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Spore creatures could challenge copyright holders
July 31, 2008
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.
Eventually technology will allow DNA to be designed on computer and the computer will be able to calculate what the animal will look like. Then will be able to have a company generate a creature using that designed DNA.
Posted by: Sue White | August 1st, 2008 at 4:42 am | Report this commentI’d like to use my own DNA as a starting point and combine with other animals’ DNA and have computer try random alterations (with simulation testing) to get to a super human/alien and then have the DNA manufactured and put into my own eggs to produce babies. Also have the telomers extended so that the babies can live for 10000 years.
In response to Sue White’s comment, I doubt that will be possible, at least the way it is imagined. There is more to life than DNA, not least because you need to know what to do with it. The DNA for a human, for example, does not explicitly state that it must be baked inside another human for nine months. For a computer to simulate the ontogenic development of an organism (which it must in order to calculate its appearance and overal biochemical functions) it must know the conditions in which development must occur to result in the desired organism. In the case of viviparous organisms, that requires that you already know all about the organism you are trying to generate so that the program can properly incubate it to full term.
Posted by: Marcus Sampson | August 1st, 2008 at 2:00 pm | Report this comment“The possibilities in Spore for making realistic imitations have not been seen in video games before”
Never been seen before? What’s Wolfenstein 3D or Unreal Tournament then? Chopped liver?
I mean granted Spore is going to be so awesome, the only thing EA has to worry about is where they’re going to put all the money, but realistic imitations have cropped up in video games LONG before Spore was even thought up. You could use custom skins to make yourself look like Homer Simpson in Unreal Tournament, Pacman in Quake 2 even look like Robert De Niro in Grand Theft Auto 3. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made a Wall-E skin for Unreal Tournament 3.
Posted by: Lenny | August 1st, 2008 at 7:27 pm | Report this commentI think they meant the -procedural animation- system of this quality has not been seen before… it’s actually very innovative.
Here’s a link to a paper by one of the Spore devs talking about how they made their animation system: http://chrishecker.com/How_To_Animate_a_Character_You%27ve_Never_Seen_Before
Posted by: Pietoro | August 1st, 2008 at 11:51 pm | Report this commentWell, compared to spore, those are chopped liver, amirite? No but seriously, for all the end-user modification tools avaliable to the masses, spore outdoes them in leaps and bounds.
And we have a lot of work to do before we can give a computer a DNA sequence, render up the result, then alienify it, reduce that back down to dna, and synthesize it in the lab.
A whole lot of work.
In the grand scheme of things, we don’t have a clear understanding of how your dna is converted into you, and we discover new mechanisms all the time. 20,000 genes produce something on the order of 400,000 unique proteins in you (maybe only 200,000, these estimations change frequently); theres a LoT of work left to do.
Posted by: Nate | August 2nd, 2008 at 1:50 am | Report this commentI have to agree… the way he stated it could be interpreted to mean “haven’t been done this well before” but I had to go back and re-read it with a precisionist mindset not to see it as “nobody’s done realistic imitations in a game before.”
I think what he’s trying to say is “nobody has done it this well before” or “nobody has done it to this degree.” Perhaps a re-phrasing would make it more obvious.
Frankly, though, if the Simpsons characters animated in Quake (and using sounds sampled from the show) aren’t enough to cause a crack-down (not to mention several dozen other characters and real people), I suspect that free fan-created content in this game shouldn’t either.
I won’t say “Won’t” because I know better. But it shouldn’t.
Posted by: Jeffrey Nonken | August 2nd, 2008 at 7:50 pm | Report this comment“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.”
Didn’t this exact situation come up before in a video game which allowed you to create your own superhero? I forget the name of the game, but I’m pretty sure the lawyers forced them to neuter their character creation suite.
Posted by: Scott VV | August 25th, 2008 at 8:27 am | Report this comment