In fact, Lovelock contributed to the game’s design. The theory asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. The game’s subtitle ‘The Living Planet’ nods to the key scientific inspiration behind SimEarth: James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis. In SimEarth its players were invited to take control of a planetary ecosystem, tinkering with environmental factors such as atmosphere, temperature, and landmass, to see how their decisions influenced the evolution of living organisms. Wright pioneered this genre of what he called ‘system simulation’ games. SimEarth was the second in Will Wright and Maxis’ extremely successful ‘sim’ series of games (including The Sims), following the release of SimCity in 1989. It had first come to the Museum sometime in the early 1990s, shortly after its initial release. One such thing was a copy of the cult computer game SimEarth, which had been languishing in a box of miscellaneous objects in the archives. Part of the fun of working with the Science Museum Group’s collections is the rediscovery of things that have been long forgotten. Stick on some Skunk Anansie and have a go.Assistant Curator Rupert Cole takes the controls and explores the comprehensive world of SimEarth. for the list, then.Īnyway, while SimEarth was a pain in the arse to get hold of for many years, it’s now relatively easy to find a browser-based version - or so I’m told. Actually, that might have been in SimLife, which I am only now remembering was a totally separate game. I learned all about eukaryotes and prokaryotes, nurtured trilaterally symmetrical life into technological civilisation, and created loads of new kinds of wasps. And while I can’t honestly say I ever fully got the hang of how to play, I had enough fun poking the game’s stacks of interconnected systems to earn me dozens of bollockings for staying up til 2am on a school night. I spent a lot of time in my very early teens battering away at SimEarth - for some reason, I’ll always associate it with hearing Hedonism by Skunk Anansie on the radio, which dates my time with the game to 1996. In a shocking plot twist, SimEarth was the second major work by none other than Spore’s lead creator Will Wright, and it was stunningly ambitious. Specifically 1990, when SimEarth was released. This looks like it may finally change with the extremely promising Ecosystem (which I had a go on in April and deemed a mindblower), but for now, the best place to look for evolution sims is arguably the deep past. I suspect Spore made people a lot more reticent to promise a proper evolution game, and there certainly haven’t been many full attempts in the last ten years. It offered a series of lengthy, chained minigames with a brilliant character creator near the start, and a passable 4X at the end. Spore was going to allow us to follow the evolution of a creature from a single cell to a spacefaring megasociety. The great “we’re gonna clone a mammoth” moment for evolution sims was, without doubt, the maelstrom of hype preceding the release of 2008’s Spore. An electric playground in which to grow monsters is the dream for speculative evolution fanatics like me, but while the idea gets discussed all the time, it never seems to materialise. So it is with games that promise to simulate biological life, and its evolution. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but they seem to have been on the brink for at least 25 years now, and the press release promises are starting to wear a bit thin. One of the most maddening things in mainstream science reporting (and my goodness, there’s a panoply to choose from), is how every year, without fail, there’s a rash of articles making wild claims about how scientists are “on the brink” of cloning a woolly mammoth. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.
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