Sporepedia & Metaverse

What is is and what does it do?

Sporepedia is really two different things, a encyclopedia and a social networking service. While you are playing Spore, your galaxy is being populated by content created by other players. This goes for everything from flora to intelligent species on distant plants. Sporepedia presents itself as a set of cards (profiles if you will) with the name of the creator, the stats of the entity and a tag/subscribe option. The content is not always random, you can tag the creator of the entity and subscribe to them, triggering Spore to download more of this person’s created content. Anything that is created by other players, through any of the editors, can be shared very easily. The practical purpose of this, is that you can pollinate your world with content that suits your style and block the content you dislike. This ties in with the social networking segment (or Metaverse) of Spore, as all players and their creations can be ranked on the metaverse according to the number of subscribers that they have, allowing you to easily find the most popular spaceships, creatures, buildings etc. Players can also download someone’s entire set of content, called a Sporecast. Players would do this if they absolutely love the creator’s style and want to include everything they have made, from their UFO to their user created plants. An example of a Sporecast, would be if someone had designed their creature and the species’ architecture to resemble Star Wars. This aspect of Spore is intended to not only build a strong community, but also give to players an incentive (ie. competitive incentive) to create the most interesting and creative content. Not to mention prolong the game’s appeal. The social networking service goes beyond this, as Sporepedia also includes a facebook/myspace like profile, where you can comment on other player creations and make new friends.

What to expect

• Easy content sharing, with very little downloading involved as most of the content can be rebuilt by Spore itself, it simply needs instructions.
• Facebook/Myspace like profile with friends, messaging and a comment system
• Content popularity ranking - individual pieces and aggregate sets (Sporecasts)
• Pollination of your Spore galaxy with content made by other players
• Subscribe to the content of friends or strangers - you can have a little or as much control as you want over what populates your world

According to Will Wright

Every time the player makes something in the game a creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play. And whenever I encounter this content I actually end up building a little card deck in the game that we call Sporepedia, there’s a little card to represent every piece of content, every creature, every building, every vehicle, and I can see who made that. I can see what its stats are. I can bookmark that person if I like their stuff and have their stuff like I can find my best friend and say make sure my best friend’s stuff comes into my game, so I encounter their worlds first. So it’s almost what we were seeing people do with The Sims, where they would go browse web sites looking for cool stuff and then download it, except we kind of burn it all into the gameplay. I don’t have to leave the game, put it in my folder, go browse the web and it’s now part of the gameplay experience.

Metaverse

We’re going to have different feedback mechanisms. One of the things we’re going to be doing continually is rating the most popular content, so when you make a creature you’re going to be able to go to what we call the metaverse report and get a sense of what is your creature’s popularity ranking relative to other people’s creatures. And if you’re not on the Net, we will still have a large database of stuff on your disk that it will draw from instead, so it’s not required, but it’s pretty simple turning it on.

Pollinated Content

Whenever you make something in the game, a very compressed representation gets sent to our servers. As you play the game our servers are continually sending you new content for your world to fill out your ecosystem; your galaxy; opponents; cities; vehicles; whatever-it’s being drawn from our database of content that other players have made.

Now, it’s also trying to pick stuff that’s appropriate for your game level. You don’t want kick-ass creatures killing you right at the very beginning of the creature game. But the player also has a lot of control over that stuff. I can make a buddy list, and it will try to put my buddy’s content in my universe at a higher priority. I can subscribe to Sporecasts, which are aggregations of content that players have decided to basically organize themselves. Also, when I get a card for a piece of content–whether it be mine or somebody else’s–at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It’s like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there’s going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion. Then we add things like Flickr tagging of content and stuff like that so that people can search what is probably going to be a very large database of content.

We’ve put a lot of functions in because this is unknown territory for a game, this type of sharing of content. Yet looking at The Sims, that was the thing you know people enjoyed almost as much as the game itself–sitting there playing, organizing, collecting the stuff that other players were making for the game. For them, that actually became a good bit of the gameplay of the Sims: people aggregating, collecting, browsing, and then using that content for things like storytelling. (Newsweek, 2008)