Creatures: Искусственная жизнь и эволюция норнов.

Creatures is an artificial life video game series created in the mid 1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand while working for the Cambridge video game developer Millennium Interactive. The gameplay focuses on raising alien creatures known as Norns, teaching them to survive, helping them explore their world, defending them against other species, and breeding them. Words can be taught to the creatures by a learning computer (for verbs) or by repeating the name of the object while the creature looks at it. Once a creature understands language, the player can instruct their creature by typing in instructions, which the creature can choose to obey. A complete life cycle is modeled for the creatures childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, each with its own unique needs. The gameplay is designed to foster an emotional bond between the player and their creatures. Rather than taking a scripted approach, the games in the Creatures series were driven by detailed biological and neurological simulation and its unexpected results. There have been six major Creatures releases from Creature Labs: between 1996 and 2001 there were three main games, the Docking Station add on (generally referred to as a separate game) and two children's games, and there were three games created for console systems.

The program was one of the first commercial titles to code artificial life organisms from the genetic level upwards using a sophisticated biochemistry and neural network brains, including simulated senses of sight, hearing and touch. The Norns turned out to behave similarly to living creatures. Norns respond to external stimuli, such as interaction with the player, and internal stimuli, such as changes in chemical concentrations or neural activities. Sight is simulated by having a group of neurons representing each type of object in the world. When an object belonging to this type is in front of the creature ('within eyesight'), the neuron becomes active and the creature can 'see' the object. Mutations in the genome can occur, allowing new characteristics to appear in the population and potentially be inherited by a future generation. Because the Norns have a lifespan of roughly 40 hours, users could observe the changes that occur over a large number of generations. creatures which are either missing organs or have surplus organs, Creatures used the emergent approach seen in animats, but with the goal of more complex behaviours than locomotion. Grand describes the psychological model of the creatures as being inspired by rats. In 2000, Grand described the intelligence level of Norns as being like ants. Margaret Boden, in 2003, rejected Creatures as being a form of alien life as the simulated metabolism is concerned with controlling the Norn's behaviour, not on maintaining its 'physical' form. In 2011, Grand stated that while the Norns in Creatures could learn, generalise from past experiences to novel experiences, and react in an intelligent manner to stimuli, they could not think. The genetics in Creatures are somewhat different from human genetics; they are haploid. There is no concept of dominant gene and recessive gene, much less recombination between loci. Nevertheless, the complexity of the simulated biochemistry meant that Norn behaviour was highly unpredictable. Among the fans of Creatures were the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, who called it a "quantum leap in the development of artificial life", and author Douglas Adams. Creatures inspired some players to take up careers in the sciences.

Originally conceived as a desktop pet with a brain, Grand later incorporated inspiration from The Planiverse to pitch a "little computer ewoks" game, like the game Little Computer People. Grand wanted players to have a rapport with their creatures, feeling that he should make the creatures seem "genuinely alive" to the player, showing "the 'right' kind of behaviour' in a variety of circumstances. To create this kind of behaviour, Grand felt it was necessary to program the creatures by simulating the building blocks of nature in a bottom up approach, allowing the complex behaviour to emerge, rather than using a rule based system approach. but found that the team wanted to make the game into a conventional adventure game. Creatures was developed as a consumer product by Millennium, and was released by Mindscape in 1996. The program was instantly successful, and an online community of players soon formed, swapping Norns, creating new objects for Albia, Based on sales of 500,000 copies of Creatures from 1996 through to the second quarter of 1998, it was estimated that at that time, there was a possible global population of up to five million norns. In 1998, the video games division of Millennium was sold to Sony Entertainment while those working on alife and Creatures formed a new company called Cyberlife Technology. Along with continued work on the Creatures titles, the company did work for industry and the British Ministry of Defence, famously attempting to teach live organisms to fly virtual fighter jets. Creatures 2 was nominated in the Artificial Intelligence category of the Game Developers Conference's Spotlight Award. In the late 1990s, Grand left Cyberlife to form Cyberlife Research and focus on the production of new alife technologies, including work on a robotic life form he called Lucy as well as writing books about his research. The remainder of the company was renamed Creature Labs, and focused on video game development. Sequels to Creatures, including Creatures 2, Creatures 3 and the small children's games Creatures Adventures and Creatures Playground, were released by Creature Labs in subsequent years. Creatures Adventures won an EMMA Award in 2000. Creatures Playground was exhibited at E3 and nominated for a BAFTA award in 2000. The final major Creatures release, Docking Station, was made available for download from the company's web site in 2001. Development was suspended on future Creatures games on March 20, 2003, when Creature Labs ceased operations, but development and trademark rights have since been purchased by Gameware Development, Ltd. Gameware has revived the Creatures Developer Network, the shop, the forums, the Docking Station server, and has released many before purchasable tools and add ons for free. Gameware staff that previously worked on Creatures developed a convergent media game for the BBC called BAMZOOKi. Kutoka Interactive, a Canadian children's software company, has created releases of Creatures Exodus (Kutoka) and Creatures Village (Kutoka Kids) that are compatible with both Apple's Mac OS X and Windows XP. In 2011, Creatures 3: Raised in Space, a PlayStation One game, was re released on the PlayStation Plus service. In 2011, Fishing Cactus announced they were developing Creatures 4, to be demonstrated at that year's Gamescom. A second demonstration was exhibited at Gamescom 2012. Creatures 4 is Fishing Cactus's most complex game to date. Creatures 4 appeared at the 2012 Paris Games Week. In May 2013, Fishing Cactus announced that they and BigBen were partnering with ProSiebenSat.1 Games as a distributor, and that the name of the game would be changed from Creatures 4 to Creatures Online. Another demo was shown at Gamescom 2013. Julien Hamaide, a developer of Creatures Online, presented about it at the Game/AI Conference 2014. In September 2015, Fishing Cactus halted the development of Creatures Online. In 2016, Spil Games announced that they had bought the Creatures intellectual property from BigBen and were developing a free to play mobile game called Creatures Family to be released in 2017. In December 2021, Creatures 3, Docking Station, Creatures: The Albian Years and Creatures Village were released on the Steam games service.

There were six major Creatures releases from Creature Labs. In addition to the three principal games, the Docking Station add on (generally referenced as a separate game) and two children's games were released.

The original Creatures game, released in the United Kingdom and Australia in November 1996 and in North America in July 1997, took place on the fictional disc shaped world Albia. While the "faces" of the disc were uninhabitable, the "rim" of Albia was home to a complicated environment much like Earth's. Here lay an abandoned system of laboratories left over by the Shee, an advanced race that had suddenly left the planet many years earlier in order to find a more stable world. In these laboratories and environments, the player was able to hatch new Norns from leftover eggs and re inhabit the world of Albia. According to Millenium, every copy of Creatures contains a unique starting set of eggs, whose genomes are not replicated on any other copy of the game. Creatures 2, released on September 30, 1998, took place many years after the first game, after a devastating natural disaster (or, as explained in later games, a devastating Shee disaster) had changed the landscape of Albia dramatically and opened up new areas of the world. New technology and species were made available to the player, and the creatures themselves had been provided with "considerably more sensory input, more actions they can take, and improved brain dynamics". Despite the great change in environment, including a "complete working eco system", Creatures 2 was considered "much more difficult" than C1, and the new, more challenging environment and norn biology was described as frustrating, but that after installing a new genome and going through successive generations, the Norns seemed smarter. Sid Fisk of Gamezilla criticized the audio for Creatures 2 for not alerting him when his creature was near death, but playing a "funeral dirge" as the body left the screen. Creatures 3, released on November 4, 1999, took a detour from the first two games. It took place on the spaceship that the Shee had used to flee Albia. The ship was divided into many carefully controlled environments (Norn Terrarium, Jungle Terrarium, Desert Terrarium, Marine Terrarium). Creatures 3 was much more technologically focused, including many agents which could be connected in various ways to perform tasks. Still, the goal was to experiment with the three principal species and create a living world out of an empty ship. Creatures 3 included a "new social element", by which norns could remember relationships they've formed with other creatures better. It was intended as a way to sell Creatures 3 (the player could dock the worlds of the two games together, hence the name "Docking" Station) and extra packs of Norn breeds. Docking Station has an intermittent reminder screen that encourages users to buy Creatures 3. Docking Station added the possibility of interaction between individual player worlds; Norns could 'travel' to other online worlds via a central server, players could chat to other online players, and it was possible to track Norns (and their offspring) that had been present in their worlds via the Docking Station website. Another reviewer criticised the online portion of the game, as it requires the player to find online buddies. Docking Station also expanded considerably on the game mythos, including the introduction of an 'anti Shee', the Banshee (a Grendel/Shee hybrid).

Released in 2000, and targeted at younger children (ages 6–9), Creatures Adventures dropped the complex interface of the main series in favour of brighter graphics and a more childlike atmosphere.

The second game in the younger children's series, Creatures Playground (released the same year), could be connected to Adventures to create an even bigger world to explore. It has a theme park for the creatures, including mini games like whack a mole.

The Creatures concept was made into three different games for consoles: Creatures for the Game Boy Advance and Creatures and Creatures: Raised in Space for PlayStation. In the PlayStation games, the hand is replaced by a fairy named Scrubby. Because of the limited processing power of the early day consoles, the AI had to be completely reprogrammed by the console development team around Volker Eloesser.

Prior to the cancellation of Creatures Family, Spil Games produced two free to play online creatures games, Creatures Alchemist, and Creatures: Color Craze. Unlike the main series, these games are not simulation games, but are instead puzzle games loosely based on the Creatures franchise.

While the initial pitch was for a desktop pet that could interact with other Windows programs, for example, Windows Media Player, Sarah Kember describes Albia as a "technological Eden". The world is rendered in 2.5D, and the world can smoothly scroll to follow a creature. The world contains many different items, which creatures can interact with in a variety of ways. Objects are written using an object oriented programming technique each item has their own scripts which determine how they interact with creatures and with other objects. Objects are detected by a creature by being in its line of sight, which excites a neuron dedicated to that class of objects. All objects within the world are categorised, once a creature knows the name of one object, they will associate it with all other objects in that same grouping. The object oriented approach means that the games are highly modifiable. In Creatures 2, the environment became more complex, with a "Complete working eco system, including weather, seasons and a functioning food chain. The plants seed and spread around the environment if conditions allow. The result of this is a very "real" feeling world that adapts around the player."

As of August 2023, the Creatures Community, also referred to as CC, is still active online. The CC hold a "Creatures Community Spirit Festival" abbreviated to CCSF every year, in order to celebrate the games and the community that has formed around them. The games were made to appeal to a wide audience, with players often ranging in age. Several reviews of the series emphasize that the player would need patience, and it was often recommended for players who were not parents. The early games did not have specific goals, One reviewer compared the game to a 'virtual fish tank', feeling that once the frustration of raising norns through their childhood was over and a breeding population had been established, the game had become boring. Between July and November 1997, over 100,000 copies of Creatures were sold in the American market. Windows Sources magazine gave the series a "Stellar Award". Jay Schindler, a game reviewer, speculated if the game was meant to be entertainment or, instead, a simulation of parenthood. Schindler criticized the inability to scroll all the way around the world, as well as noted that raising a group of norns was much more difficult than raising a single norn, due to the fact that they could interact with each other with much greater ease than the player could interact with a norn. Don Labriola, another game reviewer, wrote of Creatures that "no other program so successfully mirrors the joys and challenges of raising a child or pet." In 2016, the Creatures series was featured by an academic study into science themed video games as depicting an accurate model of evolution and natural selection, displaying three key features of the process.