Week 11 Tute Cyberlife's Creatures

In Cyberlife’s Creatures Sarah Kember mainly discusses the Creatures game. She provides a detailed analysis of how the game works. Specifying that perhaps Creatures is on the way to realizing Artificial life. She alerts us to the aspects of genetic engineering and evolution that are integral to this game. And, posits that an innovative relationship has developed between producer and consumer in regard to this game. Kember’s article covered a rather interesting area in gaming. One that I’m that not too familiar with. There seemed to be quite a scientific technical aspect to the Creatures game. Especially seeing as the major underpinning of the game is that of evolution and genetic engineering. The issue of genetic engineering is still a controversial one in real life. Yet, it appeared as unquestionable in the game. Its basic assumption is that the user wants to fiddle around with random genes in the name of creation. Yet, this has proved to be popular and is probably so for the same reasons The Sims is popular. It seems to me like having your own pet or plaything and a kind of wish fulfilment rolled in one. And, in the case of Creatures there is the added surprise of not being able to exactly control the agent. Key Quotes: “Interactions with the human user may alter the norn’s behaviour, but the human can only influence a norn, not control it” Kember pg 284 in Course Reader “Partly by design, and partly because of the building-block nature of biological systems, there turned out to be number of ways people could enhance the product and hence their enjoyment of it…………Infact they were so good at this that I decide to save them the trouble of working it all out for themselves, and simply published the necessary documentation so that they could get on with it.” Steve Grand (Creator of Creatures) quoted in Kember pg 287 in Course Reader