The video above comes from our roundup of Spore's most demented and inspired pornographic creations, a while back, gathered into one giant sexy music video. And now that Hollywood is interested in making Spore the movie, we demand it include some Sporn.

Chris Wedge (Ice Age) is producing the film, while the writers from Disney's latest animation project The Princess and the Frog, are writing the script.

"I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation," Wedge said. "From every perspective — visually, thematically and comedically — the world of 'Spore' provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."

That's the truth. We can't imagine an interesting Spore movie without some unconventional genitalia bursting out on screen. That's one clever way to market it as a tent pole production, no?

[Variety]

Crappiest way to encourage people to use their imaginations and experiment with evolutionary possibilities in a game devoted to both: Last week saw the release of EA/Maxis' Creature Creator — a component of the upcoming evolution game Spore — and the entire internet greeted it with a cry of happiness. Creature Creator lets you build any organism you like, quickly fleshing out an animated being as cute or hideous as you can imagine. An algorithm animates the little beast, giving it realistic motions for its body shape. You can share your creations with other users, too.

Of course, one of the first things that people did was create the most obscene-looking creatures they could. It turns out the Creature Creator is very versatile when it comes to adding body parts that look like penises, vaginas, and anuses. Thus, within a day after Creature Creator's launch, Sporn was born. Instead of laughing the whole trend off and coming up with ways to prevent people from uploading their dirty bits to kid-friendly areas in the Spore community, EA reacted with censorious poopheadedness. They banned users from the Creator Creator community who uploaded naughty creatures, and requested that YouTube yank any Sporn videos. What the hell, people? Is this any way to encourage people to think about evolution, which is after all very much about genitals and where you put them? I can understand wanting to wall off this grown-up stuff once kids start playing the game, but squashing it entirely? Crap! Luckily, io9 has managed to procure some of the best Sporn available and we've edited it into a smashing NSFW music video for you.

Infographic above via UK Telegraph.

The creator creator allows you to design a unique look for your critter, and to pack it with attributes that will aid it in its quest for survival. A social animal will have to make friends and influence creatures. A herbivore can only eat fruit it can reach, and a predator can only feed on prey it can outrun or outfox and outfight. You can guess which path my Chlororaptor is designed to take.

Your critter's biology - the choices that you made while creating and upgrading your creature - will influence the culture that develops as your creature moves into the civilization phase of the game. Twitchy many-eyed herbivores built by nature to constantly search for and flee from trouble do not easily develop into Klingons. The game is likely to be more forgiving than evolution, but one can imagine a player sighing, "The appendix...what was I thinking?" You can also add my creatures to your games. Spore is kind enough to keep track of the statistics, giving me a chance to see how successful my voracious sack of algae tends to be.

Environment, change, and consequence aren't the whole story, but they are a pretty good introduction. As a teacher I've always been interested in entertainment that manages to educate without being obnoxious. If science is done entirely without a sense of play it ends up being wearisome and fruitless. And Spore isn't the only game to figure that out.

Programs like Folding@home use your home computer or Playstation 3 to process the dynamics of protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that are wadded together in specific ways. Fold them into the wrong shape, and at best you'll have a nonfunctional protein. At worst, you could be looking at the beginning of Alzheimer's. The math to describe protein folding is typically too much for a single computer to handle, but thousands of idle PS3s between games of Call of Duty 4 can do a lot of sums.

With apologies to the King of All Cosmos, this is how I imagine Folding@home on a PS3.

Foldit takes this approach a step further. Instead of taking advantage of computers, Foldit takes advantage of users. Teams of folders compete to produce the best 3D shape for a given protein. Human beings are good at manipulating 3D shapes and solving puzzles - computers aren't, or, at least, aren't yet. Given the rules of how different pieces of a protein will interact with one another, what likely shapes will it assume? Give a computer this problem and it will laboriously and ponderously churn its way to an answer that might be obvious to you or I (for a simple protein). Give the same computer the wrong algorithm or starting conditions, and you'll get nowhere fast.

Dr. Leeroy Jenkins prematurely rearranges a protein, much to the chagrin of his Foldit guild.

Games like this take advantage of what NYU digital studies professor Clay Shirky has called the cognitive surplus - the spare time to ponder and participate that technology and culture have been steadily generating ever since the human race moved past subsistence. Though some of the surplus ends up devoted to projects like Wikipedia, much of it is naturally expended creating and consuming art and entertainment. The amount of work required to appreciate entertainment varies, but many would argue that the complexity of popular television narratives has increased significantly. A good narrative is a puzzle with people in it, and requires a bit of that cognitive surplus to enjoy.

The alternate reality game I Love Bees tapped into that surplus with a vengeance. A beekeeper's website begins to display disjointed and enigmatic fragments of text. What follows is a complex narrative involving the Halo universe and an damaged artificial intelligence. Players were rewarded for solving puzzles given to them by the game team with a new clue or an advancement of the plot towards. In Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming, Dr. Jane McGonigal discusses how players - without prompting from the game team - naturally developed strategies for distributing workload and solving puzzles efficiently. Given a list of numbers that could be GPS coordinates, the mathematically inclined began working out alternate theories while the more physically adventurous (and geographically fortunate) began visiting locations and looking for commonalities. A relay puzzle required the communication of facts given to the players via payphone increasingly quickly to the next player at a distant payphone - one break in the chain, and that part of the narrative ends. Despite a scant 15-second pause from one call to the next during the most challenging part of the puzzle, the players never wavered. Another part of the game involved an artificial computer language, which the players were so successful at deciphering that, by the end of the game, the game team was using the player documentation to write hints.

Expert analysis of data, peer review, and the effective coordination of large groups in an emergency emerged in-game. These are talents that are useful for more than finding out what happened to a fictional bee fancier's web page. The energy, brilliance, and sheer bloody-mindedness of your gamers is a largely untapped resource. I imagine Final Fantasy minigames where players fold magical widgets into protein shapes for bonuses, or an alternate reality game where FEMA takes notes. Hybridize real problems with compelling narratives, and you may find that you and your guild inadvertently cured cancer.

If you don’t know Will Wright, he’s the visionary standard-bearer for "sandbox" games – instead of exotic mazes with pre-packaged surprises, these are free-running simulations, where fun emerges from how players use the systems to accomplish goals they create for themselves – hence the industry buzzword, “emergent gameplay.” So in Sim City, for example, you’re free to make your city an idyllic Bedford Falls, or a sleazy, jazzy Pottersville, or a smoking crater. Plenty of fun either way!

In Spore you have whole alien species to play with. You design it, then guide it as it scratches its way up the evolutionary ladder, from micro-organism to animal life to tribal society, to global empire to space faring galactic civilization – as all species must! With each step, the scale of the game jumps an order of magnitude, like in the old Powers of Ten short, which was one of the game's inspirations.

The Creature Creator by itself is already a fantastic achievement in UI design – it’s ridiculously easy to create a vertebrate organism, configuring the spine then choosing from a huge library of arms, legs, sensory organs, skin, body ornamentation, everything positioned, scaled, rotated. It's a powerful 3D design program broken into sweet, manageable toylike chunks, and makes the least of us feel like a Pixar animator. The engine's flexibility seems endless.

Spore then looks at your alien’s anatomy and calculates how it walks, speaks, dances, and fights. It generates ability scores, and these presage something of the future strategic landscape, as interstellar diplomats or hegemonizing military horde.

But that's not all – once you’ve got your alien, it gets uploaded to a communal server, and is downloaded to populate other players' universes. Spore is a “massively single-player” game – the solo experience is embedded in the many tentacles of a fully -featured social networking service., letting you tag and sift and comment other players’ creations. The Creature Creator is being released early as a free download, so that the "Sporepedia" will already be seeded with user-made content when the game launches (I assume there is some mechanism for filtering out the inevitable flood of aliens that look like penises and/or the cast of Family Guy).

As a science fiction fan, I like Spore’s classic, friendly space-opera vision of the galaxy: It's a place where aliens of every shape can evolve, develop space flight, and cruise around to weird planets, messing with less-evolved creatures, and trading and fighting with other aliens. I feel in my bones that this is the way life in the galaxy should be, and now we're going to live it.

A few caveats. Powerful as the editor is, the aliens it makes inevitably bear a family resemblance to one another. Morph them how you will, share a rounded, fleshy feel that makes them look like they're made of many-colored putty. They move with the same stagy, cutesy toddler-like motions, so despite the fabulous variety in shape, it's hard to make something that feels truly alien or dangerous. Walking around the room, one parameterized alien starts to look like another, and I'm left feeling that the possibility-space of alien life is only partly explored.

And…it's an enormously generative plaything, but will it, ultimately, be fun? Without individualized characters or anything human to look at, will we come to care about our legions of BEMs? Will the algorithmically generated galaxy feel like a limitless universe of wonder, or just one randomized planet after another?

It's easy to take shots at a game as ambitious as Spore, a game whose scope, ambition, and top-notch level of execution are frankly jaw-dropping, but as a game designer and gamer, I can’t help but cheer it on. Will Wright and the Spore team are hammering at the limitations of the video game medium itself, as a tool for storytelling and self-expression.

My prediction is that Spore will rock our collective world. Their vision statement references "Sandkings," so that's got to be a good sign. So download and begin seeding the galaxy! Just be careful when they make a castle with your face on it.

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• Will is a huge fan of high dynamic range photography, as well as Olivo Barbieri's tilt-shift photography that makes everything look like miniature models. He said both style of photography take the real world and make them look like toys.
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• He's also a huge proponent of expanding the experience of movies and television shows, pointing to the numerous Star Wars tie-ins like novels and toys, and his own endless slew of expansion packs for The Sims.
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• The new Cylons were mentioned numerous times, and he specifically used Battlestar Galactica to show how new life with old properties can enrich the viewer experience and tell a new story at the same time.
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• He pointed out how people have obsessed over Lost, mapping out the entire island and the deciphering of the blacklight text and drawings from inside the hatch. He compared the maps of both the hatch system and the island to maps from Treasure Island and The Land of Oz.
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• He compared the castaways on Gilligan's Island to the seven deadly sins: Gilligan = Sloth, Ginger = Lust (and how), Mary Ann = Envy (hey, I lusted after her too!), The Professor = Pride, Mr. Howell = Greed, Mrs. Howell = Gluttony (what?), and The Skipper = Anger (we'd say gluttony).
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• He distinctly remembers being 4 years old and having the crap scared out of him by Godzilla on television. He also went on to point out how Godzilla changed an extreme amount over the 24 movies (!) in the series, and how he went from fierce and terrifying to almost cute and cuddly. Son of Godzilla? Ouch.
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• His main point was that "the best stories are inherently deconstructable and lead to the largest variety of play, and those are inherently generative and lead to story." In other words, let's break everything down, mix it up, and have infinite play with the cool things we love, and the stories will come out of it.
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• He hope that one day we have a huge sandbox world of toys to play in, that would include movies, where the Borg could fight Star Destroyers and Cylon Basestars. That actually sounds like too many cooks spoiling the soup. When he started saying "Wouldn't it be cool if Harry Potter could meet Spider-Man?" we had to say "Uh, no."
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