Setting the Record Straight
“Okay, time to get out in front of this LOVELY storm that arrived in my inbox this morning.
My name is Lars Doucet. I spent hundreds of hours programming CellCraft, and I’m going to set the record straight once and for all:
Despite the private beliefs of some people on our support team, CellCraft is NOT intended to be a “Creationist” game.
For the record, Anthony (lead designer) and myself are STRONG proponents of evolution. Hear that? We believe in evolution. We don’t believe in creationism. As for those who hold those views on our team, they never forced their views on us and just kept things to “what’s in a cell.”
Evolution wasn’t “removed” from the game. It was a design decision to focus on the inner workings of the cell, not the development of the cell. Anthony’s taking credit for this shift of focus, but I think he’s being noble as it was I who originally broached the subject with him.
I was concerned that if we tried to make the game about evolution, it would fail at getting the theory right and we would expose ourselves to criticism. Misrepresentation of evolution in video games is one of my big pet peeves. Pokemon “evolution” is really just metamorphosis and Spore “evolution” is nothing like the real thing. If you want to make a game about evolution, it’s really hard to give the player any agency at all – mostly you would probably just sit back and watch, if you wanted it to be ACCURATE (we are being criticized for instance, that a “unseen force” is “intelligently” directing the cell, ie, the PLAYER). I’d actually really like to make a game about evolution and emergent complexity one day, genetic algorithms are really cool and I think it’d be fun and educational.
Basically, I thought with our very limited budget we could focus on evolution, or focus on how the cell works.
Our biologists were our support staff. They did not tell us how to make the game. We just phoned them up and said, “Jed, how does a Chloroplast work?” and Jed would tell me. “David, how does a lysosome work?” and David would tell me. That’s it. I would consult with Anthony, I would code something, and I would send it to David & Jed to see if it was accurate. We would forward it on to grad students and other scientists who would check it too.
Now, as for other game design decisions. In order to make a video game, certain things have to happen:
1) You have to introduce new features one by one
2) You have to build on previous lessons and grow to stronger complexity so the player doesn’t get overwhelmed
3) You put the player through a series of sadistic tests, each harder than the next (ie, levels)
4) You have to make the player care about what’s happening in the game
Our cheesy platypus story was our attempt to hit the four points above. As for Platypi being a “secret code” for creationism, this is actually pure coincidence. The Platypus was Anthony’s idea because he thought they were cute. As for the panspermia thing, we were actually trying to make fun of panspermia. Also, we once had some contacts at Maxis who were following our game’s development, and once upon a time we were planning on pitching CellCraft to them as a “prequel” to Spore, but with more accurate biology. In the beginning of Spore, the first cell comes on a meteor, and we kind of ran with that idea. The association later dissolved, but the story was written and animated by that point.
Organelles “fall out of the sky” not because we’re trying to say that’s ANYTHING like in real life, but because “now it’s time for you to learn about the nucleus” so, POOF! Here’s a nucleus. Just like a video-game powerup. I suppose I could have made them fade in or something, and just say they were all “hidden,” but I’d heard that scientists can actually splice organelles into cells in a laboratory setting to make “franken-cells”, and so I thought this was a cool story hook. This was not meant to say that these things come out of nowhere!
Obviously, a cell can’t live without a nucleus. Obviously, you can’t just throw a centrosome in there. Obviously, we’re also omitting 99% of the rest of the things that are in a cell. This is Freshman biology, we had a narrow focus and a tiny budget, and we were just barely able to finish this game with the features it did have. On the evolution thing, we didn’t see it so much as “omitting” or “censoring” evolution so much as focusing on cellular mechanics rather than cellular origins. If this has led people to strange conclusions, that can’t be helped. The game will be open source and if any of you would like to change it to your heart’s contents, you’re more than free to do so. Thanks for coming here to let us set the record straight. If you have any more questions, please let me know.”
This was posted by Lars Doucet on our forums this morning. Please leave all comments there where we can talk with you. Thank you
-Sam
jesus christ people, you have nothing better to do than accuse some game for being creationist? It’s ONLY a game for god sake!
And it’s quite a good one, I admit…
I really can’t understand those who have problems with enjoying it.
If you don’t like it, then do your own game, instead of criticising.
Great game, I really feel that it deserves a place in schools. I’m sorry you there were nitpickers to catch you in the evolutionnism vs creationnism debate, you don’t deserve it. I guess there’s no way around it as soon as you’re making educational material in biology… *sigh*. Anyways, keep up the good work!
Excellent. If you keep on developing this game, I could see it becoming the next Oregon Trail. Educational and fun. I learned something and I had fun doing so.
You should expand on what you have created. After beating it I wanted more. Cells are complex things. I’m sure there is plenty of room to introduce additional information about cells.
After introducing all of the cellular structures and their functions, the game just ended. You should make more levels. I could even see a tower-defense-type mode where the player has to confront increasingly difficult waves of viruses while dealing with different environmental scenarios (ex. fluctuating light conditions). Maybe even a custom mode where the player gets to choose the game parameters (ex. how many ATPs are sitting around, the starting level of Amino Acids, the size and type of viruses attacks, etc.),
Anyway, I really enjoyed the game!
Honestly, there’s a more fun explanation for creationism part of the game. It’s a known scientific fact that platypuses are infernal aliens who are here to anally probe us all, especially focusing on homophobic religious male population. Fear the mighty platypuses.
Also, platypuses worship the only true god, the great flying spaghetti monster.
Really. It’s called “game lore”
. You can play around with it as creators.
On a more serious note, the game only needs two things – a “survival mode”, where there is ever increasing amount of viruses incoming and objective is to survive for as long as possible (this would add to game replayability tremendously – if this catches on you could add various enemy number controls, lighting settings, etc), and if possible mobile conversions for some of the biggest mobile phones, i.e. symbian, android, ios, blackberry. I tried SWF version on my nokia 5800, but sadly flashlite that comes with it doesn’t support flash10 necessary for playing the game.
Overall, excellent educational game. Enjoyed it tremendously, as it reminded me of my old high school biology taken over ten years ago.
I’m not a biologist, but I do understand a few things about biological evolution and cell biology and game design. I found “CellCraft” to be a very solid game that as far as I can tell teaches basic cell biology in a factual and very entertaining way. Placing this information in the context of a RTS was a great idea and I think that it was executed very well from a game design standpoint — hard enough to not be trivial, yet simple enough that most players will complete it in a reasonable time span.
Playing through the game, there was only one portion I noticed that seemed to be presented as factual that I think was actually Intelligent Design-wishful-thinking, and that was when the Space Platypuses inserted their own DNA into the ‘much larger’ amoeba genome, presumably so that in zillions of years the platypus would inevitably rise again.
First of all, as I understand it, an amoeba’s nuclear membrane very probably could not contain both its own genome as well as that of another complete, multicellular organism. (In a quick Internet scan, I did find one named Polychaos dubium that might be the basis for the player-controlled amoeba, but apparently although the size of its genome might be extremely large, this is not at all certain.) Second, even if it could, that doesn’t mean that the ‘rider’ genome would ever emerge from the implanted DNA. Both of these notions are, from what I can tell, pseudoscientific speculation from ID-enthusiasts. Also, the idea that the cell could ‘choose’ to produce venom from the platypus rider genome, as happens in the last stage, is pretty specious, although it is a well-made game mechanic that makes the final stage much trickier than the others to complete.
I also noticed that there is life on ‘E4R1H’, presumably resulting from an evolutionary process (although this could be spelled out better). And the end of the game makes it pretty doubtful that the ‘Space Platypus hypothesis’ of Dr. Nutzen is meant to be taken seriously, in fact it could be read as the designers calling ID-enthusiasts…well, let’s just say that I got that they don’t seem to agree with Intelligent Design. The ‘organelle implant’ portion I have no problem at all with, it makes sense in the context of the game and after all mitochondria and chloroplasts were, as I understand it, thought to be originally unicellular organisms that a billion or more years ago evolved a symbiotic relationship with what are now their host cells, and the game makes clear that this is all taking place in a lab, not in a natural environment, where things would happen differently.
If a introductory biology teacher wanted to use this as a learning tool, I would hope very much that they would point out these nonscientific speculations as what they are, something that someone dreamed up and has no proof for — and thus, not science.
It would be nice if there was a stronger dividing line between ‘this is science’ and ‘this is not’ but for what I assume is meant to be mass entertainment, I admire what the designers have accomplished and think they should be very proud of it. I would like to see a later version of the game that flags the ‘insert our DNA here’ explanation as nonscientific, but as long as an educator is aware of this section and points it out, then I would have no problem with this being used as-is in a classroom. (On a tangential note, some improved sound controls would help too, I liked the music and sound effects but independent mutes for each as well as a volume slider control would have been nice.)
One last point, I wish you would not say that you ‘believe in evolution’. You can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. You can have faith in Yahweh and Allah and Legba. For evolution, you either accept (the evidence for) it or you don’t.
(props to the playthisthing.com blog, where I found out about CellCraft)
Thanks for a very nice game!
PZ – thanks for posting on our blog. I think now you’re understanding what I’ve been trying to explain:
“PZ: That has made it a fine drill-and-practice game for memorizing functions and parts of the cell, but has hopelessly compromised it in terms of its utility for higher level learning.”
That’s a fine criticism and one I will happily admit. It was never our intention to use this to teach college-level biology. When describing the audience for the game, the only times I ever mentioned college students was in relation to a “quick review” that might help them if it had been a while since they had taken high school biology. We’ve always aimed to be accessible to middle school (ages 11-13) and useful to high school (14-18).
Should we have had evolutionary biologists as advisors too? Yes, that was an oversight. But that didn’t diminish the quality of the game, nor did it lead to any inaccurate science. Here’s how things would have been different. With Jed, we had a conversation that went roughly like this:
Me: “I think we need to cut out evolution.”
Jed: “Ok, if you think that’s best.”
Me: “Great.”
Had I had you, or another evolutionary biologist as an advisor it would have gone more like this:
Me: “I think we need to cut out evolution.”
Advisor: “Evolution is an important part of cellular biology, you can’t just ‘cut it out’.”
Me: “I understand that, but it’s simply not feasible on our budget and timeframe, nor would it make sense from a gameplay perspective. I understand that you want to include it, but we have to limit our scope. You asked to bring me on a project manager and I’m telling you this can’t be done. We can mention it in the encyclopedia, but that’s about it.”
So, perhaps there would have been more references to it in the encyclopedia (though there already are some), assuming such references didn’t over-complicate the encyclopedia beyond what would reasonably be read by middle and high school students (who were the primary targets). The game itself would likely have come out almost exactly the same.
I understand your skepticism when you see Creationists as advisors, I really do. But you have to follow that skepticism up with investigation, analysis, and reason. If the game doesn’t teach Creationist/ID ideas (which it doesn’t), then, while your skepticism was founded originally, it no longer needs to be maintained.
I’m sorry PZ, maybe I’m not getting it. But does mRNA work differently in the eyes of a creationist? We never set out to teach evolution. This is a supplemental teaching aid, it is not designed to replace teachers or textbooks, and I should hope it is not the first thing a student sees about biology! But it’s not a game to teach “biology” in the sense of the field, it’s there to reinforce the functions and parts of the cell as you said. Now, I am a physicist, and I wrote the encyclopedia entries in the game based on what students of all ages (that means 8th grade or 9th grade bio, not just college students) NEED to know, and I’m talking bare minimum, they are correct. And yes, I included mentions to endosymbiosis and evolution (yes, I even used the word “evolution”). Now, I had a discussion on your blog and someone pointed out a very specific and high level fact that I neglected to specify, and though I agree and will amend the entry, I ask that you keep in mind that the audience is broad. In early physics classes students are taught “the half-life of an element is the time it takes for half that element to decay”. I could argue that this statement is false, that it in fact represents ONLY a probability. However, no one accuses the physics book that says this of promoting bad science. 8th graders learn simpler science than college students, whether we like it or not. This applies to the biology of cells as well. Some students will only walk away with “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”, and know nothing of the inner workings or the electron transport chain or even how much ATP it can produce, but that doesn’t make the simple statement incorrect, and it does not make the simple statement imply creationism just because it doesn’t mention the parts of the mitochondria that support evolution. Our game doesn’t aim to teach the origin of cells, and even if Anthony and Lars relied on advisors for science content, the content they were advised on can’t be “corrupted” by creationism. And I certainly didn’t need to be advised, and yet my writing is supposed to support creationism just because it’s not designed to teach evolution? I must be a bad agnostic-science major-evolution supporter then.
You aren’t getting it.
You may be good programmers, but you aren’t biologists. You relied on your advisors for guidance. And, unfortunately, they have cheerfully led you down the path of unwittingly creating a creationist-friendly game. And they did it very cleverly, from the very beginning giving you helpful advice that shunted you away from including any evolutionary concepts in the game, and also it seems, from any implementation of concepts of homeostasis. That has made it a fine drill-and-practice game for memorizing functions and parts of the cell, but has hopelessly compromised it in terms of its utility for higher level learning.
Learn from this. You want to make an educational game for biology? Bring in biology advisors, not creationists.
Soriac, you’re the dogmatic one. Saying that obviously, evolution is false, and that obviously, a designer designed something to adapt is extremely dogmatic. If a designer designed life, than who designed the designer? If I saw just one piece of evidence that ID was true, I would consider it, and so would most scientists. But right now, the only thing supporting ID is poor human reasoning and religious texts. The reason most scientists believe in evolution is because all the known evidence supports it, and none of the evidence supports ID. Just do me a favor and read one of Richard Dawkin’s books. I don’t care which one, just pick one. If you think about it hard enough you can pick holes in religion and ID easily. Just take a step outside of yourself.
As Douglas Adams’ said: “Isn’t enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to imagine there are fairies in it?”.
Hey, I’m a graduate student in a program that concentrates on evolution. I’d just like to say that I think that this game is a great tool, and I am considering mentioning it in the classes that I TA.
Glad to see you post a response. It really did seem fishy for awhile, especially with the platypus, which conjurs images of noted biologist (sarcasm) Kirk Cameron and his infamous “Crocoduck”.
Soriac demonstrates the all-too-common argument from ignorance of the general form: “It’s so complex, therefore it must have been magic/supernatural/intelligently guided.” As we’re all well-aware, this is a type of irrational reasoning that mankind has employed since the beginning of recorded history. Just because it’s complex and we may not know exactly how it works, it does not in any way imply that it’s supernaturally-guided. How many times do we have to learn this lesson?
I think a lot of us are still wondering why your biologist contacts were all Creationists, though (or am I incorrect about that?).
[...] that CellCraft team member Sam Flynn has posted a lengthy response to these criticisms on the CellCraft blog, titled “Setting the Record Straight,” in which he says that CellCraft is not intended [...]
[...] that CellCraft team member Sam Flynn has posted a lengthy response to these criticisms on the CellCraft blog, titled “Setting the Record Straight”, in which he says that CellCraft is not intended [...]
CellCraft is brilliantly done. This game could make first graders learn science and have fun doing it at the same time. However, it’s unfortunate that you believe in evolution (i.e. naturalistic evolution) and yet understand the sheer complexity of a single cell as if all of this was a product of luck. You understand it so well you said, “Obviously, a cell can’t live without a nucleus. Obviously, you can’t just throw a centrosome in there. Obviously, we’re also omitting 99% of the rest of the things that are in a cell”
And ALL Creationists know evolution does happen to adapt etc, which is a concept of design. From briefly playing the game, it’s obvious the nucleus, centrosome, and 99% of the rest didn’t evolve.
Anyway, great game. Just don’t be dogmatic about the origins of life. We both were not there.