Spore fans weigh in: They hate Chris Hecker Poor Chris Hecker (Spore animator) …the guy is getting ripped apart at the Sporums and it appears he is unable to defend due to EA/Maxis rules in getting involved with the community.* Players are tearing him up as they found out he’s the scrapegoat to blame on why Spore is the way it is with it’s “cuteness” approach.* They found a quote from an article in which Chris states how he founded the ‘Cute’ teamand how he persuaded Will to drop the science aspect from the game: This was Spore’s central problem: Could the game be both scientifically accurate and fun? The prototyping teams were becoming lost in their scientific interests. Chaim Gingold, a team member who started as an intern and went on to help design the game’s content creation tools, recalls a summer spent playing with pattern language and cellular automata: “It was just about being engaged with the universe as a set of systems, and being able to build toys that manifested our fascination with these systems and our love for them.” But from within this explosion of experimental enthusiasm came an unexpected warning voice. Spore’s resident uber-geek and artificial intelligence expert Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. “I was the founding member of the ‘cute’ team,” he says with pride. “Ocean [Quigley, Spore's art director] and Will were really the founding members of the ’science’ team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!’ and some of us were thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that.’” Soon rival camps had formed. New recruits were taken out to lunch and covertly probed to discover where their natural leanings were. Quigley’s microscopically accurate concept drawings were vandalized with stuck-on googly eyes; there were suggestions that it might be cool if the creatures wore sneakers. It might have been painful for the founding members of the science team, but Quigley acknowledges the need for compromise. “From a single-celled organism through the four-and-a-half-billion year history of life on Earth to a self-projected future where we are gallivanting around the stars? I mean, it is so absurdly vast, so radically outside of any scale that people can really empathize with, we knew we had to turn it into a toy.” In fact, this whole deal even blew up to getting a front post on Digg - with 1101 diggs and 222 comments at the time of this post.* And to top that off, he’s even got his official Spore Creature that a crafter creator made: Cute Hecker The Cute Hecker is a curious creature who’s sole purpose seems to be ruining everyone’s good time. Its head is oversized to accomodate an inordinately large mouth, but appears to contain no brain at all. The ears are vestigal–Cute Hecker doesn’t listen. While I did get a chuckle out of the creature (if you’re reading, Chris, I do apologize - but it is funny), I do think some of the things they want to do to the guy is pretty horrible.* We just don’t have the full story on why Will made the switch from the game, but the fault cannot be placed on Chris alone.* He just put in his opinion on changing the game and in the end, a majority of the developers ended up going with it. So if you’re reading this Chris, just thought I would let you know that at least you have one person that is not mad at you.* Upset, kind of, but I’ll get over it.
