Tomorrow's games, designed by players as they play - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Ace_O_Spades · 02-23-2006, 10:53 PM

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...ml?sid=6143653

Quote:

Tomorrow's games, designed by players as they play
User-generated content is back in vogue as games go "open source;" J Allard and Will Wright get behind personalization of games at SoCal conference.

LOS ANGELES--Game budgets are skyrocketing. Development teams are swelling almost to film-studio proportions. The only way out of this trap is to enlist players to help create their own worlds, a pair of top game creators said Thursday.

Speaking at The Entertainment Gathering conference, Sims creator Will Wright and Microsoft Xbox team head J Allard both cast a spotlight on the growing role that game players will have in creating content for the biggest games.

Wright's newest game, dubbed Spore, will populate fictional planets with animals and cities created wholly by other game players. Allard said the Xbox 360 will increasingly encourage developers to let their players add on to worlds and even sell their creations though a central Xbox store system.

"[Gaming] is the only medium where we yield control of the protagonist. Let's yield control of the director--and the producer," said Allard, a vice president at Microsoft. "We're going to take on the Wikipedia model. We're going to take on...the open-source model, if you will, for gaming."

Indeed, the idea that consumers have a virtually infinite appetite for customized entertainment and are willing to invest both time and money in tailoring their own experience is rippling through the media world far beyond gaming with deep financial consequences.

Record labels see the personalized ringtone market that brought in more than $600 million in the United States alone last year, one of the most promising bright spots in years of declining revenues. TV companies have finally adapted to the idea that consumers may want on-demand versions of their shows online, and are beginning to release shows in bulk to Apple Computer's iTunes store for sale the day after they air.

But gaming has had the most experience with the power of the consumer-director and is going much farther than any other medium in opening the process of content creation to its customers.

Players' eagerness to go beyond the conventional boundaries has been seen in almost every online game. In the first major massively multiplayer game, Ultima Online, developers saw their swords-and-sorcery stories expanded by players who opened taverns to host online friends and create theater groups to perform A Christmas Carol inside the game.

That behavior helps create new content for the game and gives players a stake in the game to keep their interest piqued longer--a critical thing for online games in which players pay a subscription fee every month.

Wright said he had learned the power of the phenomenon by watching players in his Sim City and Sims games spend hours customizing their characters and creating in-game objects that were traded online.

His new game, Spore, still under development at Electronic Arts, is built wholly around this phenomenon. Players will control a species as it evolves from a single-cell organism all the way to an interstellar space-traveling "galactic god," creating the look and personality of the species and, later on, the tools, cities, and even planets they use and inhabit.

The game is created so that simple choices on the part of the consumer--mouth shape, leg placement, and so on--will be amplified by the computer's physics and behavior models to create creatures worthy of a Pixar movie, he said.

But the real secret weapon for the game is that each player's creations will be uploaded to the company and then downloaded to other players' computers. Once a species reaches space, for example, it will visit other worlds inhabited entirely by cities full of beings created inside another player's game. "Instead of putting players in the role of Luke Skywalker, or Frodo Baggins, I'd rather put them in the role of George Lucas," Wright said.

Allard told a story of meeting a 12- or 13-year-old inner-city child last year and introducing him to a basketball game on the new Xbox 360. Instead of spending hours dunking or trash-talking with his friends, the boy spent two hours creating a pair of sneakers, saying that was what he wanted to do when he grew up.

Maybe that boy wasn't typical of every single game player, but he didn't need to be, Allard said.

"If only 1 percent of our audience that plays Halo helped construct the world around Halo, it would be more human beings than work at Microsoft corporation," Allard said. "That's how much human energy we could harness in this medium."

By John Borland

Interesting concept, attempting to effectively tap a vast resource of potential.

I've been eagerly awaiting this game for a long time...

Do you think player created content really is the future of gaming? Will gamers buy into this?

Briz9 · 02-24-2006, 08:06 AM

Player-made mods are pretty widespread already, however, since they are using someone else's game they can't charge for their mods. If people could get paid for the mods they create, I think we would see a lot more quality mods. Maybe they could set something up where 25% of the price for a mod goes to the creator of the game.

Some mods that I'm looking forward to trying out are Sven's Co-op Mod for Half life 2 & Shattered Faith for Battlefield 2. I'll also be keeping an eye on Oblivion mods when that game comes out.

guthmund · 02-24-2006, 08:25 AM

Quote:

"If only 1 percent of our audience that plays Halo helped construct the world around Halo, it would be more human beings than work at Microsoft corporation," Allard said. "That's how much human energy we could harness in this medium."

...."and we wouldn't have to pay a fucking dime for it. Imagine that. We won't have to come up with storylines, character arcs or well, anything...we just give you the 'innards' and tell you to run with it. A lot cheaper on our end, but don't worry, we're still going to charge you the $60 for the game and maybe a fee to access the online component. Not to mention the workload lightens considerably now that we don't have 'fancy' up the game. A lot more work on your end, but what the fuck do we care?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by briz

If people could get paid for the mods they create, I think we would see a lot more quality mods. Maybe they could set something up where 25% of the price for a mod goes to the creator of the game.

I don't think so. In fact, if anything, it's going to make the overall quality of the 'mod' pool worse. Every idiot on the planet is going to try to get in on the action. Creating just any 'mod' is easy. Creating quality 'mods' is difficult and time-consuming. The fact that you don't get paid for it keeps most of the slackers out, in my opinion. Once money gets involved every Tom, Dick and Harry with a modicum of skill in the necessary tool set is going to be creating crap just to get paid. More mods=more money and the desire to make a quick buck as fast as possible means substandard quality pushed out the door round the clock.

And the obligatory Penny Arcade reference...

robbdn · 02-24-2006, 09:37 AM

Deep breath... this is going to be a long one...

I think this thread so far really illustrates the full potential for this gaming concept. Will Wright will probably make a fun and interesting game, but is it really going to revolutionize gaming? I don't think it will.

There is a reason that when anybody mentions user-created mods, there are a handful of games that spring to mind. For my purposes, we'll take Valve's work, which arguably has the most well-known mod community. There's a reason for this. Valve focuses on creating a fully-realized gaming experience from their own minds, nothing else, and then says to the community that if we can do this, so can you, using our tools. When one plays through any of the Half-Life games, one is confronted with a creativity, in the art direction and in the gameplay, that comes directly from Valve's various individual minds. It inspires the player who wants to play MORE to continue that play by creating additional content for others to play with, just as Valve did. That's right, making good games is just a way of "playing with the players." These are people who love play in it's highest form, and I would argue that this higher form of play is an art, but that's a topic for another thread.

My point here is not to say that Will Wright is not one of these people who loves to play with players--he is--but I think he may have gone astray with this latest idea. When I'm deep in the game, it's more than just playing, it's part of understanding and relating to the team/individual that brought me said game. Spore will have that, for sure, but when my game is invaded by some aliens that come out of a drunk frat party I have reason to believe the game is going to crumble under its own weight. It's too much. Wright obviously has a vision to share, but how can it come through with an excess of user-created content, noise, to the game's true form? Obviously none of us have played this game, but this is the line of reasoning that leads me to my skepticism. At the risk of sounding elitist (it's a risk I'm willing to take) when we have nothing but user-content, we cannot play with the minds that brought us the game amidst the noise of those who cannot play as well as others. Games are always fun for them, but more as an expression of their own stupidity realized in-game as opposed to an appreciation of the creative process of play. You more commonly know them as the cheaters, and so on.

That said, I think Spore and the Xbox Live Marketplace are two completely separate issues. But when Microsoft's bad boy goes with Will Wright to talk about games, these issues will be linked. I agree with guthmund when it comes to XBL Marketplace, for the most part. The homebrew and indie gaming scene are both alive and kicking, and beautiful things. They are communities of people who love play for its own sake, and work at playing for nothing more than the reward of play itself. The fact is, though, that these people do have to eat, and pay their mortgages/rent. XBL Marketplace finally offers an easily accessible direct-to-market path for indie developers, which is fantastic.... it also means that Microsoft profits everytime somebody enjoys the fruits of a dedicated game-maker's art, which tastes sour to say the least. I would not be surprised, however, if these indie communities continued to offer their work for free to PC and homebrew users on the "free" internet and solicit donations, while raising revenue for food and future products by selling to Xbox 360 users who aren't aware of these communities on the net. Or maybe I don't understand how XBL really works. I'll have to do some more research on it. Any thoughts?

02-24-2006, 09:37 AM	#4 (permalink)
robbdn Crazy	Deep breath... this is going to be a long one... I think this thread so far really illustrates the full potential for this gaming concept. Will Wright will probably make a fun and interesting game, but is it really going to revolutionize gaming? I don't think it will. There is a reason that when anybody mentions user-created mods, there are a handful of games that spring to mind. For my purposes, we'll take Valve's work, which arguably has the most well-known mod community. There's a reason for this. Valve focuses on creating a fully-realized gaming experience from their own minds, nothing else, and then says to the community that if we can do this, so can you, using our tools. When one plays through any of the Half-Life games, one is confronted with a creativity, in the art direction and in the gameplay, that comes directly from Valve's various individual minds. It inspires the player who wants to play MORE to continue that play by creating additional content for others to play with, just as Valve did. That's right, making good games is just a way of "playing with the players." These are people who love play in it's highest form, and I would argue that this higher form of play is an art, but that's a topic for another thread. My point here is not to say that Will Wright is not one of these people who loves to play with players--he is--but I think he may have gone astray with this latest idea. When I'm deep in the game, it's more than just playing, it's part of understanding and relating to the team/individual that brought me said game. Spore will have that, for sure, but when my game is invaded by some aliens that come out of a drunk frat party I have reason to believe the game is going to crumble under its own weight. It's too much. Wright obviously has a vision to share, but how can it come through with an excess of user-created content, noise, to the game's true form? Obviously none of us have played this game, but this is the line of reasoning that leads me to my skepticism. At the risk of sounding elitist (it's a risk I'm willing to take) when we have nothing but user-content, we cannot play with the minds that brought us the game amidst the noise of those who cannot play as well as others. Games are always fun for them, but more as an expression of their own stupidity realized in-game as opposed to an appreciation of the creative process of play. You more commonly know them as the cheaters, and so on. That said, I think Spore and the Xbox Live Marketplace are two completely separate issues. But when Microsoft's bad boy goes with Will Wright to talk about games, these issues will be linked. I agree with guthmund when it comes to XBL Marketplace, for the most part. The homebrew and indie gaming scene are both alive and kicking, and beautiful things. They are communities of people who love play for its own sake, and work at playing for nothing more than the reward of play itself. The fact is, though, that these people do have to eat, and pay their mortgages/rent. XBL Marketplace finally offers an easily accessible direct-to-market path for indie developers, which is fantastic.... it also means that Microsoft profits everytime somebody enjoys the fruits of a dedicated game-maker's art, which tastes sour to say the least. I would not be surprised, however, if these indie communities continued to offer their work for free to PC and homebrew users on the "free" internet and solicit donations, while raising revenue for food and future products by selling to Xbox 360 users who aren't aware of these communities on the net. Or maybe I don't understand how XBL really works. I'll have to do some more research on it. Any thoughts? __________________ I'm swimming in the digital residue of a media-drenched world. It's too cold.

02-24-2006, 08:06 AM	#2 (permalink)
Briz9 Crazy	Player-made mods are pretty widespread already, however, since they are using someone else's game they can't charge for their mods. If people could get paid for the mods they create, I think we would see a lot more quality mods. Maybe they could set something up where 25% of the price for a mod goes to the creator of the game. Some mods that I'm looking forward to trying out are Sven's Co-op Mod for Half life 2 & Shattered Faith for Battlefield 2. I'll also be keeping an eye on Oblivion mods when that game comes out.