I'm allowing myself to be swallowed by? __Well, I have my suspicions:
__Every culture that you run into in the game is assigned a philosophy---and nearly half of the aliens that you meet are religious zealots who worship someone named "Spode". The hints start piling up at some point, and you're finally led to believe that no one less than God Himself is at the center of the Spore's galaxy. ---------Frankly, if I'm going to meet Him, I want to be prepared. Recently I found out that, if I eradicate the populations of 50 different planets, I'll earn the "Conqueror" level 5 badge, and gain access to a bomb that can destroy an entire planet. I'm at 23 planets right now. Once I get the chance, I'm going to buy two of them. In Spore, my mission from now on is to kill the Almighty.Whatever it is that I find at the center of that swirl is going to be the "message" of this video game. It might not be God, in the theological sense, but it's the force around which the rest of the game's action revolves. If I want to destroy the simulacrum's ideological heft, I'll have to absorb myself in it completely.
__.....anyway, consider that a sort of a thesis statement for what I want to do with this blog. To really get a handle on the outer limits of discourse, or pop's permeation, you kind of have to love it. So, like in Spore, the only way to kill the god at the center of culture is to soak it all in. Movies, TV, journalism, poetry, junk food, bad tatoos, weird video games, philosophy, comic books from the 60's, Kanye West. Let's talk about all of it! We'll share in the terror and vice of modern culture together, and you can watch me slowly lose the ability to form an original thought. Sex On Christmas is a reference to a Beat Happening song, by the way.
1 comment:
I think you should've just written your senior thesis about Spore.
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