I downloaded the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator and had a good time creating my aliens last night and watching them dance around and act cute (they manage to act cute no matter how fearsome you try to make them). Even with the extremely limited set of creature features available in the trial version, you can make a surprising range of creatures. The mind boggles when you think about all the creatures that are possible when you unlock the full power of the engine and start sharing your creatures and creature parts with others.
The mash-up of this creature creator and social networking has me all “a-flutter.” Why? Because it ties in so well with my research area and my interests in virtual worlds.
In grad school I was fortunate enough to be able to train under one of the founders of the creative cognition approach – Dr. Tom Ward. His research, and mine by association and training, examined conceptual expansion. Conceptual expansion occurs during creative tasks. When people are coming up with novel examples of a category (drawing alien animals), they tend to base their creations on existing examples of the category (knowledge of animals on earth). This is manifested in the tendency to include common features of category examples in their novel creations (legs and arms, eyes and ears, etc.). Their creations are constrained by existing knowledge. Dr. Ward’s seminal work investigating this phenomenon demonstrated the various ways in which exiting knowledge constrains novel products (Ward, T. B. (1994). Structured imagination: The role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive Psychology, 27, 1-40).
The constraining effects of knowledge on creativity has proven to be a robust phenomenon. Consequently, I expect that we will see the same trends in the types of creatures generated using the Spore Creature Creator, even though the ability to create almost anything that can be imagined is certainly possible with this engine. The first types of creatures developed by people using the engine will resemble Earth creatures in their basic attributes……at least initially.
However, the social networking component that EA has built into the game ensures that the end user won’t be creating these creatures in in isolation for very long. They will be exposed to other people’s creatures and experience a greater diversity of examples. This should expand their knowledge of the category to include a more diverse set of examples. They could then generate a more diverse and less Earth-like creature as a result. Of course this is just a guess at this point. But I think it makes a very interesting research project.
There is another interesting twist to the story of how existing knowledge affects performance in creative generation tasks.
When people are asked to imagine an alien animal, one of the most common approaches to the task is to imagine an existing earth animal and start the creative process from that point. The result is an alien that possesses typical Earth animal features. However, when people are told approach the task by thinking about how their imagined animal will feed, defend itself, move, and reproduce, they end up creating more imaginative creatures. The creatures generated using this approach are less likely to have standard senses and appendages. In short, thinking of more abstract features of the category results in more novel creations (Ward, T. B., Patterson, M. J. & Sifonis, C. (2004). The role of specificity and abstraction in creative idea generation. Creativity Research Journal 16, 1-9).
In Spore, the creature creation is inextricably tied with consideration of the type of food the creature will eat, how it will move, how it will defend itself and how it will socialize. Because people are forced to consider these things while creating their creatures, it is likely they will generate creatures that are more deviant from earth creatures than if this wasn’t such a large component of the game. Because the Spore creatures’ interactions in the game environment are critically determined by their biology, gamers will learn fairly quickly the degree to which they can ignore survival and still survive in the game.
Right now, I have no clue how the influence of this component of the game could be examined experimentally. Give me time 
I have more to say about this game as it pertains to emergent behavior as well as a few choice words about EA’s fairly draconian EUA but I’ve prattled on enough for one post.
