Friday, August 1, 2008

Video game's user content spawns naughty Web 'Sporn'

When makers of one of the most anticipated video games of the year invited users to help design part of the game, the gamers jumped at the chance to create animated characters.

But some took it upon themselves to create something entirely different: a new kind of Internet porn.

It started when the makers of "Spore" released a Creature Creator program that allowed users to develop their own characters to drum up hype before the game's scheduled release in September.

The game, a joint venture from "Sims" creator Will Wright and Electronic Arts, allows users to create a unique creature and then control its evolution from a single cell into a complex cultural civilization.

Within 24 hours of the Creature Creator's release, gamers had gone creature-crazy, designing millions of critters that were all thrown into a database and shown on a YouTube channel for the public to see.

But scrolling through the database -- past the three-legged sea horse, past the seven-eyed wildebeest and the half-motorcycle-half-pig -- revealed something many users didn't expect. Buried among the more wholesome attempts were two-legged dancing testicles, a "giant breast monster" and a four-legged "phallic fornication machine," for starters. - cnn

Here is an example of the creature creator in action:







Here is an interesting creature:







Here is a more human looking one:







Searching for "sporn" on Youtube still turns up lots of weird and obscene artificial animals.

1 comment:

Spore said...

Ahh, of course, the media chooses to focus on the "negative" aspects of a game.

Whenever I see something like this, I can't help but wonder whether there is a conflict of interest between "old media" (TV, papers) and "new media" (games, blogs)...