Unscientific America

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future is a worthwhile survey of the cultural, academic, entertainment, and political aspects of science in America, and how they all contribute to the steady decline of science primacy in our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s writing benefits from their immersion in the Science Blogging culture, where they are on the frontlines of the debate about how to best communicate science and bring it into the public eye (Note: Because I’m already tired of writing the names “Mooney and Kirshenbaum,” I will heretofore refer to them as “the authors” or “Moonenbaum.”). Moonenbaum does well in expanding the scope of their book to include, not just the division between the scientifically literate and illiterate, but the divide between experts in specialized fields of science, and the differences of opinion between scientists concerning what is acceptable science coverage in the media.

For instance, the author’s mention Larry Moran of The Sandwalk blog, who I have mocked in the past with a great deal of emotional immaturity and who argues that it is fine for science journalism to die because he thinks it error-ridden and worthless. At the 2007 Science Blogging Conference I saw him take some representatives of the Science News Hour to task for not knowing the journal sources backing up the stories they were covering. Dr. Moran is pedantic and elitist, which is fine for a professor, who must guard the gates of his academic profession to make sure only those who will contribute to its integrity get in. There is a place for his writing, which takes the media to task for calling a fossil a “missing link” when the term is silly, for running a sensationalist article title that misrepresents the science content, and that science media outlets and even journals all pretty much FAIL.

Of course, if we got rid of all these aspects of popular science journalism, there would be no need for science sections in newspapers, documentary channels on cable tv, or ideonexuses (ideonexi?) on the Internet. This site thrives on “Gee Whiz” 30-seconds-or-less science news. I get enough hardcore science at work, and I want foo-foo science when I get home. Carl Sagan, Moonenbaum aptly notes, was the greatest foo-foo science popularizer of them all (I think their term was “Science Ambassador” or “Proponent”), and he was skewered by the scientific community for bringing science to the everyday person:

…Sagan was punished by the scientific community for his public endeavors… Harvard University denied him tenure. Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a chemist who had previously served as one of Sagan’s mentors, helped quash his chances with a nasty letter objecting to Sagan’s budding media and outreach efforts.

This is so tragic considering Sagan delivered that unique sense of wonder to the masses that comes from understanding the world a little better. Even if some of the details are out of context, we’re still benefiting from it. So I’m with Sagan and Moonenbaum in that I don’t want science news to die. I want people tuning into science programs all day long, science radio while they work, I want them talking science at the coffee shops like they did during the Enlightenment. I don’t care if they’re getting the details wrong or are talking about some discovery out of context or over-emphasizing the significance of a finding that really isn’t a big deal. I want people rejoicing in science daily, appreciating it the way they appreciate reality television shows or summer blockbusters.

So when Moonenbaum takes on science in Hollywood films, I was surprised to find myself falling on the side of being a little more lenient in my appraisals. For instance, the authors take the film The Core to task for its admittedly ridiculous premise, but ignore the fact that all of the film’s heroes were scientists, and that the film’s climax involved a physics solution scientists should appreciate. John Rogers, one of the six screenwriters on the film, explained his intent:

When I came on, I set out to make one of the 50′s/60′s “science hero” movies that inspired me to go into physics (it was those movies and Lucifer’s Hammer actually, that led me to my field). I probably should have told Paramount that’s what I was up to, but it’s more likely for the best they had no idea what I was up tp. The Core is an explicit rejection of the “scientists bad, blue collar/soldier boys good” ethos that seems to have taken over current cinematic science fiction… If one kid sees physicists saving the day with wave-interference formulas fer chrissake, as in our big finale, and thinks it’s cool, we did okay. [sic]

No matter what you think of The Core as a film, it did kick off an epic debate between David Brin and John Rogers about communicating science in film and the originality of ideas in Hollywood. Just like even though it misrepresented black holes, blood boiling in a vacuum, and the destructive force of supernovas, the new Star Trek was still a movie that made scientists the heroes. I got a near-sexual chill down my spine from the scene where Kirk tells Captain Pike, “I read your thesis.” Anything that provokes discussion about science is a good thing in my book.

I challenge any scientist to write an even halfway decent Science Fiction story with rock-solid science. I don’t care if the author spends an dissertation-length exposition on astrobiology explaining the metabolism of silicon-based extraterrestrials, I guarantee you a physics scientist is going to write a blog post making fun of the alien’s mode of space travel. This is exactly the reason why author Jo Walton quickly abandoned her attempts to write science fiction, because building a plausible SF world involves too much research and too much explaining details within details. Screw it, was her conclusion, it’s easier to write fantasy. That’s a writer scared off to the dark side by scientists the same way my gaggle of Dungeons and Dragons geeks will scared away the girls.

The point is that science fiction movies, even bad science fiction movies, provide teachable moments, a way to ride a little bit of science education onto a blockbuster movie’s coat tails. Moonenbaum points out how Phil Plait regularly does this on his Bad Astronomy blog (referenced in the above ST link), and he does it well, acknowledging that no science fiction story is going to get it all right and that storytelling trumps realism… until doing so violates the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Then they should be properly flamed, like 10,000 BC or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Science Debate 2008

The topic of flaming brings me to Moonenbaum’s research on science in politics, where they have much to be proud of through their involvement with Science Debate 2008, a movement that continues to be active (and a movement of which the Larry Moran’s of the world disapprove). They note how politicians are actually afraid to debate science because they don’t want to appear ignorant on the subject. Surveying the blogosphere’s opinions of politicians, how could they win? Even if they answered 90 percent of questions thoughtfully, they’d get burned for the one fact they got wrong.

But consider the alternative:

Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), one of three physicists in Congress, describes having to rush to the floor to prevent fellow members from killing science programs they haven’t understood–assuming, for instance, that “game theory” research involves sports.

Scientists would rather abandon the control of public policy to this kind of ignorance rather than engage in public debate? If scientists represent the truth, what do they have to lose? As we can see in the author’s example, we have everything to lose by not debating.

Overall, Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book is a fantastic survey of the many dimensions to consider when tackling the issue of waning interest in science for Americans. My concern for Unscientific America is that the book has a narrow audience. Non-scientists will pass it by, while scientists appear apathetic. I greatly appreciated the book despite much of it being old-news to me, and hope to see more books tackling the issue of bringing science back to the forefront of American imaginations once again.

Additional Thought

I’ve been a longtime fan of Chet Raymo’s Science Musings blog, a rich, wonderful merging of classical literature references and modern scientific awe I discovered not long after seeing the inspiring film he wrote Frankie Starlight. I’m sorry to say that When God is Gone, Everything is Holy is the first book of his that I have had the pleasure of reading, but it will not be the last.

The feeling I got reading this text is similar to the deep sense of peace I get reading Carl Sagan. Here is someone who echoes the thoughts in my mind, like when he refers to “truth with a lowercase t.” He even shares my fascination with the golden mean, finding a deep spiritual significance in it:

The golden mean is the secret of tolerance, of modesty, of a healthy skepticism–of knowing that every dogmatic definition of God is a pale intimation of the truth and, inevitably it seems, an excuse for jihad, pogrom or crusade.

Raymo was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school, but reminds us, “The science I learned at Notre Dame was the same science that was taught at University of California at Los Angeles.” This is a sentiment echoed by my friends who attended private Catholic schools as children, that they were taught evolution and appreciation for the sciences that was completely secular.

Religion and science do not have to be at odds, and may, as John Updike notes, share in the wonder, when he wrote, “Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.” Raymo knows exactly how to draw the line:

The religious naturalist foregoes a personal God. God defined in our own image. God invested with human qualities: justice, love, will, desire, jealousy, artifice, and so on–in short, the attributes of human personhood. To the agnostic, a personal God is the ultimate idolatry.

The word “God,” Raymo notes, “is indeed almost irretrievably burdened with personhood. It is our golden calf, our idol.” When I use the word “spiritual” in this sense, I am not referring to anything religious or supernatural, but rather a feeling. It’s the feeling I get when I see a sunset, a satellite photo of Earth, diagram of the solar system’s boundary, hear about some fascinating scientific fact, or anything else that instills a sense of awe at the world around me and inspires a profound appreciation for the simple fact of existing to experience it.

Raymo is a proponent of spiritual naturalism or naturalistic spirituality, and he finely articulates this sense of spiritualism:

So this is my Credo. I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative–a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth.

“Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.” Chet quotes Charles Darwin, and then Lewis Thomas, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” Raymo stresses the importance of recognizing our ignorance, and remaining humble to the vast realms of knowledge currently beyond us. “Only when a few curious people said “I don’t know” did science begin.”

“The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer,” Charles Darwin wrote. At the core of the Intelligent Design movement, is an urging for us not to tolerate complexity, but rather throw up our hands and give up when faced with it. When Chet Raymo applies gentle scorn to the Intelligent Design movement, it is done with just the right rhetorical tone of persuasion, not mockery:

Gaps have a way of being filled. We no longer see God’s intervening will in the appearance of a comet, or look for divine meaning in the death of a child from disease. I would hate to think that my own faith in God depended upon scientists never figuring out exactly how the blood-clotting protein cascade evolved…

ID and other ideologies, both religious and political, stress humanity’s distinction from the natural world, and argue for our dominance over it. But Raymo argues that thinking ourselves separate from nature denies us total enjoyment of it. It almost sounds like a sin when he talks about it, just as humility about our ignorance sounds like a holy virtue.

This is the strength of Chet Raymo’s worldview, that he can find a spiritual sense of awe at the natural world, without having “imagine fairies beneath it,” to quote Douglas Adams. Enlightenment scholars look pessimistically around at all the churches, one on every other street corner, and despairs at the apparent overwhelming popularity of religion’s fantasy. Chet Raymo sees the opposite. Every school building, university, hospital, research corporation, space mission, car, streetlight, grocery store, museum, and other modern convenience is a monument to science and the natural world. A world we all share, and would all be better off if we simply appreciated it together.

Emily Dickinson Kindle Screensaver Credit: Cheneworth Gap

I have hundreds of megabytes worth of free books that I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg and various other sources online, which presents me with the dilemma of finding a way to read all of them. Reading them at my desktop is uncomfortable, although I have done this, sitting at a computer monitor for hours to read a novel. I’ve gotten through a couple of books on my cell phone, but the small screen is also headache-inducing. My OLPC would make a great reading device, but it takes a long time to boot and crashes when I try to access large text files.

That’s why I decided to try out Amazon’s second-generation Kindle, an iPod for books. I was drawn to the fact that the screen is not backlit, which is easier on the eyes, and the device uses very little energy to render text, making it portable on long trips. Plus, as text-files are extremely small, I knew the device’s several gigs worth of storage space was something I would never exhaust. Could you imagine telling someone they’d be able to store thousands of books and hundreds of hours of music on devices smaller than a dimestore novella twenty years ago? Technology is magic.

Since this is a positive review, I’ll start with the bad and get that out of the way. At $360, the Kindle is very over-priced. I would value this device around $200 max, and there are cheaper e-readers out there with more features, such as the Sony PRS-700BC. Additionally, the Kindle should really be priced at $390 as you should absolutely buy a $30-$50 cover for it. I made the mistake of buying just the Kindle, and got a scratch on my screen within two weeks of owning it, just from carrying it around in my messenger bag with pens and a clipboard.

With the capacity to store thousands of books on the device, it’s an incredible oversight that Amazon provides no way to organize books on the Kindle. Despite organizing my library into folders by category on the device itself, all of my books are displayed in a single list sortable by title, author, and last accessed. This is fine now, while I only have four pages of books to flip through, but will become unacceptable years down the road, after I’ve downloaded dozens of public domain texts from Gutenberg and need to find that one passage in The Age of Reason to quote in a post.

One final gripe is that the Kindle offers an incredibly useless feature, the capability to subscribe to blogs. For a small monthly fee, you can subscribe to a wide selection of well-known blogs. Whoopdee-doo. What use is it to subscribe to a link-blog like Boing Boing on my Kindle, if I can’t navigate to anything the site links to? That would be as worthless as looking at ideonexus on the device.

Edgar Allan Poe Kindle Screensaver Credit: Stillframe

Which brings me to the cool stuff. I am enthralled with the idea of being able to download newspapers onto the kindle for a small monthly fee, even if I have no intention of using the feature. Unfortunately for me personally, I read the news with an open text editor to take notes and links for later reference on ideonexus. Had this device come out ten years ago, newspapers might have found a viable way to survive the Information Age. Reading a newspaper on the back porch or at the breakfast table is a very relaxing and enlightening habit, and the Kindle enables this, making it a great gift for the Baby Boomers in your life.

Another feature Boomers will appreciate is the thriftiness of the device. I easily blow through a couple-hundred dollars a month in (mostly used) books from Amazon. Two inconveniences of this practice is having to wait a week for books to arrive in the mail and having to pay delivery fees. The Kindle 2 comes with a free, built-in cellular connection, which allows for buying books from Amazon right from the device. The e-versions of books are usually about half the price, if you factor in the shipping, and the book downloads directly to the Kindle, restoring the all-important “instant gratification” factor that is missing from online shopping.

One bit of advice though, keep the connection turned off except to synch the device, as it drains the battery. Thanks to the Kindle’s E-Ink display, the device uses very little energy. After a week of heavy reading on it, my Kindle’s battery hadn’t even lost a quarter of its charge.

My favorite characteristic of the Kindle is how it enables active reading. I read paper-based books with my cell-phone on hand to take notes on everything I read, diligently copying passages down into word files (I hate to deface a paper book by highlighting pages) and summarizing important passages. The Kindle interweaves this practice into the e-book. With the keyboard built into the device, I can take notes directly in the book I’m reading and highlight passages on screen. It’s like I’m adventuring through realms of knowledge and taking photos of things I see along the way. : )

The Kindle is not for everyone, but my fellow bookworms out there should definately consider an e-reader to support their addiction.

Commodore Logo

Researchers are using the oceans of data in Everquest’s logs for psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other studies. Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, has found clear evidence that gamers use the scientific method, experimenting and communicating results, to understand the virtual worlds in which they play.

Academia is finally standing up to take notice of gaming as cultural phenomenon, and Volume 2 of the Journal Transformative Works and Cultures focuses on Games as Transformative Works, dedicating all of the journal articles to various aspects of gaming from a variety of academic perspectives.

Casey O’Donnell’s The everyday lives of video game developers takes an anthropological eye towards the culture of video game developers and their technoscientific art. Rebecca Bryant’s Dungeons & Dragons: The gamers are revolting! explores the fascinating recent history of Wizards of the Coast’s buying the rights to the then waning D&D, making it open-source as a marketing strategy, attempting and failing to revoke the open-license, and finally releasing a new, copyrighted edition of the game and fans hated it. Joe Bisz’z The birth of a community, the death of the win: Player production of the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game explores the life of dedicated gamers after the company producing their game goes under, and makes the most succinct explanation for the appeal of collectible card games, “Though CCG cards are premade, players have the power to edit their own unique deck of 60 cards, a process that can be compared to writing one’s own dramatic television script for an established series.”

I thoroughly enjoyed all of these essays, but Will Brooker’s Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s resonated with me the most. In it, Brooker describes his experiences revisiting the video games of his youth from the mid 1980s:

I don’t remember Zzoom as a garish clutter of magenta airplanes and bright red tanks, like a kid’s poster painting of a war zone. I remember the way palm trees rushed toward your windscreen in the desert zone, and the way, between attack waves, the camera drifted up into the clouds in a brief, calm interlude. In both cases, I remember landscapes, skies, seas, and natural environments rather than military hardware.

Zork

Zork and other text-based adventures had no graphics at all, and I spent months adventuring in their dark dungeons and travelling in their fantastic starships. Wasteland was my all-time favorite game on the Commodore 64. It came out in 1986, and, despite being able to push a human-looking icon around on a map, the details of the world were all described in text.

Ultima II Cover VS Actual Game

The idea that a screen with stick people could serve as a rich, complex environment may seem silly to today’s gamers, but at the time games like Wasteland, Ultima I-IV, and others provided endless hours of engaging adventure. Brooker observes that these limited in-game graphics were enhanced with elaborate artwork on the box, like the way old arcade games were decorated with action-oriented cartoons to dress up the comparatively simple graphics on the screen. I remember games like the Ultima series coming with cloth maps, code wheels, miniature books, and coins to bring something tangible to the experience.

Ultima IV Map of Britannia

Some games were based on motion pictures, and relied on the player’s experiences watching the movie to enhance the game play. One of the scariest games I ever played on the C64 was Alien, where you must try and kill the alien running around on the ship before it kills all the crewmembers… or failing that, at least make it to the escape pod. Looking at the graphics now makes the fear the game evoked seem silly.

Alien

Brooker doesn’t fall into the trap of claiming modern games fail to provoke an imaginative response in the player. Rather, he argues that in games like Grand Theft Auto, “I could map my experiences of the simulated spaces—Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas—onto my memories of the real geography of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.” So video games are still an imaginative adventure, requiring a suspension of disbelief, or “consensual hallucination” as William Gibson put it. Only the games today have more power to persuade us.

I found a video of someone running through Wasteland in 16 minutes (using cuts and speeded up play). Here’s the first part:

You can play all the old Infocom text-adventures online.

Chriggy played with this on facebook, and the meme is totally something I can support:

This can be a quick one! Don’t take too long to think about it! Ten books you’ve read that will always stick with you! First ten you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Principia Discordia, Malclypse the Younger
2. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
3. Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
4. The Roving Mind, Isaac Asimov
5. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
6. The Critical Tradition, Various
7. The Postman, David Brin
8. Blood Music, Greg Bear
9. Zen Teachings of the Bohdidharma
10. The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine

You think you’re doing some damage? Two plus Two is *shzzzt* ten… IN BASE FOUR, I’M FINE!!! Ha! Ha! Ha! – GLaDOS

Infinite Portals

I had seen previews for this game online, and thought it looked pretty spiffy, but it wasn’t until I dabbled with the flash version that I was really intrigued (plus I found it was priced at $10, a bargain). I haven’t played a puzzle game since the original Tomb Raider, back in 1996, and this one totally sucked me in.

The Computer is Watching

You wake up in a glass cell. A computer, GLaDOS, begins taking you through a series of potentially fatal obstacle courses. “Cake and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test,” she promises.

You Play Chell, an Orphan of “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” and Equipped with Heel Springs to Survive Falls This Screenshot was captured by Opening two portals next to each other and looking through

To help you navigate each level, you are given an Aperture Gun, which you may shoot into walls, ceilings, and floors to produce portals. You can open portals to cross chasms or drop weights on military drones. Open a portal in the ceiling above you, open one underneath your feet, and you can fall forever, gaining velocity as you do. With this strategy, you can fling yourself across great distances.

Portal Physics Velocity is Maintained, but Direction Changes Credit: Pbroks13 at Wikimedia

The levels are difficult enough to make the game challenging, but easy enough to make you feel smart. The basic game isn’t very long, I beat it in about six hours, but a collection of bonus advanced stages have driven me batty since then.

The Cake is a Lie!!!

Any game is only as good as the story it tells, and in Portal’s case, a delightfully twisted computer provides a witty and insane narration for the action, which itself has you thinking in strange ways. I found myself chuckling throughout the many levels at GLaDOS’ silliness, and even went and downloaded the song Still Alive from the soundtrack, sung by the GLaDOS (voiced by Ellen McLain).

I highly recommend this relaxing, mentally challenging game. It’s a rare treat in a world of first-person-shooters to find something so original and well written. Plus, at $10, you have less than the cost of a DVD at Wal-Mart to risk on what might provide 6-10 hours of fun.

This video of an extremely advanced bonus level of some sort demonstrates Portal’s craziness (The player has disabled the drones somehow in this demo):

Note: Portal is the “spiritual successor” of a freeware game, Narbacular Drop, which is also a puzzle game with portals, however it is a much simpler one.

Another Note: After beating Portal, it’s fun to read the Wikipedia entry for it, as the history behind the game’s story just gets more and more twisted.

Apparently Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger hypothesizes the “Creation of Man” mural painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel actually depicts god bestowing intellect on man, arguing that Adam’s eyes are open in the painting, god and the angels take on the distinct shape of a brain, and that Michelangelo was well aware of human anatomy from the many cadavers he dissected in his study of the human form for his art.

Can you see the brain in this painting?

Creation of Man Credit: Michelangelo

There are lots of drawings from anatomy texts with the brain in the painting highlighted in this article. A discussion on physicsforums turned up this insightful comment:

Upon reading the title and seeing the painting, I can definitely see the “brain” in the image. Of course this is coming from a neuroscientist who also knows that the brain “likes” to make associations between recognizable images and the abstract. But I have seen a lot of brain in my time and that shape is pretty “brainy”.

This is wayyyyyy cooler than anything found in The DaVinci Code.

So being the nerd that I am, I had to see TDTESS opening night. Understand, though, that I went into the film completely biased against it. The trailer had me pretty upset when I first saw it months ago. It was clear that the original 1951 film’s thoughtfulness was being replaced with flashy swarms of nanobots, explosions, and gratuitous CGI, but the main reason I disliked this new version before even seeing it was the question, Why remake a great film?

Gort 2008

I have previously reviewed the original DTESS as one of the great, must-see classic films for being ahead of its time. Baby Boomers often tell me about how much the original film scared them as kids, but when I see it, I only see a positive, redeeming film.

Klaatu and Gort 1951

TDESS is a cult favorite among geeks. Announcing “Klaatu Barada Nikto” is a surefire way to gauge how hip another nerd is (bonus points for knowing what other films the saying has appeared in). I believe the quote makes an appearance in the 2008 version, but it’s so distorted and alien as to be unrecognizable. Unfortunately, this is also how the rest of the film pays tribute to the original.

1951′s Klaatu comes to Earth to deliver an important message about the human race’s place in the cosmos. 2008′s Klaatu has simply come to kill us all. His reasoning is that planets capable of supporting life are too rare to let the human race kill this one; however, Roger Ebert best articulates why this is faulty logic:

The aliens are advanced enough to zip through the galaxy, yet have never discovered evolution, which should have reassured them life on earth would survive the death of mankind. Their space spheres have landed all over the planet, and a multitude of species have raced up and thrown themselves inside… the aliens plan to save all forms of life except the intelligent one.

Both the 1951 and 2008 versions cleverly acknowledge that teachers and academics are the true leaders of the human race, but in the 2008 version it is the humans who must teach Klaatu this rather than 1951′s Klaatu having to teach us this fact by refusing to meet with world leaders, instead choosing to assemble an audience of professors to deliver his climactic speech.

And what’s wrong with having some dialogue? The best segment in the 2008 DTESS is when Klaatu debates a Nobel Laureate played by John Cleese about the future, or lack thereof, of the human race. The vastly superior extraterrestrial who has traveled light years to exterminate the human race gets completely schooled by the Earthling Professor. Klaatu, for all his powers, isn’t very bright in this remake.

He’s also a hypocrite, judging us for being violent and destructive, and then proceeding to use violent and destructive methods against us. 1951′s Klaatu was far more powerful than this new kid on the block. He had an unstoppable robot that he preferred not to use, could make the Earth stand still just as a demonstration, and never had to kill or harm anyone, because the truly powerful know that, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

When you remake a great film, try to do it with a little more competence.

I’m sorry to say that I was not able to beat Spore this weekend, as much as I should have. As a youth I would have kicked this game’s butt in a single day of playing, but as it is, I’m two days into it and only halfway through finishing the final stage, but that’s enough to give an informed review. If this post reads like I’m reviewing five different games, that’s because Spore is five different games.

Spore’s Cell Stage (Click to Enlarge)

Life in Spore has panspermia origins. You arrive on a planet via comet, hatch, and start wiggling around the primordial ooze, avoiding predators and finding food. As pretty as this Cell stage is, with the bubbles, forminifera, and murky visions of larger animals in the deep, it’s a quick play simply to establish you as an herbivore, carnivore, or predator.

Spore’s Creature Stage Epic Creature in the Background (Stay away from those) (Click to Enlarge)

A pair, or more, of legs graduates you to the Creature Stage, where you will establish your elementary strategy for interacting with other creatures. I chose a peaceful route, which some other players have criticized as being too difficult. I’m not sure how fighting with everything everywhere you go is easier than singing and dancing with them, as I did, but to each their own.

These first two stages were very reminiscent of Sim Life, which I played on the Apple IIe in high school (like 1992), where you got to design a wide variety of animals with various adaptations and see how they faired in a world you designed. Up to this point, Spore is like that cubed. The options for designing your creature are endless, and every creature you meet in the incredible wealth of biodiversity of its world, you can create to play for yourself.

Spore’s Tribe Stage (Click to Enlarge)

The Tribe stage takes the Creature stage to a group level, from first-person to real-time strategy. Instead of controlling one creature, you now control up to a dozen. Again, your options are to beat all other tribes into submission, or conduct cultural exchanges with music and gifts. I continued my make-love-not-war strategy here with much success.

Spore’s Civilization Stage (Click to Enlarge)

The Civilization stage, where you graduate to managing a city with territorial boundaries, plays like very simple version of Sid Meyer’s Civilization, where cities must be kept happy, natural resources harvested, and neighboring civilizations conquered (either militarily or ideologically). Instead of directing tribe members, now you are designing vehicles to conquer the land, sea, and air. As cool as this stage was, it was unfortunate that the only difference between conquering through military means versus ideological was whether your units guns fired bullets or rhetoric.

Spore’s Space Stage (Click to Enlarge)

The increasing complexity in gameplay we experience in each stage of Spore becomes almost too much in the Space Stage. Your strategies here can be galactic conquest, terraforming, interplanetary trade, exploration, running missions, or, as will invariably be the case, a combination of strategies.

Spore’s Space Stage (Click to Enlarge)

The Space stage plays like a lot like Star Control II meets Elite. The game even acknowledges its many origins, as when the soundtrack to the Commodore 64′s M.U.L.E plays in the background whenever you conduct interplanetary trade. If you don’t get these references, I’m saying Spore takes the best from the best classic games and incorporates them into its scope.

One thing I’ve had difficulty learning in the Space Stage (and in all stages to some degree) is not to worry about every little thing. Are space pirates raiding one of my planets? Let them raid, I’ve got more planets and a whole lot of exploring to do. The Spore universe is way too big to hope to take it all in.

Spore’s Galaxy (Click to Enlarge)

My only major let down with this game is that it’s not as educational as I’d like. Too many of its characteristics, such as “Mining Spice” instead of energy or metals, have only a metaphorical connection to our world. When alien fantasy substitutes for real-world examples, teachable moments are lost. I wish the game creators could have put more thought into building a universe that deals with more the issues we deal with here on Earth.

The game does effectively tickle the imagination, and, overall, Spore is a relaxing, inquisitive adventure as delightful as I’d hoped, and much more epic in scope than I had imagined.

But who watches the watchmen?
- Juvenal

To my shame, I must admit I have never read Alan Moore’s literary classic Watchmen, the graphic novel above all graphic novels, the book that is required reading in many college English classes, and the comic that made Time magazine’s 100 All-Time Novels. I totally lose nerd-points for never having taken the time to add such an important and influential work to my reading list.

1986 Watchmen T-Shirt

Last week I corrected this personal shortcoming. My plan was to read the book in a week, but, unable to put it down, I read it in a six-hour marathon session. All I can say is, WOW. I had previously read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Promethea, the latter held my previous #1 spot for all-time-greatest graphic novel before Watchmen dethroned it.

Watchmen is a classic noir tale, opening with a murder, leading to a mystery, and a journey through a menagerie of classic noir archetypes. The psychotic killer, fem fatale, confidant, mobster, floozy, bad-cop, hard-boiled detective, and wealthy untouchable are all present and accounted for, only here they are all superheroes.

With one exception, Alan Moore’s superheroes do not possess super-human powers. They are merely athletes, inventors, or vigilantes needing costumes to protect them from the law. Watchmen takes place in an alternate history where the existence of superheroes has intensified the arms race between America and the U.S.S.R., where their intervention in Vietnam allows America to win that conflict, and allowed Richard Nixon’s re-election. The book is brimming with historical inside jokes, as when Robert Redford is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, a character responds, “Who wants a cowboy actor to be President?”

I would consider Watchmen a fairly anti-superhero book, wrestling with the philosophical concept of valetism, hero-worship (“No man is a hero to his valet.”). Moore’s heroes are so humanly-flawed, like any authority, how can we imagine consolidating so much power in their hands?

Which of Moore’s superheros’ worldviews would we trust to care for us? Rorchack’s extreme social conservativism, Ozymandias’ extreme socialism, the Comedian’s nihilism, or Dr. Manhattan’s impartial omniscience? At the book’s conclusion, the characters are faced with a disturbing moral decision to make, but one that is brought about from all their meddling in the world.

Watchmen is a book that requires several readings to fully appreciate the complex characters, myriad plotlines, layers of symbolism tying everything together, and the depth of its philosophical issues, to which there are no clear answers. It’s a book about superheroes in the real world, and the good and the bad that comes of it.

A film version of the novel is scheduled for March 9th 2009, produced by Larry Gordon who has been working for 17 years to bring this novel to the big screen. It will be directed by Zack Snyder, whose previously directed the offensively bad film 300, and who I think lacks the emotional maturity to pull off Watchmen. A trailer for the film further squelches my enthusiasm, as it features all the stereotypical shots of people in costumes striking cool poses, which really goes against the spirit of the novel.