Spore - Creature Creator nearly here...

I have long talked about the game Spore from EA games that is due for release in September this year - and the potential for it to be used within education. There has been a lot of speculation about the game and what it will bring to the gaming world. I am excited because of the possibility for gamers to develop and build a creature from a microscopic phase to a space faring organism capable of terraforming planets.

Next week we see the first step towards the release of the game, EA will release on Tuesday 17th June the Spore Creature Creator via a trial option or a fully functional option. This application will allow users to develop and explore the creature construction components of the game - this development is an exciting prospect as you will be able to get a feel for the type of options available when constructing a creature and in the long run may help with some of the decisions we make when we play the real game and get DNA credits to advance our creatures from the primordial swamp into the spore universe.

Imagine the possibility for our students to hypotheses and test the movement and actions of creatures they create - the little variations that can be made to change behaviours as well as the colour, look and mood. Imagine the creature creator beng used on large screens, data projectors or IWB's, oh the possibilities - but do we yet as teachers and educators have the capacity to use Spore in our classrooms?

EA have also taken the next step in the gaming environment to look to enable Spore to be as Web 2.0 friendly as possible - spore will enable players of the game (our students) to start to do some of the following simply and easily:

• Take pictures of creatures and send them via e-mail.
• Record video of your creature and game play that you will then be able to uploaded straight to YouTube
• Search and find our creatures, created by others and drag and drop the creature image into your own game software to then be able to play with that very creature.
• Ability to send creature creations to third parties to put into blogs, online comic books, or even print out into a 3D mold
• Creatures will be able to be tagged which will enable them be sorted
• Data from spore will be outputted in RSS or embeddable HTML
• There will even be a user-created wiki environment called SporePedia

The Creature creator is expected to be available online for $10USD and will around 300Mb to download.

The following posts are worth checking out for more detail:

Analysis: The Evolution of Maxis' Spore - http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/06/analysis_the_evolution_of_maxi.php#more

'Spore' set to mold the future of Web 2.0-enabled gaming -
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9965497-2.html

Thanks Darren for the links.