There's some game called "Spore" that "Militant Atheists" are angry about

[Synnical]

Or so "they" say

http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=206496

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/85613-Will-Right-Says-Spore-Criticized-By-Militant-Atheists

-Cindy in Fort Lauderdale

[moggie]

1. Sounds like marketing

This just wouldn't be an issue in the rest of the developed world. Only in America does the company behind a game which features evolution (albeit in cartoonish form) feel the need to say "hey, we have religious developers!" and "atheists hate us!". It certainly won't be the first game to feature religion; there are even those, such as Okami, where you play a god. I haven't noticed hordes of angry atheists boycotting those. Any who do so need to be on medication: it's a game, nothing in it is real.

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. Indeed, it is just a game

Just like religion. :toast:

[cosmik debris]

3. What happens in your imaginary world

Stays in your imaginary world.

Heaven and hell too.

[moggie]

4. But that can't be right

Since us atheists have no moral compass, what's to stop us taking the lessons from console games and applying them to the real world? Why, just the other day, I rolled up half my neighbourhood into a giant wriggling ball, while chanting "na naa, na-na-na-na-na-na, Katamari Damashii!"

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. You should see how I get after playing Work of Warcraft

But wasn't as bad as when I played EverQuest: my main was a druid of Karana, the god of Thunder and the open plains. Count yourself lucky that I didn't have a necromancer.

[Evoman]

6. I like stabbing people with my sword for gold pieces.

But usually they just have useless wads of paper and little plastic cards.

[Synnical]

7. Time Mag: Playing God

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1838763,00.html

Snippets from the article:

For the past seven years, Wright has been working on one of the most ambitious video games ever conceived. The basic idea is to blow out The Sims to the horizon in all directions: this time you create and control an entire species. Wright's first title for the project was Sim Everything. Later he settled on Spore. It will be released on Sept. 9.

The opening act of Spore shows a comet crashing into Earth bearing organic material from outer space. This represents an actual hypothesis of how life on Earth began, called panspermia, which Wright considers to be fairly plausible. (He describes himself as "definitely an atheist. Well, agnostic atheist maybe.") But that's not why he put it in Spore. He put it in because it's more fun than other hypotheses. "We did a lot of prototypes around more of a biogenesis model," Wright says. "Autocatalytic sets, emergent chemistries. The programmer and I really enjoyed playing with those. Nobody else did. They were a bit abstract." One of the drawbacks of being interested in everything is having to remember that not everybody else is.

[and-justice-for-all]

8. It is Publicity and hype...

nothing more.

[Pale Blue Dot]

9. Crap! My stepson has that game!

He tried to install it on my computer, but since I have a militantly atheist computer, the game was rejected.

There's only one option: I'm going to have to burn the game. Wish me luck.

[Synnical]

10. Apparently an anti Spore site was rick-rolled.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2008/09/12/antispore_answerable_to_a_higher_power__rick_astley-2.html