John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney, loves playing with the Spore Creature Creator according to Maxis, Pixar’s Bay Area neighbour.
But should he show alarm at what is being invented and uploaded online by others or welcome in a whole new generation of animators?
Spore is Maxis’s long-awaited follow-up to The Sims, launching on September 5, and the Creature Creator is an appetiser that allows players to build life forms that can be placed in the game later and used to evolve civilisations and take part in interplanetary expansion.
In the meantime, they can be uploaded to Sporepedia, a vast shareable online database of user creations. Electronic Arts, Maxis’s parent, said this week 2.5m copies of the Creator had either been downloaded for free or bought as a boxed version, while more than 2m creatures have been created so far.
I received a full demo of the game from Thomas Vu, a Maxis producer, this week. He showed me the flexibility of the Creature Creator in shaping backbones and bodies and attaching all manner of limbs and appendages. This was only one of eight Creators in the game as well, with others available to make objects such as vehicles and buildings.
I could imagine Mr Lasseter and his Pixar animators using the Creators to prototype future animation characters, such is the sophistication of the tools and the flexibility they allow.
In fact, as we flicked through Sporepedia, Mr Vu pointed out a very passable imitation of Pixar’s Wall-E character in the library, created by a player.
I wondered if Mr Lasseter would approve of this as adding extra buzz for his movie or be more inclined to reach for the phone and call his lawyer.
The possibilities in Spore for making realistic imitations have not been seen in video games before and the user-generated content it will create is going to launch it into the realm of YouTube in risking copyright complaints from intellectual-property owners.
It also means questionable content of another kind can be created, such as the flying genitalia that has struck the Second Life virtual world.
Maxis says there will be parental controls and the Spore community has been very good at policing itself and flagging such content for removal so far.
On the opportunity to reproduce accurately characters, buildings, cars and other trademarked products, the studio says it will adopt YouTube’s stance of taking objects down on requests from the copyright owners.
They could be kept very busy, Spore users have already created more species than exist on Earth with the Creature Creator, just imagine what they can do when they get more tools.
