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Spore hasn't exactly had a smooth ride since hitting the market back in September. While the Sporepedia has garnered its fair share of praise, reviewers and fans alike have consistently pointed to one problem -- oversimplified gameplay.

So who is to blame for this apparent flaw? If a recent post on the Official Spore Forum is to be believed, it's not Will Wright but Chris Hecker, the same guy who once called the Wii "two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape." Apparently Hecker is drinking the kool-aid now though, proudly calling himself "a founding member of the 'cute' team" in the Seed Magazine article the post derives much of its information from.

On the other side of the line was the so-called "science team," apparently lead by Wright and art director Ocean Quigley. According to former Maxis intern Michael Chang, creature morphology "actually mattered" in early versions, forcing players to carefully consider the placement of parts lest the creature find itself too slow, or overbalancing from its own weight. Hecker, however, was apparently having "strong misgivings about how all this hard science would appeal to the wider world."

According to Seed, Maxis ultimately decided to "preserve the illusion of life at the expense of the actual facts of life." That meant that the game's more Darwinian outlook on creature design gave way to a more external process, with the player deliberately intervening in the design of the creatures. Scientists asked to evaluate the game for educational purposes suggested that Spore was actually furthering the premise of intelligent design "under the badge of science," and call the evolution mechanic "misleading."

Wright, for his part, pointed out that to get bogged down in specific factual errors is to miss the point, saying, "Since you're actually travelling through the evolution of this organism from very simple to very complex and intelligent, the meta-message here is that life evolves." If anything, Wright seems almost more interested in the players than the game, keeping careful track of data to see how female and male gamers play differently, among other things.

But was Hecker really the one responsible for Spore's change in direction? In a recent post on the Quarter to Three Forums, Hecker wrote, "The original post is nonsense. I'm trying to figure out how to handle this now. I've been ignoring it for a month, and it looked like it would fade away on the various forums, but some people seem to need simple explanations and a single person to blame for their disappointment, and now it's hit the front page of digg and reddit."

We'll do our best to try and get Hecker's side of the story on this issue. But in the meantime, do you think Spore is too simple?