Spore: The Best Game Ever

Ever since Ashley and I jumped the gun on Christmas, I have been compulsively playing Spore. Typicality, I don’t play many video game. When I do play, I rarely finish. Spore isn’t your typical role playing game, instead of leveling up your warrior with nerdy new features, in Spore, your creature evolves. You start by controlling a cell, evolving into a creature. That creature teams up with other creatures and makes a tribe. That tribe becomes powerful and turns into a civilization. Once your civilization is supreme, you move on to conquer outer space.

The game is very fun. Entertainment value aside, the game does a great job providing an accessible vantage point at how life really works. It’s exaggerated of course, but it offers a fun explanation of the theory of evolution. Once in the civilization stage, religion does make an appearance, however it’s only portrayed as another form of technology, on par with military technology.

It’s an extremely ambitious undertaking, to offer an entertaining and playable version of evolution all the way from cell, to galactic adventurer. The game doesn’t take too long to beat. I’ve been playing for just a few days and I’m already at the space stage. A few days play might be too short for many people, but I don’t have time to dedicate to really long term games.

Anti-Spore is as you would expect, anti-it. This mom is afraid of the damage of allowing children play an evolution game. In one entry she talks about how the game actually proves creation in how the player “creates” their creature, but still, it’s too dangerous to dabble in.

Last night, Ashley and I took a trip tp the the Yaglenski Family Holiday Light Show. It’s a free Christmas light show that the family puts on every year. You pull up and every 20 minutes the computer controlled light display puts on a show to a privately controlled radio frequency. It’s cool.

Just Be Good For Goodness Sake

More then a religious bus riders will be displeased in the DC Metro area.  The AHA (American Humanists Association) is running the
“Why Believe In a God” campaign during the holidays to inform people about the “Humanists” philosophy.  Humanist is a more positive sounding version of atheist.  They are both exactly the same thing, they believe in reason, evolving understand and all that good stuff.