Virtual Petri Dishes: Digital Evolution Discussed

This month, the UNESCO City of Literature are releasing as their 'Big Read' Conan-Doyle's The Lost World. This early 20th century adventure story, with its tale of dinosaurs discovered on a lonely plateau in South America, has been chosen to commemorate both Conan-Doyle's 150th anniversary, and Darwin's 200th. With such a portentous collision of dates, it seemed the least we could do to get involved.

As part of the extended series of events to celebrate the 'Big Read', The Skinny is hosting a discussion about videogames, and where they meet our understanding of genetics and evolution (if at all). Titled 'Digital Evolution: What Can Gaming Teach Us About Where Life Came From and Where It's Heading?', the event will feature leading thinkers (award-winning SF author Ken MacLeod, synthetic biologist Dr Alistair Elfick and genomics expert Steve Sturdy) who will be setting out to discuss what is a fascinating question at a time when the boundaries between technology and biology are becoming ever more blurred.

Information about how to get along to this (free) event is included in the bar to your right, but we thought we would whet your appetite for some of the topics to be discussed by taking a casual look at some noted evolutionary gaming titles and scouring them for Darwinian inspiration.

One game many people will have heard of – it being really recent and getting a lot of press – is Spore. A game from the folk who invented The Sims, which aims to simulate a species' entire evolution, from first-ever bacterium to intergalactic space scoundrels.

Bigged up due to its expansive, all encompassing nature, Spore lets you guide your single-celled thingy through the primordial soup, up to multi-cellular stature, out of the soup, through society and then boldly on into the big black. All this is while allowing you to control its physical and mental nature by choosing from a few common traits seen in reality land (they had some evolutionary biologists on board and everything!). But the game seemed to fall short of any real-life simulation because it tried too hard to be… fun.

Allowing you to undo any evolutionary changes at any stage (so as to avoid hideously deformed creatures you have worked on dying from, um, 'evolutionary pressures' after you the gamer have put in a good few hours of toil) also had the effect of rendering the whole thing somewhat lacking in 'edge' (although it is entertaining to gift a creature 30 legs and one eye, in some kind of crazed bid to make the universe's best tap dancer).

Another game, much better at simulating life genetics and evolution, was the Creatures series. Setting out to be a life simulator (with creatures and chemical processes modelled on our own), and being much smaller (16 creatures at once, as opposed to a galaxy full) in scale and scope than Spore, it achieved something much more true to life.

Your task was to rear cute 'Norn' creatures on a space ship. Feeding, teaching, training, treating and breeding the little freaks to your heart's manipulative content. Being based on a whole range of biological principles the game would allow you to find creatures with ideal genotypes for a given situation (much like in life) and breed them to amplify this fact. Like real people, some might get fat easier or be more resistant to a disease. Others could suffer depression, have a mad case of ADD, or even just be a weird colour. You could see how these things panned out across the generations, and could in theory select for traits which were beneficial for your Norns' survival (or just funny to watch), not unlike the selection of dairy cattle or the breeding of more meat efficient spherical cows in real life. All this served to make for an excellent and compelling life simulator, and this was a good decade ago. Sadly poor sales (the game didn’t quite have the broad appeal of Spore; it was a fair amount more serious) meant that this life sim never got past a hyper Tamagotchi stage, though the concepts it touted were pretty darned sound.

Although these two probably do evolution most competently, other games did attempt something similar. For example Evolva saw you controlling creatures which would evolve depending on what they ate, gaining the traits of whatever it was they just killed. Great fun in theory, Evolva’s scientific merit is held back by the fact these evolutions would generally allow them super laser eyes and rocket legs, and your creatures were a team of interplanetary assassins. Personally, I think there's a strong case that the theory should stand... because it's hilarious.

It is fair to say that games have tried and will continue to try to mimic life, from the humble (and mostly dead) Tamagotchis of yesteryear, to 50-armed space-spore creations and a whole bunch of crazy games that we don’t even know about (they haven’t been conceived yet). Game designers will no doubt keep trying, but until these digital lives stop trying to be entertaining, their merit as credible life forms will forever be in question. Which is probably for the best, as no one wants real life inside their computer, do they? Imagine the mess!