Could the game 'Spore' teach us about life on alien worlds? An epic journey from a tiny cell to a complex organism (Part II:    • The Biology of Spore | Part II  )

I don’t think there’s ever been a video game quite like Spore. Released in the late 2000s, the game lets you create and then guide a lifeform from a microorganism in a tidepool to an advanced creature in a galaxyspanning civilization. Being able to, essentially, design and play as your own speculative creature really blew my mind when I was younger. I remember spending hours trying to make my creations as detailed as possible, and coming up with fake scientific attributes about how they functioned in the ecosystems around them. Of course, you could also use Spore to create bizarre creatures, and throw the rulebook of biology out the window. I also know a lot of content was cut during its development.

Yet Spore remains an evolution simulator that’s quite nostalgic to many. And the game does explore a number of the principles of evolution and biology, albeit in a simplified manner. So, for this entry into the archive, we’ll make a creature and play through the game ourselves to gain an understanding of how this virtual race for survival relates to real scientific laws. And as an added challenge, we’ll try to keep our creature within the parameters of plausibility — as much as such a thing is possible in Spore.

So, let’s begin our multibillionyear voyage through this simulated universe…

0:00 The Biology of Spore
1:38 Dawn of Life
4:15 Early Adaptations
6:26 Changing Tides
7:59 Ocean to Land
10:39 Conflict and Evolution
13:14 Rise of the Pack
15:04 A Changing Mind
17:56 What Comes Next…

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♫ Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Beauty Flow, Firesong, Impact Lento, Majestic Hills, Thunderbird, Bittersweet, Floating Cities
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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