Will Wright (Sims) and J Allard (Microsoft) were recently at the Entertainment Gathering conference, and talking about player-created content being the model for the way forward. CNet's got the piece:
Speaking at The Entertainment Gathering conference here, "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.
Will Wright once said - I believe - in an interview that over 90% of the assets available to The Sims were player-generated. (Damn I wish I could find that quote now!) You only have to look at the mapping scene in games like Quake to see how a game can have years added to its lifespan just from the novelty of a steady stream of new content.
This is bloody exciting.
There's a paper (2005) from two guys from Vienna's University of Economics and Business here (http://userinnovation.mit.edu/papers/SIMS_R&D_final.pdf) discussing the value of users in contributiong to games and focussing on the Sims. "It is widely underestimated that users
might be highly innovative themselves, especially users at the leading edge in a certain area." - makes the case for making it easier for users to join in.
Posted by: Rich | February 03, 2006 at 10:05
However, I'm hoping that they're not relying on user-generated content... There's only so many obsessives to go around who will be willing to dedicate sufficient time to a particular product to produce material of a sufficiently high quantity...
Posted by: Shard | February 03, 2006 at 10:06
True. I guess the question is how much of the stuff generated by the otaku minority filters out to the wider community, and what designers can do to make that happen.
Posted by: Rich | February 03, 2006 at 11:01
Actually, there is a large pool of "obsessives" waiting in the wings. The industrial design community, which is growing at a staggering pace, is capable of generating the kinds of nextgen content games require. Additionally, a couple of factors (at least) will probably lead to their migration:
1) Job openings are not keeping pace with graduation numbers
2) The increasingly porous boundary between the tangible and the intangible
However, I'd add that it's opportunities like those presented by MS's Marketplace which have the highest liklihood of attracting these individuals. After all, they'll have student loans and bills to pay.
Posted by: csven | February 03, 2006 at 19:14
The thing here is that Wright isn't counting on the obsessives alone. They're building tools for these games that makes it *extremely* easy for anyone to create content for these games (in specific, Spore). The days of learning QRadiant or another game dev tool with high learning curve are slowly becoming numbered.
Posted by: DeadMertz | February 04, 2006 at 15:54
Agree. The barriers to creating almost anything are dropping steadily.
Posted by: csven | February 04, 2006 at 17:19
Many people seem so optimistic about the possiblities and the long term future potential. I however dread the day i will have to wade through a sea of unmitigated user generated crap to find a single piece of good quality product, etc.
Posted by: bigwig | February 05, 2006 at 04:23