Spoon Plus Fork = Spork, Spore Plus Porn = Sporn?

EA's sandbox-y Creature Creator's been out for a month and it's already packing a melange of oddities like chameleon droids, demonic elephants, two-legged grapes, and pigs with schnozes the size of hoovers.

It's also, thanks to some lascivious digital sculptors, become a magnet for internet porn.

Well...make that internet sporn, also known as "Spore-plus-porn," as in comically carnal creatures with, ahem, "conspicuous anatomical features." Use your imagination, and maybe a smattering of adjectives like "prodigious," "manifold," and "waggly," or employ a little ingenuity and reverse-engineer monikers like "Dongzilla," "Horny Little Creature," and "Phallic Fornication Machine."

A few folks have even wrestled letters from featureless flesh, fashioning "living profanities," i.e. creatures literally shaped like four-letter-words.

But does it really constitute pornography? Or creative expression? Porn isn't merely showing naked people, even naked people with their naughty bits exposed. Nope, not porn, any more than Michelangelo's "David" or Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People."

What is? That would be naughty bits exposed for the express purpose of stimulating erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

Clear as mud? It gets even more confusing when you're talking about a hypothetically "alien" species, where what looks like your average Dirk Diggler appendage may or may not be.

EA's response: Shut it down, YouTube videos et al. Which, while predictable, is also curiously anthropomorphic, i.e. attributing human characteristics or behavior to decidedly non-human creatures or objects. It's a way of saying, perhaps without intending to, that on the one hand, Spore is about creating totally new forms of life, but on the other, that anything resembling human sexuality -- human or no, aesthetic or just plain prurient -- is taboo.

It also raises the specter of product ratings. Remember the ridiculous Oblivion ESRB ratings scandal? The one where a user released a mod that let you pull the shirts off characters to reveal "anatomically correct" upper bodies? The ESRB re-rated the game "M" for Mature and compelled Bethesda to pull existing copies off shelves to be relabeled, despite the fact that the only way to view a partially nude character in the game required user interaction with the product in violation of its terms of use.

With Spore's Creature Creator -- rated "E" for Everyone -- the only way you get from G-rated extraterrestrials to "The Creature From Planet Nooky" is, likewise, user interaction with the product in violation of its terms of use. In fact Spore goes one further than Oblivion: It places no technical restrictions on what you can or can't do with that hunk of formless blob waiting for your creative spark.

I guess it comes down to the proverbial tree in the woods (sounds unheard, sights unseen). If a guy or gal under opaque digital clothing is anatomically correct, does he/she constitute "mature" entertainment?

I mean, no one thinks all those cartoon Disney girls and guys are just formless mannequins under their clothing, right?

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