Spore without intelligent design

Darwin@HOME is a project that uses idle personal computer power to do a whole lot of simulating of artificial life. (Much like SETI@HOME uses that power to sort through radio data from space to see if any of it is from, well, aliens.) They started with simulating something simple: locomotion. How to walk. How to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Plans are to expand it into a competitive world. Getting food. Hunter and prey. The good stuff. So a lot like the early stages of Spore but without the meddling human input.

(via Kottke via Boing Boing)

(Warning: Boing Boing has quite a few interesting things posted this morning. I try to not make this blog just a Boing Boing reposting site... today I expect to fail.)

Play God with The Stars

The celebrity Spore creature creation vote contest charity thing has started. Well worth a look. Tons of celebrities and not quite celebrities and their messed up minds.

I not even going to bother listing them all. Except to say... Melissa Joan Heart is messed up. She created something that has crawled out from a Lovecraft story. Amphibian-like with a spike mace for a tail, a toothed sphincter mouth and what appears to be buzz saws extending out from the back of the knees. And she named it Buttercup.

Give people the tools to create ANYTHING and they will make penises

Honestly, NSFW.

The demo for Spore Creature Creator (which is sort of like a demo for a demo) has been out for about 48 hours now (although it was leaked to the internets a few days before that), and youtube is being swarmed with vids of folks creations.






Not surprisingly, a lot of those creations are creatures with large penises or shaped like large penises...



Or "beasts with two backs"...
(It appears the video of this creature has been removed from YouTube... for some reason.)

Make your own conclusions all of this says about human nature.

(via Kotaku)

I wish Cronenberg was on the list

For those you don't know, Spore is the next game (or perhaps "game") by Will Wright (and team), maker of TheSims (and SimCity... and SimAnts... man, I loved SimAnts). It has gotten video game geeks and the industry at large all atwitter with anticipation.

Like TheSims in is a "sandbox" game, in that there aren't really goals. It gives you a bunch of tools and such to play with. In Spore you start with a single celled creature, swimming in the muck. Then you evolve. As you evolve, you (the player) get to craft your creature into whatever you want. Forming your creature like Playdoh, attaching parts and coloring it. You want to have a creature with three legs and claws? Fine. How about arms that come of its ass? Will do. Something with a head twice the size of the rest of its body? Yep. Nigh infinite possibilities. And all full animated. How does a seven legged, three armed, spiked butted creature walk? Fight? Love?

It doesn't stop there. From creature it evolves into a society. Tribes to civilization. Develop a society, create technologies, go to war. Eventually travel to space... and explore the universe. So everything from a single sell to the universe. Compelling, yes?

(PapaSix pointed out that for a game about evolution, it teaches a pro-intelligent design message. I'm looking forward to that debate.)

Now, a lot of folks are saying this will be bigger than TheSims. I doubt that. The people who say that are people who follow computer gaming blogs and read gaming magazines. Geeks, nerds, what have you. Me. TheSims is so successful because it basically is playing with dolls. Dress them up, give them furniture, play house. Spore, on the other hand, appeals to people who's school notebooks were filled with drawings of space creatures and space ships and the like. You know, the people who now read gaming blogs.

Both games to appeal to people who like to pull the wings off flies. Or build bathrooms with out doors. Or beings without anuses. So theres that.

Anywhozits, in a marketing genius move, EA is selling just the creature building portion part of the game, cleverly named Spore Creature Creator. Yeah, it's $10 demo. To create some buzz, they're holding a celebrity creature building contest. Celebrities will build a creature, they'll but them up on the web and the unwashed masses (people who read gaming blog) will vote. A lot of the names of on the list are gaming bloggers and the like (celebrity is a flexible concept). But some...

• Stan Lee
• Richard Branson
• David Lynch
• Ellijah Wood
• Kevin Rose
• Mark Cuban
• Curt Schilling
• Kent Nichols
• Robert Scoble
• Veronica Belmont
• Carlos Santana
• Bijou Phillips
• Brian Crecente
  
• Flight of the Conchords

I have to say, I am very curious to what Lynch does. And Flight of the Conchords.

(via Kotaku)