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Electronic Arts/Maxis Spore Photo Gallery

Gamers play God

Related BOWN Article: Electronic Arts/Maxis Spore

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Electronic Arts/Maxis Spore Image 1

In the computer game Spore—developed by Will Wright, of The Sims fame—you can create your own characters in various stages of life.
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Electronic Arts/Maxis Spore Image 2

Most of the creatures you see in the game come from other players. Spore uploads their designs to an online database, and then your game chooses from these options every time you encounter another creature or vehicle. You can also download individual characters yourself. To make this transfer speedy, programmers boiled all the info needed to recreate a character—such as size and personality type—into a short text code, like virtual DNA. Then they included this text in the metadata of a small graphics file, like the one shown here, so you can import an entire creature, mannerisms and all, just by downloading a small picture.
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