Fig. 1: Does old
necessarily have to mean primitive?
God-games are a
genre of video games that on one hand feel obscure, but, on the other hand, it
also feels like everyone has played at least one game of this type during their
childhood. What actually counts as a god-game is difficult to define, as simply
putting the player into a controlling position over people, cities, wars and
societies would mean that most strategy games like Civilization or Command
& Conquer would have to be counted as god-games as well, but nobody
does that. Instead, the genre is commonly imagined as putting you into powers
outside of human influence and there have generally been two approaches by game
designers in how to do that. One is the Peter Molyneux one of games like Populous
or Black & White, which let you roleplay as a deity as imagined by
ancient mythologies. The other is a more simulation-based approach, which lets
you play with or mimic natural progressions, which in reality happened over
geological timespans, such as the evolution of life and the formation of
natural landscapes. Of the latter kind the most recent and still widely
remembered big budget example is 2008’s Spore by Will Wright and Maxis,
which put you in charge of guiding an alien species from planktonic beginnings
all the way to interstellar exploration. Spore promised a lot and I
remember it being the first game in my childhood I actually felt hype for after
reading about it in a newspaper. When it released it fell short of expectations
however and, while not at all bad, is remembered by many people as a
disappointment (personally, I had a lot of fun with it when I was 10 and still
play it from time to time). While the game offered unprecedented editing tools
in the creation of your own lifeforms, vehicles, architectures and so on, which
I have yet to see replicated to the same degree in a modern game, many of the
other gameplay aspects were very basic and not fleshed out. The game’s
stages of progression are basically simplified versions of multiple other
genres, which just makes you wish you were playing deeper examples of those.
More egregiously perhaps, the game does not actually simulate anything outside
of the locomotion and movements of your created creatures and vehicles.
Evolution does not progress in the game naturally, things only change when you
make them, which has prompted some reviewers like LazyGameReviews to note that a game about evolution may be
unintentionally endorsing the pseudoscience of intelligent design (Maxis or at
least the game’s marketing team seem to have been aware
of this contradiction and
jokingly referred to its philosophy as “creatiolutionism”). The pathway that
the game gives you is also relatively linear. While you are given the choice to
be herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, pacifistic, religious, war-like or
commerce-oriented through the consequences of your actions, all your created
species must, for example, progress from water to land in order to advance (some
interviews with Will Wright indicate that, the option to stay in the oceans
throughout the creature stage and all the way into the civilization one seems
to have been a planned option at one point).
Fig. 2: Oh how
much I miss these times.
While Spore
was not a commercial failure, seeing how it was successful enough to warrant
multiple spin-offs, a sequel has never been in the works and this, combined
with its shortcomings, has made people long for a true successor which
addresses all the flaws and in turn creates the ultimate simulation game, SimEverything
if you will (Spore’s original working title). There have been some
interesting attempts, which scratch at least a few of the itches left behind by
Spore, such as S.P.E.C.I.E.S.: Artificial Life, Real Evolution, Ecosystem, Universe Sandbox, Adapt, The Sapling, Niche or Tyto Ecology, but many of these do not have the same polish or reach
the scope which EA-backed Spore tried to tackle, due to being made by
significantly smaller studios, sometimes just one person. Many are also still
very early in their development with progress being very slow. The
God-Game-Heiland, the ultimate simulation game that addresses all of Spore’s
failures and simulates an entire world and its history, has yet to be made.
Or has it?
Background: Will
Wright and James Lovelock
Fig. 3: Will
Wright, pictured here during a Spore presentation with an arm possibly
broken by Electronic Arts executives after not producing enough The Sims
DLCs. After the release of Spore, Wright left Maxis and the gaming industry at
large, though in 2018 he announced his comeback with a still mysterious mobile
game named Proxi.
The year is 1989, the
Berlin Wall has fallen, Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life has climbed
bestseller lists and a man named Will Wright has just released a game called SimCity.
SimCity was born out of the first game Wright worked on, Raid on
Bungeling Bay, in which you need to shoot down military bases and cities in
a helicopter. During development, influenced by books like Urban Dynamics or
A Pattern Language by authors such as Jay W. Forrester, Christopher
Alexander and Stanislaw Lem, Wright found it far more fun to build the cities
than to destroy them and decided to make a game out of that. SimCity
was a milestone in software history, not because of its technological
achievements, but because of its concept. It was a “game” which did not have a
definitive win or lose state, even though this is one of the defining
characteristics of games, be they digital or otherwise. If you did well with
your city, you just kept on going until a natural disaster hit or you got
bored. Instead of referring to it as a game, Wright coined the new term “software
toy” to describe it and many other games of the Sim-genre. At the time the idea
of a software toy was perplexing for publishers but at the same time very
refreshing for audiences and the game became an immediate success. A sequel was
a no-brainer, but it needed to be larger and newer in scale. What is next after
simulating entire cities? The whole planet, Wright and Fred Haslam apparently
said to themselves, but who could help them simulate that? By coincidence, one of
Wright’s neighbours at the time was Stewart Brand, an editor of the magazine Co-Evolution
Quarterly, and Brand was by coincidence also a friend of one James Lovelock.
Fig. 4: James
Lovelock, seen here clearly having a good time.
Lovelock is an
important though controversial figure in the history of earth system sciences
(what I am currently studying as my minor) and other geosciences. In the 60s,
while working as an advisor for NASA, he was the first to propose in a
significant way that the different components which make up the Earth and its
inhabitants, such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere and
anthroposphere, are not separate entities, but instead influence each other,
sometimes massively, to form one giant interconnected earth-system. Nowadays,
this seems pretty obvious and not controversial (unless maybe you are a
climate-change denier) and is pretty much the basis for all earth sciences.
Lovelock went one step further, however, and argued that this earth-system is
able to regulate itself through feedback-loops between its sub-systems in order
to continuously maintain habitability and stability. For example, when the
sun’s energy output was up to 25% lower than today, the biosphere put out more
greenhouse gases in the form of methane, so that the atmosphere could heat up
the rest of the sphere, but as the solar input increased, the biosphere evolved
lifeforms in the form of plants, which could absorb the excess carbon from the atmosphere
and through fossilisation store it safely in the geosphere in the form of coal,
maintaining a stable global temperature throughout the whole process (a more
crass example I heard a colleague make, and which I do not endorse, is that the
biosphere evolved Covid-19 like an antibody to impede the Earth’s cancer that
is humanity). In this sense, the Earth functions like a living organism, with
the components functioning like organs. Since its inception, Lovelock’s idea was
strongly criticized, accused of being teleological, sometimes even
esoteric (Lenton 2016). While Lovelock never claimed that this self-organising
system was conscious, instead evolving entirely through natural processes, it
certainly did not help that he embraced William Golding’s coining of this idea
as the Gaia-Hypothesis, named after a Greek titan that has become prevalent in
many new age religious movements. There are also various examples of the Earth
not being able to stabilize itself, during mass extinction events for example
(though one could argue this is just the earth-organism being sick or injured
for some time before beginning the healing-process).
Even if a
hypothesis might be problematic, it can still be useful, as Will Wright found
out. As Lovelock notes in an interview with the gaming magazine The One,
most computer models at the time, which tried to individually simulate
atmospheric or geospheric processes on their own, quickly broke down into
instability. Only when the spheres were linked together, did the simulations
reach long-lived, stable conditions. The Gaia-Hypothesis thus became the base
for Will Wright’s SimCity-sequel, and Lovelock one of the game’s advisors.
He would also end up writing the foreword for the manual, as well as for the
official strategy guide, written by Johnny L. Wilson (If you ever get the
chance, I recommend getting your hands on it, because it is a very engaging
read). In the span of just one year, SimEarth: The Living Planet was released
in 1990, over 30 years ago.
The basics of
the game
Fig. 5: The game’s
editing window. Taking my own screenshots of the game was a bit difficult, so please excuse the low resolution.
Like SimCity,
SimEarth is a tile-based two-dimensional game viewed from a top-down
perspective, but things are significantly more zoomed out, as you are in charge
of a whole planet. You can view it from three windows: The zoomed in Editing
Window, in which you can interact with the world, the zoomed out Map, on which
you can apply various filters to see, for example, wind patterns or tectonic
movements, and the rotating Globe. SimEarth is about as complete of a
planetary simulation as you can get. The geo-, atmo-, bio- and anthroposphere
are all distinct, but interconnected entities, which are simulated in detail. And
you can change every aspect of them. In the geosphere window, you can for example edit the
pace at which continents move, volcanoes erupt, meteors fall down or heat
escapes the planet. In the atmosphere window you can change albedo, rainfall,
the greenhouse effect and more. The biosphere model lets you edit the rates of
mutation, speciation, “advancement” and so on, while the civilization window
lets you adjust what sorts of technologies and energy sources cultures on your
planet value, which will in turn have an influence on wars, pollution and the
greenhouse effect. Every change on your planet you can analyse in more detail
by pulling up graphs and statistics menus.
Fig. 6 – 8: Three
of the different control panels in the game.
Apart from these
options you can also terraform the planet in a more hands-on way by placing
buildings and tiles SimCity-style, such as CO2-generators, biome-tiles
and lifeforms. As befits a god-game, you can also unleash natural disasters,
such as comets, meteors, plagues and nuclear bombs. These actions cost
energy-points however and how many of those points are available to you is
determined by the difficulty in which you play a new game. In experimental mode
your budget is thankfully unlimited. Unlike Spore, and this is an important difference, you do not
have to interact with the world at all to see interesting results, as
everything from technological and biological evolution to plate tectonics and
ocean currents are fully simulated by the game. If you wish you can just let it
develop on its own from a starting point and observe what will happen, like a
gigantic digital ant farm.
Fig. 9: The many
tools and lifeforms the game provides you with.
The game’s
timescale spans billions of years, but its pacing changes depending on which
phase your planet is in. In the early stages, before life has developed, it
runs at a geologic timescale where millions of years pass in seconds. The next
phase, where you have evolved animal life but not yet sapience, it runs at the
slightly slower evolutionary timescale, and afterwards the civilized and
technological timescales. You can nonetheless speed up the game’s time
yourself. The closest to a winning condition the game has, is once a
civilization has reached past the nanotech-age and decides to leave the planet
in a mass exodus (mind you that this game came out one year before Sid Meier’s
first Civilization game with its Alpha Centauri victory), but the game
does not end then, instead the planet just reverts back to an evolutionary
stage and allows sapience to evolve again from scratch. The official end of the
game, the closest to a losing condition, is once 10 billion years have run
their course, because at that point the sun enters its red giant stage and
swallows the Earth. Do not worry about that, if you do not mess up
catastrophically, most of the interesting stuff will have happened on your
planet long before you reach that point.
Fig. 9: World map
seen through the altitude filter.
When beginning a
new game, SimEarth offers you 8 different scenarios to choose from:
- Random World: You are free to choose at which developmental stage
your randomly generated planet starts in and do not have any hard-set goals.
Just mess around or watch things play out on their own.
- Aquarium
World: The whole planet
is covered in water and stuck at the evolutionary stage. You need to form
landmasses in order for life to advance.
- Stagnation: Humanity is stuck in the stone age and you need to help them progress.
- Cambrian Era:
You get to start
at the very beginning of animal life and have to help it progress towards
sapience.
- Modern Day: You are in charge of Earth as it was in 1990 A.D. and have
to avoid humanity destroying itself through environmental pollution, nuclear
war or pandemics.
- Mars: You need to terraform the red planet to make it
habitable in 200 years. You are not allowed to change the geosphere or
atmospheric panels and instead need to use tools and your limited budget.
- Venus: Same as above, just even more difficult.
And lastly there
is the Daisy World, which was likely put in at the behest of James
Lovelock. In order to show that the phenomena described by the Gaia-Hypothesis arise
through natural, not supernatural, processes, he designed the Daisy World model
in 1983 to show how lifeforms can unconsciously regulate their own environment
to maintain habitability for a long time. Imagine a planet that is only
inhabited by black and white daisies. The petals of the black ones are better
at absorbing light, the ones of the white ones are better at reflecting it. At
the beginning of the model, the planet is irradiated by a sun whose energy output
is still very faint. At first the black daisies dominate, as they are better
able to absorb the sun’s heat. As their populations spring up and cover their
whole planet, their absorption also heats up the planet, to a degree which
would not have been reached if there were no daisies at all. Now the planet
becomes warm enough that the white daisies can get a foothold. As the
luminosity of the sun increases, some areas on the planet become too hot for
black daisies, allowing the white ones to expand their range. In turn, their
white petals reflect more sunlight, which keeps the temperature of the planet
lower than it would be with no life at this stage.
Fig. 10: A classic
Daisy World graph. Compare the temperature curve of the world with and without
daisies.
This continues
until equilibrium is reached between the daisy populations and in turn the
planet’s global temperature. As the sun’s luminosity further increases, white
daisies become dominant and so increases the planet’s albedo, helping it cool
down. Eventually white daisies cover the whole surface, until the sun’s
luminosity becomes so great that even they cannot regulate the temperature
anymore. As we watch the Daisy World’s temperature on a graph, we will see that
the planet’s temperature curve is, except for the beginning and the end, a
nearly horizontal line, while on a Non-Daisy World, it would just move gradually
upwards. The daisies, therefore, without knowing, regulated their planet to
keep it habitable for as long as they could. SimEarth lets you simulate
your own Daisy World scenario, where you can plant your flowers and watch how
they influence the planet’s conditions. You can even go further than Lovelock’s
original model, by looking what happens, for example, when you introduce
animals who feed on the daisies into the mix. Will they help stabilize or
destabilize conditions?
Possible
Worlds
A basic summary
like this does not really do the game justice. We need to go a bit more
in-depth. Let us start by looking at the types of lifeforms, simply called taxa
by the game, which can evolve on your planet. The game has 15 taxa, which can
all diversify into a primitive-to-advanced spectrum of 16 species, certain
subsets of that spectrum being able to evolve into new taxa. In the biosphere
panel, the rate at which a taxon diversifies among itself is controlled through
the advancement toggle, the rate at which new taxa evolve out of old ones
through the mutation toggle.
- Prokaryotes are the first to evolve in your world’s oceans and
will from that point on already begin to significantly alter your planet by
removing methane from the atmosphere.
- Eukaryotes arise shortly after and will be your planets first
major oxygen-producers. They can arise out of the eight last prokaryote species
to evolve.
- Radiates are the first group of multicellular animals to
evolve on a naturally generated world, ushering in the evolutionary timescale.
They evolve out of the four most advanced eukaryote species. The class Radiata
has not been in use for a long time and the game seems to treat this simply as
a wastebasket taxon for all radially symmetrical animals, as the in-game icons
represent it with both jellyfish and starfish, which in real life are
radically different beasts (while the radially symmetrical state was likely
ancestral to cnidarians, starfish and other echinoderms evolved from a
bilaterally symmetrical animal not unlike our own ancestor and secondarily
reverted to this more “primitive” bauplan). Unlike the two unicellular taxa,
radiates do not thrive equally as well in all of the three oceanic tiles,
instead preferring the shallows and open ocean over the deep sea. Unlike their
real life counterparts, the radiates of SimEarth can also live on land,
in jungle and swamp tiles! You will soon read why.
- Arthropods evolve from the first eight species of the radiates. Like
them, they thrive in continental shelf and open ocean tiles and also do well in
swamps, but only barely survive in jungles. As seen by the in-game icons, this
class is more meant to represent marine arthropods such as crustaceans and
trilobites. The reason is:
- Insects are treated as their own taxon apart from arthropods,
likely to better represent their wide diversity and range of habitat given the
gameplay limitations. Otherwise, the arthropods would have likely become too
overpowered in every playthrough of the game. Insects evolve out of the fifth
to twelfth species of the arthropods and they can survive in almost all
terrestrial biomes (except arctic), more than almost any other taxa in the game,
and even thrive in continental shelf.
- Carniferns are one of only two taxa which the player cannot plant
themselves through editing tools, they only appear under certain conditions.
They are carnivorous plants, which in in-game terms “evolve” out of the first
four species of insects. What this really means is they arise through
co-evolution as a natural response to high insect-populations. Carniferns can
live in boreal, desert, grassland, forest, jungle and swamp tiles, but do not
thrive well in any of them unless the insects are thriving as well. Carniferns do
not give rise to any future taxon (though read on).
- Mollusks evolve out of the first four species of the arthropods
(perhaps meant to reflect the superficial resemblance between chiton snails and
trilobites). Like the radiates, they all do well in continental shelf, open
ocean, swamp and jungle tiles.
- Fish evolve out of the fourth to seventh species of
mollusks. Wilson’s walkthrough muses that this might be a nod to the earliest
vertebrates being heavily armored animals not unlike the nautiloids. Fish thrive
in all three ocean biomes and, what the manual does not tell you, can also
survive in the swamp biome, which like with the radiates has further
implications later on.
- Trichordates are a weird inclusion, in part because there is no
taxon in real life with that name. The game’s manual states that “Trichordates
were a class of animal with three-chord spines. They lived and died out long
ago on Earth. We felt sorry for them, and are giving them a chance for survival
in SimEarth.” Their appearance strongly indicates that they are based off the
real life Trilobozoa, a phylum of animals (?) possibly related to cnidarians, which
appeared and quickly died out in the Ediacaran over 550 million years ago even
before the Cambrian radiation (though there is evidence that the Paleozoic
conulariids may have descended from them). Why exactly Maxis renamed them (and
interpreted their tentacles as backbones) I am not sure. Interestingly,
trichordates can have two origins in the game. They can evolve either directly out
of the ninth to twelfth species of radiates (implying that they descend from
starfish that lost a few arms) or the ninth to twelfth species of fish
(implying that they are vertebrates which somehow grew two extra backbones).
Trichordates can survive in swamps, deserts and grasslands, but truly thrive
in boreal forests and jungle biomes. They can therefore surprisingly be the first
major terrestrial taxon to evolve on your planets. Trichordates are not the
ancestors to any later group, technically making them a dead end (though read
on).
- Amphibians can evolve from the first eight species of fish. They
can live in boreal, grassland and forest tiles, but do best in continental
shelf areas, jungles and swamps.
- Reptiles evolve out of the first eight species of amphibians.
They can live in boreal and swamp tiles, but do best in grasslands, jungles and
deserts. They in fact stand out for being the only taxon which can truly thrive
in desert biomes.
- Dinosaurs are treated as their own taxon because, let us be
honest, they deserve it. They evolve out of the first eight reptile species and
can live in roughly the same biomes, but can not deal with deserts and
grasslands as well. They actually do best in ordinary forest biomes, perhaps
reflecting their long co-evolution with conifers and flowering plants.
- Avians, as the game calls them, or birds as they are better
known to the layman, evolve out of the first four dinosaur species (which is
actually interesting, as, while on the winning-lane, the hypothesis that birds descend from dinosaurs was
still being debated in the late 80s and the game could have represented the
classic thecodont hypothesis as a second origin for them by having them
directly descend from the reptiles). Birds barely survive in desert and swamp
tiles, do okay in grasslands and thrive in forests, jungles and boreal forest,
making them come in conflict with their predecessors.
- Mammals can have two (technically even three) different
origins. They can evolve either out of the ninth to twelfth species of the
reptiles or the fifth to eight species of the dinosaurs. Why the latter path is
even an option, I do not know. Maybe it is a nod to the fact that prominent
mammal-ancestors like Dimetrodon are often erroneously referred to as
dinosaurs. Interestingly, according to Wilson’s guide, their ancestry actually
has an influence on their environmental preference. If mammals descend from
reptiles they will do better in grasslands, if they descend from dinosaurs they
will do better in the jungles (I never actually tested this). Apart from that
they will also do well in swamps, forests and boreal forests, but barely
survive in deserts.
- Cetaceans, like with the insects and the arthropods, are again
treated as separate from the mammals to better reflect environmental
separation. Note that the in-game icons indicate that seals and manatees are
included in this taxon as well. They evolve out of the fifth to twelfth species
of mammals, do well in all ocean tiles and can also live in swamps.
Fascinatingly, should mammals somehow die out on land, the last four species of
cetaceans can evolve into land mammals again to restart their evolution (the
third mammal-origin I mentioned).
- Machine life is the final taxon, which at the time of the game’s
release was a complete easter egg. It can appear in your world if a city on the
nanotech technological level is destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Like all the other
taxa they start out simple, as robotic home appliances that survived the blast,
but will gradually adapt to the wilderness and diversify and advance through
self-improvement. They can survive and thrive on all tiles of the planet and,
if advanced enough, can outcompete all the biological taxa. If you let things
go really sour, they will wipe out all life and eventually cover every tile on
the planet, meaning the game lets you simulate a form of Kim Drexler’s famous
Grey Goo scenario.
Now here is the
big surprise, the great kicker, the smackdown: ALL OF THE MULTICELLULAR
TAXA CAN EVOLVE INTO A CIVILIZATION. Yes! All of them! From radiate
jellyfish to nanobots! From trichordates to dinosaurs! Even the mainly marine
ones, such as fish and cetaceans, have a chance at sapience if they happen to
live on swamp tiles and the carniferns too get to build log-cabins out of their
non-sapient relatives if you wish so. Some taxa are more likely to develop
sapience than others. As the manual states: Mammals, dinosaurs, birds and
reptiles are the likeliest, these are then followed by cetaceans, insects,
amphibians and carniferns, which are then followed by fish, arthropods,
mollusks and radiates (Curiously the manual does not state where the
trichordates lie, and I heard conflicting information on these. Some online sources
state they are the least likely to develop sapience, while Wilson’s Bible says
they are very likely to if given the chance). Though one may be sceptical on
how accurate the manual actually is, as Wilson’s guide notes that one of the
most common complaints people had with SimEarth at the time is that mollusks
had a disproportionate tendency to develop sapience, to the point where the
guide actually has to give tips on how to prevent the Tentacle
Acres Ending. Some of this
may be due to differences between versions of the game. However, unless you are
playing on a limited budget or setting yourself up for a challenge, none of
these likelihoods have to matter to you, as the game allows you to choose who
gets to eat from the tree of knowledge. One of the terraforming tools provided
to you is a monolith, which when placed on a population of your choosing has a
1/3 chance of elevating a taxon into the stone age, a straight up reference to 2001:
A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (of note is that,
unlike the movie/novel, the monolith in some versions of the game has a
circle-shaped hole in the top half. The exact same type of monolith would later
appear again in Spore as an uplifting-tool during the Space Stage).
Fig. 11: When you just want to give natural history the middle finger.
This
open-endedness of who will get to dominate your planet is, I feel, highly
significant, not just from a gameplay factor but also a socio-cultural one. For
context: Before the 80s a widely held, though often subconscious opinion held
in paleontology and evolutionary biology was a teleological one, meaning that
the emergence of human intelligence or at least something very similar to it,
was something inevitably programmed into the makings of the universe and the
history of our planet. Developments
during the 70s and 80s deeply disturbed such a worldview. The Dinosaur
Renaissance showed that the dinosaurs were not destined to be replaced by the
mammals, but would have just kept on ruling the planet if it had not been for
the asteroid. The
redescription of the Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna by Harry Whittington and
Simon Conway Morris led to the realization that animal life itself started with
a far grander availability of body types, but through apparently random
decimation at the end of the period became restricted to the few ones we have
today. The aforementioned book Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould highlighted
these facts and made the, at the time bold, claim that none of the major events
of our evolutionary history were predictable or a given from the start. Go back
into the Cambrian, accidentally step on a trilobite, come back to modern day
again and giant echinoderms might now roam the savannahs of Africa instead of
elephants. I do not know if Will Wright ever read Wonderful Life (he was
well-read on scientific matters and early concept art of Spore does
indicate a strong fascination with the Burgess fauna, so there at least is a
strong likelihood), but SimEarth feels almost like a direct response to
it. It released just one year after and is the earliest piece of entertainment
I can think of which presents such an open-endedness to evolution. Also, the game lets you literally play out Gould’s thought experiment of rewinding the tape of life (do modern
readers even know anymore what is referred to here by “tape”?) back to the
Cambrian and watching Earth’s history play out again. That is hard to accept as
a coincidence.
Fig. 12: The cover
of Wonderful Life’s first edition.
From a gameplay
perspective all of this means that SimEarth provides something which Spore
could not: True historical contingency. Whereas every playthrough of Spore
is linear, with the only variables, apart from cosmetics, being your diet and
policies, no two runs of a SimEarth simulation will feel alike. Yes,
ultimately you only have a limited amount of taxa which can evolve sapience,
but how each will get there and how they will run their course will always be a
unique story. On my very first playthrough, my world stagnated very early in
its evolution, with radiates and arthropods being the height of complexity. As
if wanting to take matters into their own hand, the radiates randomly evolved
sapience at one point (much to my dismay as I obviously wanted sapient
dinosaurs) but got permanently stuck at a pre-industrial level of technology.
The reason? Apparently the game accurately portrays the fact that, if not
enough diversity and biomass has accrued over the eons, civilizations will
later on not have enough fossil fuels to power their industry. On another playthrough
I had a healthy biosphere, but a freak increase in volcanic activity heated up
the planet, making jungles, swamps and especially insects thrive, which in turn
led to a high population of carniferns. I decided to mess around and dropped a
monolith on the little audreys (not knowing at the time this would actually
work). They did well, until bombing each other with nuclear weapons in the
atomic age. On a recent run, a regular, albeit slightly cold planet developed a
human civilization. Again they did well, until they reached the information age
and started a massive greenhouse effect. The poles melted away and the interior
of the landmasses became nearly uninhabitable deserts, with most settlements
clustered around the poles where temperatures were still somewhat tolerable.
From this sorry state they advanced all the way past the nanotech stage and
began their mass exodus from the ruined planet. Once they were gone and the
world reverted to an evolutionary timescale, the only taxon which could thrive
in this Mad Max ecology were reptiles, who evolved sapience almost immediately
after the exodus (perhaps salvaging what was left in desert ruins). Another
experience had by a gaming journalist in the 90s was when due to environmental
degradation all the continental landmasses suddenly became uninhabitable, but
because the civilization he had on the planet happened to descend from
amphibians, they were able to cope and simply moved all their cities into the
ocean, Gungan-style (Wilson 1991, p. 103). I can confirm that amphibians will indeed build cities on ocean tiles. Another fun run with dinosaur-hating
bird people was recently recorded by LGR.
What stories might
you be able to tell with SimEarth? Will trichordates make it past the
stone age? Will dinosaurs develop space travel? Will carniferns defeat the
nanobot invasion? You are god, you decide.
Quick note
for worldbuilders
It should be noted
that, apart from being a very fun earth history simulator, SimEarth also makes
for an excellent worldbuilding tool. Plate-tectonics are realistically
simulated and can be observed over geologic timescales and what biome a tile
becomes is determined by the temperature and humidity of the area and the
planet. If you need to create a natural-feeling fantasy or sci-fi world from
scratch, for example when you need to design a tabletop roleplaying campaign,
you can simply start up a random planet and watch as it evolves its landmasses
and climate zones. Once you have grown something you like, screenshot it or
sketch it. You can create some quite interesting geographies through fairly
simple adjustments of the game’s sliders. Crank up plate tectonics to the
maximum and your landmasses will simply be a series of island archipelagos,
shut it down completely and you might end up with something similar to Mars.
Messing with the axial tilt will also allow you to create interesting climate
zones. Put the tilt at minimum (0 degrees) and you will create an ice age
climate, put it at maximum (54 degrees) and all regions on the planet will
receive the same amount of sunlight throughout the year, creating tropical
climates throughout most of the globe. Using the game’s raising and lowering
tools and placeable tiles it is also entirely possible (though probably tedious) to build existing maps,
like Westeros or Middle Earth, yourself and then see how natural forces would
act upon them.
Fig. 13 – 16: A SimEarth
map viewed through the game’s altitude, plate tectonics, sea current and biome
filters.
Fear not, for
I am with you: How to play SimEarth nowadays
SimEarth released for a wide variety of platforms at the time:
MS-DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, TurboGrafx-16, Sega CD and the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System. Under the Maxis Classics label the game was re-released
in 1996 to be compatible with Windows 95. Gameplaywise they are all the same,
but the graphics differ widely, with the DOS-version being pretty crude to look
at, while the console versions had nicer sprites (though the game is handled
better with a mouse and keyboard). The most recent way you would have been
naturally able to play the game was with the Virtual Console for the original
Wii, which is how I experienced the game for the first time, where you could
download the TurboGrafx-version. But alas the VC was discontinued in 2019 and
it is unlikely that the game will reappear on the Nintendo Switch Online
service (which I do not recommend anyway; have you seen those prices and the
online quality?). So, if you want to experience the game in an authentic way,
it really looks like you have to cram out the old Super Nintendo or Amiga and
buy a used cartridge or floppy disk online.
But, since SimEarth
can pretty much be considered abandonware, there are thankfully other ways in
which to play it for free. For example, there are various emulating sites with
which you can simply play the game online through a browser:
While easily
accessible, this is nonetheless an awkward solution, especially since you
cannot save your games. The next obvious option is then of course actual emulation,
but I must admit that I am a total dunce when it comes to that. At the very
least I managed to emulate the MS-DOS version on my laptop thanks to online
guides:
- Step 1: Download DosBox.
- Step 2: Download
the game’s files here.
You can also download the original 228 page manual there.
- Step 3: Unzip the
file and move it to C:\\DosGame\
- Step 4: Run DosBox
- Step 5: Type in (without the quotation marks): “mount c c:\DosGame\”
- Step 6: Type “c:\”
- Step 7: Type “simearth.exe”
- Step 8: The game should start now. If it opens in a small window, you
can expand to fullscreen by simply tapping Alt+Enter.
Fig. 17: SimEarth as viewed through the prettier TurboGrafx graphics
(say that three times fast).
Of course, if you are better at emulating than me, you are free to play
any other version of the game. Like I said, the SNES and Turbografx version are
recommendable in the sense that their graphics make it a lot easier to discern
what is actually happening on your planet, but the game simply was not made to
be handled with a controller, which why the MS-DOS version is a lot less
frustrating. Judging by the screenshots, the version for the Commodore Amiga
would then be a good middle ground.
The fate of SimEarth
and software toys
SimEarth, I believe, is to videogames what Harry Whittington’s
redescription of Opabinia is to paleontology. It really is quite
remarkable how advanced it is for its time and how alone it stands among games today.
As mentioned before, according to Lovelock, most professional computer models
used by earth scientists at the time did not interlink the earth spheres.
Neither did atmospheric simulations take into account the effects of clouds and
albedo on the climate (Wilson 1991, p. xii). And yet here we have a videogame
which does both. “Strangely these atmosphere models are like SimEarth but less
complex.”, to quote the man himself. For fairness’ sake to these climate
models, they were still a lot more detailed in how they handled the structure
of the atmosphere and in how much data they computed, while SimEarth obviously
had to simplify many of its variables and is not an accurate model of Earth.
This still does not take away from the fact that SimEarth was possibly
the first software that tried to simulate an interlinked planetary system and
did so successfully enough to be remembered fondly by scientists years later
and perhaps even inspire actual models. To quote astrobiologist David Grinspoon
from his book on Venus:
“Have you ever
played, or at least heard of, the computer game ‘SimEarth’? This clever game
lets you ‘play God’ by altering various environmental factors and watching the
effects on the evolving Earth system. Like any computer model, the game is only
as good as the equations that go into it. It is far too simple to be an
accurate simulation of Earth’s evolution, but it does give a feel for the way
various components of our environment interact. We have started to construct
evolutionary climate models of Venus that include simulations of the
surface-atmosphere reactions and the greenhouse effect. In a sense we are
trying to create a “SimVenus” that really works.” (Grinspoon 1997).
If something as
complex as SimEarth could run on early IBM PCs with MS-DOS, imagine how
much more intricate, complex and graphically more appealing a game such as this
could be on later or modern technology. But alas, here lies one of the most frustrating
and intriguing mysteries. There never has been anything like SimEarth.
No sequel, no spiritual successor, no rip-off. Ever. The games most closely
comparable, such as SimLife from 1992, only tackled certain aspects of
the whole which SimEarth tried to portray. Why is that? Why could, for example,
Spore not have been SimEarth 2 in all but name? Multiple factors
might have led to this dearth:
- Even though SimEarth
got very high critical scores by reviewers at the time, it was not nearly
as popular with gamers or as well remembered as SimCity and other Maxis
titles. Most people are probably more likely to remember SimAnt than SimEarth.
The probable reason is, ironically, the game’s high complexity (Reminder: The
manual is over 220 pages long). This, coupled with its very simplified graphics
and somewhat convoluted computer-window-presentation likely made the game seem
rather inaccessible for casual audiences, who are not as interested in the
subject matters the game tackles. I fear my own enthusiasm I have with the game
might be clouded by my own background in earth sciences. I know what albedo is,
but did 9-year-old Jimmy in 1990 without widespread access to the internet?
- The technology
behind videogames becoming more complex does not necessarily mean that games
themselves become more complex. Games like SimEarth at the time were
able to be complex because everything apart from the core had to remain simple
out of necessity. Instead of focussing on graphics and sound, most of the work could
be put into gameplay and programming, which was also easier to manipulate given
the primitiveness of the technology. As such, SimEarth was able to be programmed
by just eight people. Technological progress and market forces since the early
90s have, counterintuitively, put the whole gaming industry into many
constraints. If a modern remake by a big studio were attempted, its publisher
would likely demand the game to be three-dimensional and of high graphical
fidelity in order for it to be deemed commercially viable, reallocating significant
amounts of workforce that might be needed in other departments. Many of the
more complex or demanding features might also be cut in order to not alienate
casual audiences. The fact that videogames have become a multimillion dollar
industry means that mainstream studios have to direct massive resources into
projects in order to be competitive, but this in turn means they cannot allow
high risks, as they could in turn face massive losses. This of course stifles
experimentation. It is therefore no wonder that, apart from a few holdouts like
the Sims, the era of big budget software toys is over, as is that of
mainstream god games. The aforementioned forces likely led to the decline of
Lionhead Studios (though Peter Molyneux’s own “marketing” strategies may also
be to blame, but that is a different story) and to Spore’s troubled
production. According to Will Wright, his original concept of Spore, when
it was still titled SimEverything, was to simply be a toybox galaxy,
where the player flew around in his spaceship, exploring other planets and manipulating
their properties and biospheres (If you want to check out a modern game with a similar premise there is Heliopedia). This truly could have become a successor to SimEarth,
but the lack of hard goals in the game may have forced him to instead hop to
the Stage-model the game has now. The space stage, if you have enough money and
tools, does technically allow you to terraform a planet and colonize it with
creatures of your own design, but in the end the Spore planets are nowhere near
as intricate or fun to play around with as in SimEarth. The game
originally also went for a darker, more gritty and generally more biologically
grounded design, with the different eye-types your creature has, for example, messing with the resolution of your screen. But eventually the dev team split
up into a science-group and a cute-group, the latter of which wanted to direct
the game into a more cartoony and videogamey direction, likely to appeal to more
audiences. While Wright said the final game reached a good middle ground, the
cartoony look, especially when compared to the 2005 demo, was criticized and
was likely a major factor in the disappointment people had.
- If major companies
do not want to make a SimEarth-type game, there is still the indie
market to look towards, right? Unfortunately, most indie devs in the god game
genre want to mimic either the Molyneux style games or directly remake Spore
in their image. Some truly fun and promising life simulations have appeared out
of the latter attempts, such as S.P.E.C.I.E.S. or Ecosystem mentioned
at the start, but since they are often developed by just one person and three-dimensional,
they severely limit the scope at which they can simulate and therefore just
create limited biosphere simulations more similar to SimLife. To create
something like SimEarth again also requires an interest and know-how in
the earth sciences. Wright and Haslam had luck in getting James Lovelock as an
advisor, but a modern indie dev who is not already as interested on these matters
might have to do some extensive research before being able to make a good
simulation. Conversely, while they do have to work a lot with programs, I do
not know many earth scientists who are interested in making videogames, even
though such projects would be great for public outreach and education.
The ultimate
god-game?
I admit, I titled
this post provocatively on purpose. Is SimEarth the ultimate god game?
Probably not. There likely can never be a perfect god-game (or probably game in general), due to how vaguely
defined this genre actually is and how much tastes vary. For other people, Black & White 3 might
instead be the ultimate god-game and that is a totally valid perspective. There is also some fair criticism for SimEarth,
apart from just the somewhat confusing presentation. While it offers so many
variables to play around with, it ultimately still restricts itself to Earth
and its components. Creating truly alien worlds is not possible and the game’s
evolutionary progression is pretty straight and goal-oriented. Its simulation
of civilizations is very simple as well. All of the taxa in the game are from
Earth’s biosphere (though I imagine the trichordates were included to give you at
least some raw material for slightly more alien worlds) and you cannot directly
influence their biology. This is where SimLife from 1992 and of course Spore
are better. SimLife especially seems like a final missing component of SimEarth
as the game allowed you to make your own critters construction-kit-style,
letting them loose in the ecosystem and then watching how they would survive
and adapt. A perfect mix of the two, as well as Spore, a game where you
could theoretically make, for example, something akin to Wayne Barlowe’s Darwin
IV, might not be the perfect god-game, but it might scratch the itch of a
generation.
The ultimate
god-game - A modest proposal:
I do not know much
about programming, and I have never made a game, but that does not really stop
me from dreaming and writing a concept based on what we have learned so far. My
hope is that someone more capable than me might read this someday and hopefully
get inspired.
Fig. 18: My good friend Bob Guan was nice enough to illustrate for me what I am roughly imagining (Thanks again for that). You may know him better from our "little" side-project.
For the groundwork, I imagine the game
to be two-dimensional and tile/grid-based like SimEarth (though of
course still with prettier sprite graphics), as I imagine this would make
things a lot easier to program. Unlike that game, I imagine the tiles to be
hexagonal instead of square. At the start of a game, all land-tiles initially
start out as either wasteland or desert, but will change into new biomes
depending on what vegetation you introduce, as well as the humidity and
temperature. Like in SimEarth, the multiple systems of the planet work
interconnectedly, such as the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, plate
tectonics, biosphere and so on. However, in the main mode, the “campaign” if
you will, you are the god of life and only in charge of the biosphere, trying
to hold it up against the ever-changing forces of nature. You start with a
planet that has high volcanism, no oxygen, a lot of CO2 and only a single
lifeform: an extremophile prokaryote that lives in deep sea hydrothermal vents.
As the population of these bacteria grows, it starts accumulating mutations.
These mutations are counted as mutation-points, which are the main currency of
the game. The larger the populations are and the faster they reproduce and make
copying errors, the more mutation-points are produced. Once you have enough
mutation-points you can open up a sort of “tech-tree” (similar to ones from historical
strategy games like Civilization), but instead of technology you unlock
biological adaptations. Let’s say your first bacteria-population generates 50
MP. These you then use to unlock photosynthesis in the prokaryote tech-tree.
You then open up a two-dimensional creature-editor and edit your existing
bacteria by adding a new plasmid to create a new lifeform (you can choose whether
your new species replaces the old one or lives alongside it) that lives through
photosynthesis. This lifeform you then place in a new environment, the open ocean.
If your new photosynthetic lifeform thrives, it will generate oxygen and
terraform your planet’s atmosphere. If you are not careful though it uses up
all the CO2 and your planet will freeze over, so you soon thereafter have to
produce aerobic organisms that feed on the bacterium and so on. This is just an
example of how early gameplay would work. After you accumulate more MP you will
unlock more taxa, like eukaryotes, fungi, plants, animals or something
completely alien like vendobionts, which all have their own creature-editor,
parts and tech-trees (viruses could also be in the game, but they would be
generated by the computer and live off your creations, so you have a sort of
adversary). You will have to colonize and design all available ecosystems, such
as the mountains, deep sea, shallow sea, open sea, desert, rainforest, tundra,
etc. with your creations. Depending on your difficulty setting your planet will
be hit with disasters throughout the eons, like meteorite impacts,
supervolcanic eruptions or even alien invasions, which disrupt the ecosystems.
You either have to adapt your creations for these crises or create new ones out
of the survivors.
The lifeform editor I imagine to be
similar to the one in Spore, but again two-dimensional (such a thing did exist once).
Instead of giving stats like strength and defence, organs would instead add or
deduct points to environmental preferences, niches and fitness (as well as
environmental impact in case of the prokaryotes). Changing the skin-toggle from
scaly to furry might for example deduct two points from desert biomes but allow
the new creature to settle in arctic environments. Fitness is a stat that would
define the creature’s reproductive success, efficiency and general competitiveness
and would be determined by body parts such as mating displays, armour, tooth-size etc. A creature’s niche would be determined by its size and diet/mouth-parts.
Unlike in SimEarth or SimLife,
each biome-tile could be occupied by multiple lifeforms, as long as they do not
have the same niche. In order to not lose visual track of specific creatures,
the game should allow you to apply specified filters to the map so you can look
at the ranges of individual species. Creatures of lower trophic levels on the
tile will feed those above them. In real life only 10% of a trophic level's energy is converted into the biomass of the trophic level above it, so in simplified in-game terms, if you have 10'000 plants on one tile this would be enough to feed 1000 herbivores and 100 carnivores. If two species of the same niche compete for
the same tile, their fitness stat will determine who outcompetes the other from
the space.
Of course, there should also be a pure
sandbox mode, where you can take full control of each sphere of the planet. In
this mode, natural selection should also be enabled, where the computer itself
randomly unlocks nodes of the biotech-tree and mutates creatures, so you can
just sit back and watch the game play itself as a software toy.
After you or the computer have created a
stable ecosystem in all your planet’s habitats and unlocked the tool-using
brain in the animal “tech-tree” (although I would not be against the idea of
intelligent plants or fungi in the game), what is next? The game could simulate
the development of civilization itself and you influence it through indirect
means. More fun perhaps might also be if the game turned into a turn-based or
real-time strategy game at that point, where like the god of the Old Testament you
guide a single tribe through many perils, from prehistory into the information
age and beyond, sort of like Empire Earth from 2001. The long evolutionary
history you have formed on your planet would then have direct influence on your
progress. If, for example, you never managed to evolve fruit-bearing plant
species, your culture might have a problem with finding crops suitable for
domestication and be permanently stuck in the paleolithic or resort to nomadic
animal husbandry. Or if you happen to have evolved sufficiently large megafauna
shortly before entering prehistory, your later iron age cultures might have
access to howdah-bearing beasts of war.
Fig. 19: Mammals never had the makings of a varsity megafauna.
I hope this whole read has been engaging
to you and you and that people might walk away with a renewed interest in this old but still "clever game".
If you liked this and other articles,
please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if
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Related Posts:
Literary Sources:
- Gould, Stephen Jay: Wonderful Life. The
Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, New York 1989.
- Grinspoon, David Harry: Venus Revealed.
A New Look below the Clouds of our Mysterious Twin Planet, Cambridge 1997.
- Lenton, Tim: Earth System Science. A
very short introduction, Oxford 2016.
- Wilson, Johnny: The SimEarth Bible,
Berkeley 1991.
Online Sources/Further Reading :
Image Sources:
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