Interview: The developers of CellCraft

Last month, I noticed that PZ Myers had written a Pharyngula post about a videogame called CellCraft. I didn’t bother reading it, though, since I prefer it when he’s writing about topics he both likes and knows a lot about, such as biology and religion. Games are not usually one of those topics.

Then I got a private message from a friend who knows I’m a gamer, and who expressed his opinion that PZ was “way off the mark.” Intrigued, I stopped reading immediately to go play, so I could form my own opinions. I found a cute little educational game about cell biology that had some good jokes and an earnest enthusiasm to connect with the player. And then I read the Pharyngula post about it, as well as the comments.

The controversy was interesting to me, because it ranged from very legitimate concerns to issues of game design. But I found PZ’s condemnation of CellCraft as “a creationist game” to be over the top, and the subsequent dismantling of one of the game’s developers in the comments to be unfair. I might have moved on, but this sentence from that developer just stayed with me:

“We knew that we didn’t all agree about evolution, creation, etc., but it didn’t matter — we wanted to teach about the science.”

Being what the hardliners would consider an accommodationist, I thought this notion of “bipartisanship” in science education through games was fascinating, and I wanted to know more. So I present my interview with Anthony Pecorella, who is quoted above, and Lars Doucet, the developers of CellCraft. It’s long, but I hope you will stick with us as we talk about the creation and evolution of the game, its mistakes and misconceptions, issues of science game design and whether people of faith can be scientists. I believe that while there are undeniable red flags concerning the game, they are in the end red herrings, and if you read this interview and remain convinced that CellCraft was designed to teach creationism, I also believe you should apply your own skepticism to that conviction.

Newly Nerfed: What are your backgrounds, and how did you get together to make the game?

Anthony Pecorella: I graduated from Wake Forest University with a bachelor’s in Math and Computer Science, and also got a master’s in Math. While I was there, I started up a videogame technology company called Retina Software. We had a great start, lots of support, and some initial funding, but sadly it didn’t take off. However, we became well known among the entrepreneurship groups on campus. Jed Macosko actually contacted us during that time to ask if we’d be interested in working on a game with him, but we were focused elsewhere and turned him down.

Post graduation, Jed found a grant that he thought I’d be a good candidate for (and admittedly I was also below the age 25 limit on it) and asked me again if I wanted to work on a cell bio game with him. At that time, I didn’t have my game company anymore and had more free time, so I agreed. We wrote the grant together, with the understanding that I was the principal investigator and the project manager. We were awarded the grant, at which point I needed a dev team. Lars had created an excellent educational game called Super Energy Apocalypse, so I contacted him to ask him about doing a cellular game. Much to my pleasure, he said yes.

Lars Doucet: I was getting my Master’s degree in Visualization Science (fancy word for “computer graphics and stuff”) from Texas A&M University. And, while my thesis project was languishing because I’d picked something undefined and vague, I decided to make a game for a JayIsGames.com casual gameplay competition. Long story short: I didn’t believe in global warming at the time, and a friend of mine from church was a big environmentalist, and convinced me I should make a game about energy use. So, I did some research and made a simple tower defense game about energy use and zombies. Somehow, I got second place in the contest.

From there, Houston Advanced Research Center (a non-profit, non-partisan science lab in Texas) got wind of it, and hired me to make a follow-up, with much better research behind it. This was my first real games job. The game that resulted was Super Energy Apocalypse: RECYCLED. After that, I got married and realized I still hadn’t finished my thesis, so I made SEA my thesis, as I’d already finished it. Did some testing on some students, and found that it really did help them learn about energy use and pollution. At the end of it, I’d done so much research on this I’d convinced myself of anthropogenic global warming, i.e. “Yes it’s happening and yes it’s our fault.”

NN: How cool…education through game design.

Lars: Yeah, and my professor, Vinod Srinivasan, had really been itching to find an educational game designer to work with as he’s really into the serious games field. I started working with him, finished my thesis, and in the meantime, the game started to get a reputation online, particularly at Kongregate.com, where a certain Anthony Pecorella was employed. So, what started as a game I did on a whim became not only my thesis, but the beginning of my career.

Anthony: My full-time job is working at online Flash gaming site Kongregate.com, doing quality assurance and developer support.

Lars: And I’m currently a freelancer, picking up projects like this.

NN: So you guys are game people, not biologists.

Lars: That’s accurate. I like to learn as much as I can about the field I’m studying for my next game, but that’s true — I am not a content expert on biology.

Anthony: I was rather sciency up through high school, though focused more in chemistry. When I got to college, I turned to computers instead.

NN: What was the impetus to make CellCraft?

Anthony: The original idea was that Jed wanted to be able to get kids excited about science. I really, honestly mean that — he is extremely enthusiastic about biology and physics and loves sharing it with people. He thought gaming would be a good way to go, and found a grant that would match it. He contacted me with an idea for a game that was, well, it was from a person who doesn’t know games. But it was clear that he wanted to teach about cell biology, and that’s the direction I decided to take it.

I basically scrapped Jed’s idea, and instead based the game on a board game I had created in 9th grade to teach about cell biology. Obviously we went much more sophisticated, but that was where the original design came from. We got a general idea of where we wanted to go, contacted our development team, and got started.

NN: Jed Macosko is part of the intelligent design (ID) movement. Did any of that come up during your discussions?

Anthony: Yes, Jed was up front with me about that.

Lars: At first, I just assumed he was an evolutionist. He told me pretty early on, too, though.

Anthony: Early on in the development, I had thought it’d be cool to start “from the beginning” and go through the origin of cells. Jed was very open to the idea. He said, “While I don’t believe it myself, here’s the prominent theory in biology…” And went on to teach me about endosymbiosis, RNA world, etc.

NN: That’s very interesting, that he was so open to making a game that essentially went against his beliefs.

Anthony: Indeed. As I said, his focus was making a game that could get people, kids and adults really, interested in science. He cites Carl Sagan, noted atheist astronomer, as one of his own great influences. The fact that he was atheist was irrelevant — it was his tales of the stars that got Jed interested in science. So, while I have no doubt he would have preferred not to do an evolutionary game, that wasn’t his focus and we originally set out to do exactly that.

Lars: I would like to jump in and say that I was the one who brought up the evolution thing with Anthony. I certainly believe in evolution as the cornerstone as biology, of course. It’s just, as I stated on the [CellCraft] forum, one of my biggest pet peeves in games is when they get it wrong. And that’s not to say you can’t as a matter of fact “get it right” in a video game. Just that you really have to go the route of genetic algorithms and make the player step back and not identify with the main creature. In fact, a lot of people on Pharyngula I saw suggested just that as an alternative design.

But not only is that complicated and risky (I’ve never done genetic algorithms before, so it was a huge software engineering risk to go there), Anthony and I had a different direction we wanted to take the game in. We wanted to focus on a single cell and get to the heart of what every middle and high schooler learns in biology: the things that are in a cell. E.V.O., Spore and Pokemon are all games that invoke “evolution,” and each one gets it wrong. There are actually lots of cell-themed games on Kongregate that are fun as games, but share this problem: “evolution” is just a word describing an ad-hoc upgrade system.

NN: So the omission of evolutionary theory was a practical consideration, not an idealistic one.

Anthony: Exactly. The path to get to a complete cell became so stretched out that it was going to take a lot more coding and a ton more explanation. The game already is arguably too front-heavy in tutorials, and it would have been even worse with a full evolutionary pathway. And if we tried to shorten that, we’d hit Lars’ problem of not being accurate.

Lars: Furthermore, I wasn’t sure what the current theories were on the RNA world, etc. I didn’t want to implement something today that might change tomorrow. But I figured, mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc., that’s settled science. We know cells evolved from something, but there’s still some debate as to how that all worked out because we don’t have fossils from the RNA world, as far as I know.

NN: This seems to refute the conspiracy theories about “hidden” ID content, if all of this was out in the open with Jed.

Anthony: Indeed. I can understand initial skepticism seeing his and David [DeWitt]‘s name (probably much more so David’s), but upon scrutiny I think it’s clear that there is no such conspiracy.

Lars: We also really put up a wall between Jed and us when it came to game design. He gave us plenty of suggestions, sure, but we vetoed most of them. The main way he tried to “influence” us was to spend more time on the cytoskeleton. He really wanted to dig into the mechanics of pseudopoding, he wanted to show the actin fiber networks, and microtubules, etc.

Anthony: Yes, I almost felt bad about that. That was his primary area of expertise (and the original game design he wanted was entirely on the cytoskeleton and motor proteins), and we ended up cutting almost all of it out. You can see some of the early prototypes in our forums that have visible microtubules and actin fibers.

Lars: (For the record, most of those early prototypes have gross scientific inaccuracies; I was still getting my bearings.)

NN: How did David DeWitt get involved?

Anthony: As I said, we cut out a lot of Jed’s expertise. He’s a biophysicist, and knows his motor proteins really well, but isn’t an expert on the cell in general. He asked a few biologist friends of his to help out (and I later found out others did offer fixes and advice who I just never had contact with), but David was the only one who offered to volunteer his time to help us get into the nitty-gritty of some of the organelles. We talked with him a few times on the phone and we had occasional email correspondence with him.

Lars: I think he answered, like, four emails? Maybe a few more?

Anthony: Yeah, it really wasn’t a lot, though they were very detailed and helpful accounts of cellular mechanics and systems.

NN: And you were unaware of his affiliation with the Discovery Institute, or the “teach the controversy” campaign?

Lars: On the forums, in my rush to respond to critics I spoke about “David and Jed” collectively, but honestly, the first I heard about David’s associations was on Pharyngula. I knew about Jed’s personal beliefs early on, but I had no idea about David’s until after the release of the game.

Anthony: I had never heard the name Discovery Institute prior to Pharyngula. I knew he was at Liberty University, but I hadn’t done further research on his beliefs. It honestly never came up — our questions were very pointed about specific organelles, so there was never anything we talked about that was at all questionable.

Lars Doucet: When I put the credits page together, and saw “Liberty University” something sparked in my mind, but I didn’t make the connection until later. I’m also down here in Texas, so I’m not as close to this as Anthony, who is in North Carolina along with Jed and Wake Forest University.

Anthony: I’ll even go further to say that David later told me, after this controversy came out, that he noticed some references to evolution in our encyclopedia that he didn’t like, but he intentionally didn’t mention them. He knew that wasn’t the point of the game and consciously kept it to the mainstream science.

Lars: Right, after this all came out he mentioned that he also had trouble with our introduction of mitochondria and chloroplasts. He was very polite, but pointed out that it was a little too close to endosymbiosis for his taste. If he had really tried to “push” us towards creationism, he would have mentioned that before the game was released. Even if he had, however, we wouldn’t have changed the game.

NN: And yet, PZ Myers stated plainly that “It’s a creationist game.” What were your reactions when you read that?

Anthony: I think my jaw dropped. It really came out of left field for me.

Lars: Me too. About 25% of me was worried if scientists would say we had misrepresented this or that biological process, i.e. “that’s not how ribosomes work!” or something like that. The other 75% of me was worried about whether there would be programming glitches or bugs, or whether the last level was too hard, etc. The standard post-release feedback. I was knee-deep in releasing patches to fix all that stuff when this came out, and it completely blindsided me. In retrospect, I see where people got suspicious, I really do, but I honestly didn’t see this coming at the time.

Anthony: Right. I was ready for “This game is boring” or “Level 6 crashes.” “This is propaganda poisoning our youth” wasn’t exactly on the radar.

NN: I saw the issue partly in terms of gamers versus non-gamers. When I played CellCraft and was given the parts of the cell, it felt like many game tutorials where you’re given sample resources to start with. PZ isn’t a gamer, so do you think some context got lost there?

Lars: I think that’s probably one explanation. For instance, our feedback from evolutionary biologists who also play games has been positive.

Anthony: I agree. I can see how a non-gamer would interpret it as a sort of deus ex machina, rather than a convention in gaming.

Lars: We’ve had lots of teachers, grad students, and I think a professor, all evolutionists, who say the game is great. But yeah, the organelles do just come out of nowhere. I can see where he came to that conclusion.

NN: Do you think any of the criticism on Pharyngula pertaining to ID or your association with Jed and David was valid?

Anthony: Do you mean criticism of the game’s content, or just for “associating with creationists”?

NN: I know there were criticisms of the biology and so forth, but I’m thinking more about the accusations levelled against you that you were conspiring with creationists.

Anthony: Gotcha. So, yes, there is some validity to those criticisms. I don’t think associating with creationists inherently harms the game itself, and would submit our game as evidence as such. But not also having evolutionist professors/resources on the advisory board does have drawbacks.

Most notably, I think the best criticism I’ve seen was from Wired’s GeekDad post, written by GeekMom actually. She was saying that, as a homeschool teacher, when she looks at reference materials, she can’t always go in-depth to investigate the content of each one. Instead, she has to rely on looking up who was behind it, who the experts were. And I think we did indeed have an oversight by only having two creationists credited in the game as our experts, because in those situations people will, understandably, be hesitant to use the tool. If we do a sequel or another game, we will definitely be sure to have mainstream science represented on our advisory board. Not doing that was an accidental oversight.

Lars:  I agree with Anthony. I’m glad that people have been willing to hear us out on this complicated and interesting situation but, in hindsight, I really understand how seeing those names would trip people up.

NN: Is there anything else you would have done differently? Would you still have chosen the, as it turned out, hugely controversial platypus?

Anthony: Ha ha — honestly? Yeah, I think so. I think it’s ridiculous that we can’t use the perfect character for the role just because a group holds it as their mascot.

Lars: My only association with the platypus as a mascot was Hexley the Platypus of Darwin OS.

Anthony: I can see how it added to the coincidences and confusion, but I also think it would have been a non-issue if there hadn’t already been a question about the game. Other than that, I don’t think there’s much we would have done differently, as least on the whole “not looking like ID” thing. We have some lessons we’ve learned in terms of game design and development, but those are very different.

Lars: It’s interesting that a lot of these things came from the game’s story.

Anthony: Yeah, geez Lars, why’d you write that? The basic story was, if I’m remembering correctly, heavily Lars’ idea. I then wrote the script based on his plot, and then he made the script less dumb sounding and funnier in editing.

Lars: I worked with Anthony — again, no input from Jed and David — on coming up with a story that would justify the following: 1. Why the player cares about a cell, 2. why the cell is being put through a series of sadistic tests (levels), and 3. why cellular organelles are being introduced one at a time (level/feature progression). I make no claims of being a great story writer. In the end, I riffed on Spore’s scenario where the first life comes on a meteor.

Anthony: Which was not entirely accidental anyway. EA Maxis, the Spore developers, originally had interest in the project, so we had incentive to make it a feasible tie-in too.

Lars: But before I don’t answer your question, Joey, here’s what I might do different: I would probably have made certain parts more clear, that the organelles were not magically coming out of the sky, but were being inserted in a lab. I’ve read articles about scientists doing that with “frankencells,” piecing cells together in a lab. I see in retrospect how that triggered ID alarms; however, aren’t scientists really doing that? Changing DNA, inserting and removing pieces of cells? It was really convenient from a game design perspective to use that model as it lets us add and subtract stuff as we needed it, but in the future I might just have revealed hidden organelles one at a time, saying they were all there to start with, but we’re only showing them to you one at a time.

NN: The fact that the platypuses were scientists, like the jokes about grants, eliminated that problem for me.

Lars: Right, and as we said it’s something of a game convention, only more loaded in this case.

As for “hidden messages” in our story, I’d like to address the specific accusation that our story was pushing the ID theory of “front-loaded” genetic information in single-celled organisms. The part of the story where the scientists insert the DNA into the amoeba cell was my idea. I read an interesting article online documenting how an amoeba, despite being a single-celled organism, has a much longer genome than more complex life forms such as us mammals. This gave me an idea for a sci-fi scenario where a dying race could “store” its DNA biologically in another organism, by replacing some of the amoeba’s unused, “junk” DNA for later extraction. I’d never even heard of this front-loaded DNA theory.

NN: I think it’s very telling that the two of you have different religious views as well: Anthony is an atheist and Lars is a Christian. So right away you had some fundamental differences even though Lars is an evolutionist.

Anthony: Yeah, we were aware of religious differences, but it actually didn’t even really come up since the science was never up for debate between us.

Lars: Right, exactly. I didn’t know Anthony was an atheist until he said so in the boards. I don’t feel it changes our relationship at all; this game was always just about the science.

NN: Some people don’t believe scientists can or should believe in God, especially if they’re studying the origins of life. I think we’ve covered this implicitly, but do you want to address that perception?

Anthony: Well, that’s more of a question for Lars, though I’ll clarify one thing in case it matters. I classify myself as a “weak atheist” in contrast to a “strong atheist”. In other words, I don’t believe that there is a god, rather than believing that there isn’t.

Lars: I’m not the world’s best philosopher, theologian, or scientist, but I’ll give it a stab. I feel that you can’t disagree with something you don’t understand, it’s fundamentally impossible. You’re just dismissing a straw man. To disagree with something, you have to fully wrap your head around it, understand what’s being said, and then evaluate it and say “that’s wrong.” That’s why I don’t believe in creationism; I’ve examined it and I feel like I understand the theory and the claims it makes, and I think it doesn’t support the facts. I’ve gone through the same process with evolution, as well as my faith, and feel they both pass the test.

I think there’s no conflict between religion and science, at least not my religion, anyway. I just want to believe things that are true, which for me includes both Christianity and the theory of evolution. I’d like to quote Theodosius Dobzhansky, a fellow Orthodox Christian, on this one: “Nothing makes sense in biology except in light of evolution.” He didn’t have any problem reconciling faith and science, and neither do I, and he’s a big player in the modern evolutionary synthesis. I understand people’s worries about our game — I think they’re logical, but things looked a lot different behind the curtain than some people have assumed.

Anthony: Right. As I’ve said in our forums, I think the closest thing to that you could criticize is that Jed didn’t strongly object when I wanted to cut evolution. Clearly some other biologists would have objected harder, but I do believe that I would have won that argument since ultimately it was a game design question, which was my purview.

Lars: Another thing is that I live in Texas, so I know a lot of ID’ers/creationists, and maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think this game really hits their talking points. I don’t remember the last time an ID’er suggested that life began on another planet.

Anthony: Yeah, I never really understood how panspermia would fix the whole ID/evolution thing. It just shifts it to another planet. But I probably need to read up more on the “theory”.

NN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Anthony: Ultimately, we just want our game to be able to be used in schools to help teach and hopefully get kids excited about science.

NN: Will you be revising CellCraft at all, or making new games?

Lars: We are making CellCraft open source. And Anthony and I are taking a break from educational games and just making one for fun. But I’d love to make a career out of making these kinds of educational games.

Anthony: There are definitely things we have in mind if we ever do a sort of sequel to the game, but it really depends on whether or not we find another opportunity or get funding. At this point it’s difficult to fund on its own; without the grant money we would have lost quite a lot.

Lars Doucet: Oh! We need to thank our sponsor

Anthony: Ha ha, right — Carolina Biological Supply, who purchased sponsorship rights and hopefully will be looking into future games like this.

Lars: And big thanks to MacArthur, HASTAC, and the Digital Media & Learning Competition!

Anthony: Indeed, who originally provided the grants and support for us.

NN: Thank you so much for talking to me about all this!

Lars: Thank you, for hearing us out. The internet’s a crazy place.