Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

This week saw the release of the Spore Creature Creator (free trial available, follow the link), a precursor to the full game that hits stores in September.  I have never seen a game weave so many web technologies under one umbrella.  There's the Sporepedia, a wikipedia-like collection of creatures created by users from around the world.  You can view, tag, rate, and even download the creatures from the sporepedia directly into your editor.  There's also a Facebook application, allowing you to showoff your critters to your FB friends, create galleries and share more sporelings. 

Why all the sharing?  One of the many innovations of this game is that the content is all procedural.  What does this mean?  The designers and developers did not create each level, each texture, each animation, each character, etc.  They leave that up to YOU.  If you purchase the game, your gameworld will be populated by creatures and objects you create with the editor, but it will also be populated by the creations of millions of other Spore players around the world.  The game will actually start to recognize what type of creatures and objects you prefer, and will go and acquire those objects. 

While we wait for the game to arrive, I've started to tag my creations on the Sporepedia with 'egc'.  Feel free to start using 'egc' as a tag for your creatures as well.  Once the game hits, maybe we'll have enough species for an EGC galaxy.