Lest we forget: SPORE
Zazazu:
Quote from: rohina on 2008 September 16, 00:04:55
Fwoggie installed fine in my game, but the Pumpkin creatures did not. Are you doing it rong?
I don't know how I could do it wrong. They are .pngs. You just shove them in a folder and there you go. I swapped one or two before from my test account, and they show up in my main.
rufio:
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 September 16, 01:33:40
Quote from: rufio on 2008 September 15, 23:37:35
Don't they know that there are real honest-to-god hunter-gatherer societies in the 21st century? And that from all appearances the switch over to an agricultural lifestyle was a bad one?
And just to demonstrate how bad the switch to agriculture was, look at all those high-tech hunter-gatherer societies. I know I'd rather be living in a mud hunt and worrying about whether I was going to starve in winter than sitting around in a 2.5 story house playing computer games.
- Gus
Not saying it was bad in the long run, just that there wasn't anything to recommend it at the time that anyone can tell. In other words, not a logical evolutionary step.
Also, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have mud huts - too hard to pack up and take with you. Hunter-gatherer cultures also tend to involve smaller numbers of people, who are thus less likely to starve to death, and work together more efficiently and thus have more free time than in agriculture-based communities. Raising crops is more work than killing animals that happen to be in the area, and requires more manhours. In the meantime, you have to somehow keep the larger, sedentary population clothed and fed and avoid being overrun by human waste.
Regardless, I think it would have been interesting to see settled cities having to deal with more advanced nomadic cultures.
Faizah:
Quote from: Zazazu on 2008 September 16, 02:00:00
Quote from: rohina on 2008 September 16, 00:04:55
Fwoggie installed fine in my game, but the Pumpkin creatures did not. Are you doing it rong?
I don't know how I could do it wrong. They are .pngs. You just shove them in a folder and there you go. I swapped one or two before from my test account, and they show up in my main.
They worked in my game. I've even run across a couple.
The most interesting thing I discovered last night, when I went through and 'dressed up' a bunch of my creatures for tribal, civ, and space, was that I suddenly had three new space races surrounding my planet, in the very next space-level game I loaded. I'm glad I only chose to do three of each, now...
Gus Smedstad:
Quote from: rufio on 2008 September 16, 02:10:55
Not saying it was bad in the long run, just that there wasn't anything to recommend it at the time that anyone can tell. In other words, not a logical evolutionary step.
I think it's self-evident that it did have an advantage, or it wouldn't have happened over and over again in different parts of the world, and the agricultural societies wouldn't have overrun their hunter-gatherer neighbors. I've read authors who've held forth on how great it was to be a hunter-gatherer, but I think it's a lot of starry-eye hoo-haw that ignores history. Even if the resulting diet was inferior to a hunting culture, as people like Stephen Baxter have argued, it's fairly clear that it yielded more food overall, and the sedentary lifestyle you're deriding allowed the accumulation of wealth that wasn't possible in hunter-gatherer societies.
The people who praise the virtues of living in a hunter-gatherer society remind me of socialists from the 1920's talking about how great the Soviet revolution was, and how we should all go live in that worker's paradise. Except that the evidence as to what works and what doesn't is even more dramatic today, since the handful of cultures that have stayed in that mode are even poorer than a citizen of Soviet Russia.
In the meantime, Spore is a game. Instead of thinking about how it doesn't explore anthropology in ways you'd like, you'd be better off thinking about it on its own terms. IMHO the only really interesting stage is Space, which isn't much like Civilization at all. It's more like Space Rangers or Starflight. It's primarily about you and your ship, and the colonies you found are more for your support than an end in themselves.
- Gus
rufio:
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 September 16, 02:27:15
I think it's self-evident that it did have an advantage, or it wouldn't have happened over and over again in different parts of the world, and the agricultural societies wouldn't have overrun their hunter-gatherer neighbors.
Human beings were hunter-gatherers for two million years, and it was originally employed by all humans, which cannot be said at all for agriculture. The neolithic revolution (the first transition to agriculture) was only 10-12 thousand years ago. Just because it happened later doesn't mean it was better. Have you forgotten how evolution works? The reason agriculture overran the hunter-gatherer societies is that agriculture takes up (and uses up) a stupendous amount of land compared to hunting and gathering.
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Even if the resulting diet was inferior to a hunting culture, as people like Stephen Baxter have argued, it's fairly clear that it yielded more food overall,
There are also a lot more people to feed. At a certain point the production starts to overtake the demand, but you have to get a pretty sizable population for that to work. The main mystery is what made it seem like a good idea up to that point.
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and the sedentary lifestyle you're deriding allowed the accumulation of wealth that wasn't possible in hunter-gatherer societies.
I'm not deriding anything. I enjoy my sedentary lifestyle. It's just that hunting and gathering was a lot easier then, and probably would be easier now if not for the huge population we now have. If you don't have a large population with multiple levels of social hierarchy and division of labor, there isn't much need for "wealth".
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Except that the evidence as to what works and what doesn't is even more dramatic today, since the handful of cultures that have stayed in that mode are even poorer than a citizen of Soviet Russia.
I think some of it probably has to do with encroachment by agricultural societies, and probably also differing ideas about what poor/rich is. I don't doubt that today it's much better to live in a settled city, though. But from the point of view of a culture evolving in a vacuum (as in the case in Spore), hunting and gathering is a more logical approach.
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In the meantime, Spore is a game. Instead of thinking about how it doesn't explore anthropology in ways you'd like, you'd be better off thinking about it on its own terms.
Indeed. And I think a small, self-contained hunter-gatherer culture would be more interesting to play than a space-age culture that goes flying around the galaxy blowing up planets. I guess it's just me.
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IMHO the only really interesting stage is Space, which isn't much like Civilization at all. It's more like Space Rangers or Starflight. It's primarily about you and your ship, and the colonies you found are more for your support than an end in themselves.
Ah, thanks. Doesn't really sound like what I was hoping for, then.
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