Spore - How to create a Online|Offline Mashup

If you’ve been tuned to the online world, you’ve certainly came across the name Spore someplace. In case you’ve been wondering what it is, it is basically the new game from the Sims’s Creator Will Wright (The Sims anyone?). The name of the creator itself should ring a bell as he is one of the defining videogame creators in all of the Videogame history. And if the name Spore doesn’t ring a bell, then believe me when I say it’s just a matter of time before it does.

Spore is a multi-genre “massive single-player online game” under development by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

Basically, it’s a Pac-man meets Diablo meets Civilization meets Star Trek. I could go on in describing the videogame in detail – from the AI to the graphics, but what I want to focus on this time in on the label “massive single-player online game”. Maxis has found a new way of UGC in Spore – an offline game whose content is populated by the users’ creations.

User-generated content is a major feature of Spore; there are eighteen different types of editors (some unique to a phase), and even a music editor which allows players to share songs. Will Wright has stated that in addition to being simple, all the editors will be as similar as possible so that skills learned are easily transferable from one editor to the next.

The UGC for the game began before the game is even released - via the release of the Spore Creature creator. While first looked at as a teaser for the game, allowing users to create their creature and play with the customization the game allows, the Creature Creator actually serves a deeper purpose – the creation of the Spore universe. In the final game release, users will create their creature and begin playing only to find that their planet – as well as various on the Spore universe – is also populated by rival creatures. These rival creatures are none other than the creatures created by the users via the Creature Creator and the final game itself.

How does this work? Basically via something Will Wright named “Asynchronous Sharing”. There is no multiplayer gaming in Spore – what happens is that every content created by the users with Internet access will be automatically uploaded to a central database, then cataloged and rated for quality, and finally distributed to the other players’ games. With just a few KBs per item, Maxis found a way to create a game in which only the basis is done by the company – all the rest is user made. If this wasn’t all, you’ll receive updates on how your species is faring in the games all over the world. You might even receive an unfortunate message stating that your specie has become extinct.

Another interesting development (probably not as much as the Asynchronous Sharing, but still an interesting mashup the game developed) is the partnership with Youtube that allows users to upload videos from their game directly from the game into Youtube. Users will also be rewarded by Maxis with badges for the creations they submit via game or Youtube – based on the number of accesses other users do with the content in question.

Being released on September world-wide, Spore has all the ingredients to create a memorable game. Not only the game mechanics, story and general interest are top notch – as you can see by the buzz generated online – but they also created a new level of UGC that doesn’t depend on the users’ random creativity rages on Youtube, Flickr, Blogs, etc… but via an offline application that gives them the tools to create and gathers their information in an automatic way. Let’s wait to see how the release will be done marketing-wise, but one thing is for sure – before release, the buzz generated around the game has practically done all the work necessary to guarantee the game sales.

For the aspiring marketeer, this is a valuable learning – play with the available technologies instead of just jumping to the next one. With the amount of information around, there is still an unbelievable amount of space for mashups. And as we can see through Spore, mashups are a strong bet towards creating different experiences for your users.