10/19/2008 08:00:15 AM 
Could Wil Wright and EA's Spore be the latest research tool to help understand human behavior?
The latest issue of Seed, suggests it could.
"It's the potential Spore has to evolve over current and future interactions into a massive dataset of billions of human interactions and decisions that may make the game a target for scientific research rather than a reflection of it."
They already men prefer conquest through blood and aggression and women prefer non-aggressive methods which often involve singing and dancing, this is not especially surprising and seems perfectly obvious, but it's just the tip of the iceberg of data.
The game even in the test phase has an incredible level of participation. It took only 18 days for the Spore community to match the 1.6 million species on Earth. It took just 22 hours to generate 100,000 creatures.
As of the end of September, the game had sold around 1 million units, but more impressive are the 39 million creatures that have been created to date.
Seed Magazine confirms that EA has a massively powerful research tool in its hands, but it remains unclear if they are just going to keep it for themselves or make it public.
Posted by Ed Cotton
It appears you don't have Flash installed.