10 Times Video Games Got Science WRONG

Spore was one of the most ambitious and long-awaited video games of all time, and it's fair to say that the end product simply didn't live up to the years of immense hype.

The primary criticism levelled against Spore was its disappointingly simplistic approach to its compelling premise, whereby players could foster a creature from a single-celled organism all the way through its evolution to becoming a member of a space-faring race.

Unfortunately, the game was criticised by scientists for its contradictory approach to the actual "laws" of evolution: for starters, none of the species in the game have common ancestors, and so the player's evolutionary path is linear rather than branching.

Furthermore, the player's creature doesn't evolve in response to their environment but instead a transparent path towards the final space stage, and the player's ability to alter their creature's physicality isn't at all reflective of actual evolution.

Evolutionary biologists from Yale University called the game fun but "severely messed up," while science magazine Seed said, "the snag is that Spore didn't just jettison half its science - it replaced it with systems and ideas that run the risk of being actively misleading," and spoke of "grave concerns about a game which seems to further the idea of intelligent design under the badge of science."