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- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Something I've pondered on before is how video games depict and gamify evolution.
PLAGUE, INC - EVOLUTION OF EPIDEMIC DISEASE
Usually evolution is depicted as some kind of skill tree. Take Plague, Inc (which was the app store version of the Pandemic series of flash games) for example. That game cast you as playing as an epidemic disease, goal, kill everyone. The way you engaged with it was choosing how to evolve. That was the only way, in fact. Getting kills (and some other things) gave you the magic evolution points to do an evolution and become more dangerous. When you add a trait, it also transmits automatically to all of your infected people.
Evolution in Plague Inc, then, is magic. It's a very fun game. And it's rather educational, at least in the sense of having all these skills be real life medical symptoms with detailed descriptions and logic to what they do (in terms of effecting visibility, deadliness, contagiousness, and spread through specific climates and propagation methods) and how they interact with public health measures. But the evolution is magical and ultimately runs contrary to how it actually selects on plagues. In the real world you get a disease that's souped up to live parasitically within a host. Usually it doesn't "want" to kill the host. Sometimes it does, but only if it does so slowly enough to spread within a sustainable community. But this epidemic, this animal equivalent to a cold, will break loose into a new animal. It's geared up to fight - to a standstill - the immune system of something like a horse, and so when it invades something like a human it just fucking kills it, because it's mindless, it just does what it does regardless of the effect. And so you get mass death (if it doesn't burn too fast), but ultimately that very mass death selects against the more virulent strains and the weaker people until the disease CALMS DOWN enough to live in a state of truce with us. This is why plagues, even before vaccination was invented, would be catastrophic on our first encounter and eventually become nuisances after enough generations. (I don't remember how many.)
And of course the mutation doesn't change existing versions of it, just new ones. In Plague Inc the easiest cheapest strategy is to basically have a kill switch, infect everyone first (so President Madgascar doesn't screw you over) and then start the killin'.
Plague Inc is a good game, but the irony of it is that despite having such extensive evolution theming, none of it makes any real world sense.
ANCESTORS: THE HUMANKIND ODYSSEY - EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
In another title, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, your goal is to evolve from gorillaman to anatomically modern human. The way evolution works in it, though, is different. It's more like an RPG of the type where you only level up a skill by training it, and almost all of them revolve not around physical characteristics but mental ones. You unlock the skills faster by doing them with babies around, and the total number you can lock in depends on the number of babies, so that it both represents learning and rewards propagation.
I think what Ancestors really depicts is the process of learning, both individually - by the player constantly being pushed to play around with their environment, to cultivate a sense of curiosity like a real homo ______ - but also of how that learning is transmitted to younger generations. You only ever encounter other primates of your own lineage, which is probably mostly just laziness on the dev's part, but to me that suggests that the point is that your clan's positive adaptations meant they expanded their range, conquered, succeeded, while your current troop are the ones pushing the frontier.
Physical mutations come about as part of major leveling up steps. I didn't understand how this was intended to be played for a long time, but you have a random chance of babby being special and they definitely get it if exposed to Magic Space Radiation from an asteroid strike. These asteroid strikes are mostly just there to give big 2000 A Space Odyssey vibes. You are incentivized, more or less, to keep reproducing until you get the chance to load up your babies with the physical mutations and then proceed to the next major leap.
In all, it is a very interesting take on evolution, it's even more interesting precisely because you don't actually control the physical process, you only control the things we control in real life.
THRIVE - UNICELLULAR ORGANISMS
Have not gotten to play this yet. But I am very much curious about it. It's funny, I became a social sciences kid (and eventually a math major), but when I was little I could have been easily steered towards doctor because I spent a huge amount of time drawing and looking at stuff about cells. I knew my cellular organelles by heart. Watched Ozzy and Drex. Thought, wouldn't a cell be an interesting topic for a city-builder. Well, someone had the same thought.
It looks, though, like it does the typical "evolution is just a skill tree/research tree" approach.
HOW CAN THE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION BE GAMIFIED?
Ultimately, what I think makes the existing depictions of evolution suitable as games but fail to really portray evolution itself properly, is that they suppose that creatures have control of their own evolution. That it is a purposeful process, when it's the exact opposite. Creatures don't think, "oh I wish I had a longer neck." They either have a longer neck and survive or they don't and they don't. I've met plenty of adults that don't get this. Heard one who repeated that myth that our little toe will disappear because its vestigial (which would require it to somehow hamper reproduction). Hear people that think that real plagues operate on Plague Inc logic of TRYING to kill us. Just look at how shitty the public's understanding of epidemiology was during COVID.
I think the way you make a real evolution game is to make a game that is very tense and casts the player in competition with not just other nature but their own kind. The difference is that you have an ability they don't, and you have to outcompete them. Not just live, actually cross some threshold of doing better. There could be a choice (which could be cool for things where the species diverge from each other by specializing). There may be no choice. Either way, the game presents a challenge and you either man the fuck up and win or you don't. And the challenge is set up so that you're going to have a hell of a time unless you learn how to use that new ability.
That's classic game design.
PLAGUE, INC - EVOLUTION OF EPIDEMIC DISEASE
Usually evolution is depicted as some kind of skill tree. Take Plague, Inc (which was the app store version of the Pandemic series of flash games) for example. That game cast you as playing as an epidemic disease, goal, kill everyone. The way you engaged with it was choosing how to evolve. That was the only way, in fact. Getting kills (and some other things) gave you the magic evolution points to do an evolution and become more dangerous. When you add a trait, it also transmits automatically to all of your infected people.
Evolution in Plague Inc, then, is magic. It's a very fun game. And it's rather educational, at least in the sense of having all these skills be real life medical symptoms with detailed descriptions and logic to what they do (in terms of effecting visibility, deadliness, contagiousness, and spread through specific climates and propagation methods) and how they interact with public health measures. But the evolution is magical and ultimately runs contrary to how it actually selects on plagues. In the real world you get a disease that's souped up to live parasitically within a host. Usually it doesn't "want" to kill the host. Sometimes it does, but only if it does so slowly enough to spread within a sustainable community. But this epidemic, this animal equivalent to a cold, will break loose into a new animal. It's geared up to fight - to a standstill - the immune system of something like a horse, and so when it invades something like a human it just fucking kills it, because it's mindless, it just does what it does regardless of the effect. And so you get mass death (if it doesn't burn too fast), but ultimately that very mass death selects against the more virulent strains and the weaker people until the disease CALMS DOWN enough to live in a state of truce with us. This is why plagues, even before vaccination was invented, would be catastrophic on our first encounter and eventually become nuisances after enough generations. (I don't remember how many.)
And of course the mutation doesn't change existing versions of it, just new ones. In Plague Inc the easiest cheapest strategy is to basically have a kill switch, infect everyone first (so President Madgascar doesn't screw you over) and then start the killin'.
Plague Inc is a good game, but the irony of it is that despite having such extensive evolution theming, none of it makes any real world sense.
ANCESTORS: THE HUMANKIND ODYSSEY - EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
In another title, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, your goal is to evolve from gorillaman to anatomically modern human. The way evolution works in it, though, is different. It's more like an RPG of the type where you only level up a skill by training it, and almost all of them revolve not around physical characteristics but mental ones. You unlock the skills faster by doing them with babies around, and the total number you can lock in depends on the number of babies, so that it both represents learning and rewards propagation.
I think what Ancestors really depicts is the process of learning, both individually - by the player constantly being pushed to play around with their environment, to cultivate a sense of curiosity like a real homo ______ - but also of how that learning is transmitted to younger generations. You only ever encounter other primates of your own lineage, which is probably mostly just laziness on the dev's part, but to me that suggests that the point is that your clan's positive adaptations meant they expanded their range, conquered, succeeded, while your current troop are the ones pushing the frontier.
Physical mutations come about as part of major leveling up steps. I didn't understand how this was intended to be played for a long time, but you have a random chance of babby being special and they definitely get it if exposed to Magic Space Radiation from an asteroid strike. These asteroid strikes are mostly just there to give big 2000 A Space Odyssey vibes. You are incentivized, more or less, to keep reproducing until you get the chance to load up your babies with the physical mutations and then proceed to the next major leap.
In all, it is a very interesting take on evolution, it's even more interesting precisely because you don't actually control the physical process, you only control the things we control in real life.
THRIVE - UNICELLULAR ORGANISMS
Have not gotten to play this yet. But I am very much curious about it. It's funny, I became a social sciences kid (and eventually a math major), but when I was little I could have been easily steered towards doctor because I spent a huge amount of time drawing and looking at stuff about cells. I knew my cellular organelles by heart. Watched Ozzy and Drex. Thought, wouldn't a cell be an interesting topic for a city-builder. Well, someone had the same thought.
It looks, though, like it does the typical "evolution is just a skill tree/research tree" approach.
HOW CAN THE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION BE GAMIFIED?
Ultimately, what I think makes the existing depictions of evolution suitable as games but fail to really portray evolution itself properly, is that they suppose that creatures have control of their own evolution. That it is a purposeful process, when it's the exact opposite. Creatures don't think, "oh I wish I had a longer neck." They either have a longer neck and survive or they don't and they don't. I've met plenty of adults that don't get this. Heard one who repeated that myth that our little toe will disappear because its vestigial (which would require it to somehow hamper reproduction). Hear people that think that real plagues operate on Plague Inc logic of TRYING to kill us. Just look at how shitty the public's understanding of epidemiology was during COVID.
I think the way you make a real evolution game is to make a game that is very tense and casts the player in competition with not just other nature but their own kind. The difference is that you have an ability they don't, and you have to outcompete them. Not just live, actually cross some threshold of doing better. There could be a choice (which could be cool for things where the species diverge from each other by specializing). There may be no choice. Either way, the game presents a challenge and you either man the fuck up and win or you don't. And the challenge is set up so that you're going to have a hell of a time unless you learn how to use that new ability.
That's classic game design.
