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Player-Made Content Is The Future
ZDNet reports from The Entertainment Gathering conference last week, giving out some perspective on the future of games as it's seen by Will Wright and J. Allard. From their points of view, player-made content will be king in the coming years. With the expense of making games primarily due to the cost of content, allowing players to build the game they want to play will be popular ... both with designers and players. From the article: "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. "
1. Produce a basic MMORPG framework. 2. Get players to crank out the meat of the game for free, yet still get charged subscription fees 3. Profit.
Player created content is one of the great things from the past.
This is news?
I think there is always a desire to go beyond what was put down in the first place. The advantages mentioned above are obviously postives, although i was supprised that they didn't mention the fact that it can make a game go forever, when you keep people coming back you can make more money on the game but also you give the players more as it continues and grows beyond the original "levels"...
I also like the idea of being able to set up a theatre group, and I'm reminded of when a Chineese girl died playing one of the games they held a vidgil for her centred round an ingame church, it was nice... in a slightly weird way...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
With the steadily decreasing quality of the content coming out of mainstream studios, is it any wonder than player made content is on the up?
May the Maths Be with you!
We're already seeing this with the Source engine, half the fun is Half-Life 2, the other half is the mods made for it. It's basically an open-source development model ported to games, and this can only be good.
"Oh boy"
SWG tried this, and the userbase screamed for more content, and we all know where that lead...
I remember when I was one of the players in an Australian game system run on one of their mainframes in Melbourne A.C.T., called Galaxy and it's sequel Galaxy II.
...).
At the time I lived in Canada and had a double-hyphenated last name - me and some Kiwis from New Zealand spent a lot of time creating civilizations, species, and bizarre things (like my Ford Corporation, run by Ford Prefect, which sold high-tech (level 15) robot-assisted spaceships, orbital spaceports, and plug-in robotic pilots/gunners/navigators/etc - which happened to have a minor malfunction where they wouldn't shoot my player civilization in a large-scale battle - naturally, the attacking player would rip them out and go manual, but in the ten minutes it took to fully remove them, my side usually won with it's high-G kamikaze neutron bomb ships that crashed into the enemies large ships and made them suitable only for scrap
I think Will's right about this, and when I ran my play-by-mail RPG (yes, by postal mail, 110 players) much of the time was spent by players doing the same thing and then other players piggybacking off of them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The two best examples of this outside the MMORPG realm are Escape Velocity and Rome: Total War. My suitemates play a mod of RTW called "Total Realism", which is practically a rewrite of everything except the basic engine and the GUI. I would say that the plug-ins for EV Nova have doubled or tripled my enjoyment of the game, because there were so many plug-ins that changed things that it was like playing a different game each time.
That, I think, is the key. No one will want to play $50 for a game they'll beat once then consign to a drawer to look at again in a year. Games that can continue to draw interest for months will be the ones people remember.
Player-made content is always going to be buried in a sea of vandalism and coyright violations unless it's policed and all content is pre-approved.
Games can't allow you to violate copyrights, because the game companies will be the ones who get sued. By the same token it'll be next to impossible for any game with lots of player-made content to have an ESRB rating other than AO (adults only).
This is really just natural evolution. As online games become more popular and realistic, they become more like the real world, where all content is developed by the 'players' every day.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Neverwinter Nights was very much geared towards player-created content and has done quite well over the last few years. Thousands of player created modules have been made and there's a number of persistent worlds still running years after the game came out.
These last few years I worked on a few campaigns that were well-received, and am working on a new a new campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2.
I think player created content works well for certain genres, and requires an almost mystical process to attract the right community. I got tons of value out of UT2004 and the original Half-Life. Other games like Doom 3 and Morrowind didn't quite pan out as much as I would have liked. I think it requires the game developer to actively encourage the community, as well as having a solid core game, wide install base, and easy-to-use tools. Tricky business.
I think the future of TV will be video game like episodes, where a player/viewer can interact in a virtual reality episode story, turning the "broadcast" into a choose-your-own-adventure Sims type game. Every game will have a set and entertaining ending though just in case the player sucks, or doesn't want to participate on a given day.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"With the steadily decreasing quality of the content coming out of mainstream studios, is it any wonder than player made content is on the up?"
Well it certainly will make for an interesting "put up, or shut up" when it comes to the virtues estolled by Slashdot every time criticism is lobbed against the usual suspects.
If you head over to Simtropolis, you'll see a thriving community of user-made buildings, most of them "growable". That means that in your SimCity, you can have Starbuck's and McDonald's and Home Depot "grow up" naturally into your city layout. You can have an apartment complex that looks just like where you live; you can have less-famous (but still striking) landmarks that may or may not exist. There are architecture styles, like Baltimore Rowhouse, that the original game never included, but which look fantastic and add realism to the city.
If the developers had tried to put a Starbuck's in the game, they'd have to license the logo and the trademarked architecture; if they tried to make all the thousands of obscure local landmarks in mid-sized American and Asian cities, the production costs would have tripled and the game would never have been released. As it is, Starbuck's gets free advertising and the game gets a realistic facelift.
There are also functional content upgrades, like Ground Light Rail (the original game only has subway, el train, and heavy rail) and retaining walls that block traffic noise from freeways. I wouldn't play the game without these upgrades, but I'd absolutely buy another SimCity title knowing that the mod community will polish it and make it shine.
Simtropolis' bandwidth isn't free, and I've PayPalled them donations to keep their server up; in this way, my donations have essentially turned user-created content (from which I can pick and choose) into a second, self-directed expansion pack for the game.
While I think it'd be great if developers/publishers opened up the games even MORE to the player community to allow them to personalize the game more... I also think it'd be EXTREMELY BAD for any game to rely primarily on player generated content. Why should I shill out $50-60 for a game where I have to create the actual meat of it (or other players)? I already spend my work time programming, and my hobby writing stories, why would I spend my leisure/relaxing/fun time making content for a game when I won't even own the content due to the restrictive EULA of most games? I just want to sit down and enjoy a game, preferrably with an immersive storyline. Maybe they should just save their budget by not trying to make THE MOST REALISTIC GRAPHICS POSSIBLE--just "realistic enough" or "not an eyesore" is good enough for me. Katamari doesn't have the best graphics, but that's an INCREDIBLE game. Graphics don't make the game, CONTENT makes the game. If they ship games with little to no content (just pretty graphics and tools to create the game of your choosing), why bother buying it? I really don't get it...
Read my blog posts on usability.
Sadly, from what I know (I left the game a little over a year ago), none of these ideas ever got implemented.
"I think it requires the game developer to actively encourage the community, as well as having a solid core game, wide install base, and easy-to-use tools. Tricky business."
Well Far Cry's Sandbox editor and Lua scriptability certainly fulfilled the "easy to use" tools. The core game was pretty solid. Although I'm not certain about "actively encourage" (they have a development website), or the "wide install base".
BTW one thing about NWN is that at the time it garnered a lot of attention for being on Linux and Windows, when Linux had a shortage of commercial games.
BTW2 Has anyone noticed that racing games aren't very moddable, especially compared to other genres?
Player-Customized content is more like it. TFA isn't saying that legions of basement dwelling mama's boys are going to crank out new models and textures. It's saying that the player should have more customization, and that customization should be shared with other players. Which is already the case in a lot of MMOs (things like custom houses). I think it's true, but even more so, I think the real drive is a non-static environment. Players want to see their work mean something. Not clear a city of a ghoul infestation just to see the ghouls come back 5 minutes later. Why can't my guild cleans that city and take over the biggest house in the walls, put up our banners, clean the place up, and leave a permanent mark on the world? Ahh well, I have a journal entry full of my ideas for an MMO if anyone is interested: http://slashdot.org/~RingDev/journal/128132
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
With a well-worded and specific EULA, players will be bound to the idea that what they create for this world (or anything that goes over the servers) is therefore owned by the development company or the publishing company, and no longer you.
Or the more logical route, is that anything uploaded is the opinion or owned by the people who posted them so when the FBI or RIAA/MPAA show up the game company can go "Oh, but this isn't ours... The player did this and by our EULA (and hopefully common carrier status which hasn't been proven in court yet) he is therefor the sole violator of your said content, illegal, or questional material. Oh and here is his address and home phone number. Good day sirs!"
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm officially ignoring anybody that says some single thing is "the future".
Player made content is in the past (Late '70s, early '80s), in the present, and will be in the future. It's a niche. It will exist. Just because some guy can't figure out how to make content for a huge game in an economical way doen't mean it's the 'one true future'.
Yes, player made content is the future. Pre-made content, randomly generated content, and content free games are the future too. They'll all exist in the proportions they've always existed in, and people said the exact same crap about the first 3D consoles as they're saying about the latest thing to be called "next-gen".
Most of the player-base isn't composed of qualified writers/artists/etc. Which would be why for every decent NWN module, Quake map, etc., there are a dozen terrible ones you have to sift through.
The whole reason that content is getting more expensive to create is that our standards are getting higher. We want more detailed models and environments, AND we want better design. Gone are the days when id could stick a model that looked like a turd with red eyes into Doom and have it become a legendary game baddy. We want real writing, art, and cinematics now, not what a couple programmers could hack together.
I imagine that in the future, we're going to continue to give our money to those companies, like Blizzard and Bioware, that are smart enough to put an emphasis on quality content.
At the height of the Myth II craze, there were tons of maps and game variants that you could play on Bungie.net. There were all of the WWII varients including some with tanks (definately NOT in the original Myth II game). I remember one that's not that old that had civil war characters.
If you want consumers to pay $50 or $60 for a game, there has to be replayability. People are fickle; they move on to other things.
Make love, not reality television.
One of the best things I remember from Ultima Online was the ability to be able to buy blank books, write in them, and make copies to sell to other players. I'm disappointed that this hasn't been implemented in other games.
I hear ya, and I know that was half tongue-in-cheek, but I would still think that the publishers/developers would rather have a chance to own player-made content to use in future versions/other games/etc. and would risk the legal stuff.
:)
What I would see as most likely, is again, in the EULA, some form of legal verbage that stated that you could not create illegal, copyrighted, or whatever. That way you avoid lightsabers in Everquest IX, or Elminster as an NPC in a SWG game.
THEN, the companies would own the content AND have the legal right to refer the FBI/RIAA/MPAA/gun-toting maniacs to the players doorsteps while avoiding legal action themselves.
I might be working with my english prof to produce a set of Shakespeare based video games and it occured to me that no one has done this yet...
It seems like something that would make a very interesting long term project, starting with the basic premise and theme and extending continuously to try and represent more and more of the nuance of the work...
The reference text is widely available and even the interpretations and criticism nescessary can be easily found.
I'm sure there are many similar sets of work which lend themself to distributed and ongoing development but there seem to be few gaming projects based on the same kind of incremental improvements we see in application software.
Like others have probably commented this is straight from the MUD playbook. Realistically this is the only path for developers to take. As we can tell with alot of the mods for existing games out there that there are alot of talented people out there who would love to create content in their spare time.
.05% of 1M people build content thats like having 500 developers. Now the problems you face are good quality enhancements, ones that link into the story line, balanced but that could be solved by having review panels consisting of company employees and players.
Also, if you have a player base in the millions like MMORPGS it makes perfect sense to let players develope their own content. Even if only
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
"Most of the player-base isn't composed of qualified writers/artists/etc. Which would be why for every decent NWN module, Quake map, etc., there are a dozen terrible ones you have to sift through."
So are you saying that the OSS methadology wouldn't work in the game space?
Any such game is definitely in the "fantasy" genre :-)
We hear this "user created content is the future" thing like every three months, and I think it's nonsense.
Sure, everyone would like to create a "Hello World!" MMOG and sit back and watch the players turn it into World of Warcraft.
Ha ha. Fat chance.
I'm still waiting for the glass I broke yesterday to reassemble itself spontaneously too.
Most players don't have that much imagination, most player created content will be crud (like 95% of everything), and even if it were good there's no way it would be *consistent*.
Sure, you might get a strong volunteer leader and an open-source style development success, but then you've just suckered people into working for you for free so I wouldn't really be betting my business plan on that happening, especialy if you're charging them $10/month for the privilege.
Look at the success of a game like World of Warcraft (5,000,000+ players at up to $15/month each) and then look at what went into creating that world (a huge five year development effort by hundreds of people). Now everyone wants in on that success but nobody wants to spend the time and money to do it right, so you get all these suggestions that user created content is the solution.
It will probably sucker in quite a few investors who think they're going to get WoW for free, but I'll be pretty surprised if anyone has a big success with it.
Yes, there *are* many very talented players out there, many who have better ideas than many game developers, but the trick is filtering the smart ones from the stupid ones, creating some sort of centralized continuity control to ensure consistency, etc.
One of the most critical things to any functional MMOG these days is creating and protecting an in-game economy. When you're letting players create the content that sounds even more difficult if you have to prevent any sort of exploit that would allow unbalancing the economy.
It's a fun fantasy, but I'm not holding my breath.
G.
I've seen player made content, especially in a game like Second Life. Much of it is pretty sad. Some of it is exceptional.
It really depends, imo, what type of MMO you are talking about.
Games like The Sims, Second Life, and other "social" MMOs can thrive easily on player made content. Those games are mostly about playing an alternate persona. At least in Second Life, fashion was everything. You were looked at by what outfit you wore more than your ability to actually have social skills. So, those that could create great outfits made a huge difference in the game. They also made a decent about of cash.
For RPGs and the like, storylines come more into play. Just creating a game where you hack-n-slash your way through to some goal, with not real plot to speak of, is just a remake of nethack or moria. It works for FPS, but most folks want plot with their RPG.
If you look at the history of MUDs, you see that a lot of them are very generic, based on a particular build, and then the owner of the MUD and some of their friends would get around to adding player made content. With a few exceptions, they were awful. Most of them found out it wasn't as easy to create dynamic storylines that kept people interested. 90% of them ended up being played by the creators themselves, and a few bored souls that found one that fit their niche.
The same held true with many of the player made NWN modules. Some of them were really well thought out, with a decent storyline that made you want to play through them. Most of them were fairly mindless hack-n-slash events.
It's a lot of hard work to make a dynamic storyline and then add the content to make it work. A lot of work with very little pay-off. They become labors of time and love for the creative process, and the talent to make it interesting to others. That's rare.
Look at art. A lot of people out there can draw pictures, and paint paintings, and take pictures. But how many of them can inspire the viewer to feel something? Sure, anyone can take a picture of a frozen landscape, but how many will make us see and feel things like the late Ansel Adams did? The artist has to have an eye and a feel for what they are looking at, and be able to transfer that to their medium. That is where true talent lies. I can take pictures. I even have a great digital SLR camera. I have a pretty good eye, and I've caught some great images. But nobody is going to confuse me with Ansel Adams.
Well, when someone is creating a MMO or adding content to one, I *want* them to do better than I could. I want them to do better than 99.99% of us could. I want to be entertained. I want to get into the storyline. I want to see encounters that make sense. I want difficulties to overcome that aren't impossible. I want tactics to matter and make sense.
Besides, if the player isn't creating the whole game themselves, then there needs to be a master plot, and then have the player content fill in the pieces of the puzzle. Most important, they need someone with the vision to stay the course, or make changes to support a truly inspired idea. Trying to manage various unpaid people to follow along with that master plot, working as a cohesive unit, would be difficult at best. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, but the ability to craft them all together into a final product aren't.
I've been playing WoW for ahwile, after coming from a background of heaving MUSHing, and I can say that one of the things that I enjoyed about MUSHing was the ability to build my own domicile and business. I probably enjoyed it even more than the game playing itself. Not only was it "intro to coding logic", but once created I could show off the object or the building as a fruit of my own creativity to friends, which lead to a "sense of space." I would feel actually more comfortable talking to someone, either OOC or IC, from my own home than out on the street.
Compared to WoW, where everything down to the colors of the clothes is predetermined. There is no space there to call my own, or to put my own stamp on.
I realize that the technical challenges to providing the players the tools to create their own space would be enormous, as well as finding the virtual space on the map for the thousands of buildings that would pop up. However, for the $60M/month that Blizz makes I sure wish they'd make it worth their time to figure out. In the end, doing so will I think keep a persistent level of interest maintained. Otherwise, once you hit 60, you spend, what? 2 months before giving up. With a space of your own you would invest more time into it that wouldn't require new content by the creators to provide.
--
$tar -xvf
Honest to God that's not at all what these people are saying. What you've described is the design document for Star Wars Galaxies. (As described by its lead designer before its launch.) We know that doesn't work. What Wright is suggesting is much more interesting, but I can't imagine how you'd adopt it to the MMO framework. (Which isn't a bad thing, why do we have to keep making the same games over and over?)
I bought Morrowind for my PC solely so I could try out the mod Ashes of Apocalyps (http://mods.moddb.com/4379/Ashes-of-Apocalypse/). I was really excited because the mod description made it out to be like an updated Fallout. In many respects, it was and I was pleased with it. Eventually though, I tired of it and played just regular ol' Morrowind.
Since that glorious day I have bought all expansion packs for it and eagerly anticipate Oblivion.
In my case, the mod scene truly drove sales on multiple levels for Bethesda.
p.s. I heard Bethesda is working on the next installment of Fallout. If it's anything like Morrowind (except in post-nuclear setting), I expect great things.
swanker than you
I think that Blender www.blender.org will become a major player in this niche. A completely free tool that any game maker can bundle with their game, that can do modeling, texturing (procedural, image or paint based), and rigging and animation.
LetterRip
I can't wait until deforming terriain is common in video games. It would not only add an element of strategy for many first person shooters (blow out the supports for a building to take out someone on the floor above for instance), but it also gives the sense that you are actually affecting the world.
Here is a good example of player created content Ryzom Ring It is an expansion to a current MMORPG Ryzom From the looks of it, the engine looks pretty good and it looks like the contiunity is not going to be messup. It would be pretty cool if blizzard came up with some sort of engine, even one that was a standalone that people could mess around with and post/turn in stories or scenarios
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
player-made content will be king in the coming years.
When given the opportunity, players already sink hundreds of thousands of manhours of development time into building game worlds. No company can afford to match that with paid hours, nor can any small group of developers match the sum of that creativity. The construction process creates a somewhat chaotic and hapazard world, sure, but if you structure it right even chaos will tend to flow smoothly.
In effect, the players will entertain each other with their cleverness and (bonus!) pay you for the privilege.
Sometimes when I think about this I'm almost surprised more companies havn't learned this route to easy money. Then I remember that most programmers have a deep-seated desire to retain control over their artistic visions. Its just not in them to spend years of their lives building a game only to hand control over to a bunch of doofuses paying ten bucks a month.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
While rFactor hasn't yet taken the simracing world by storm, it's a very interesting contender, given the "moddability" and mod track record of previous ISI titles.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Will Wright, in his amazing new project Spore, is taking player-created content to the next level. For those of you who don't know, Spore lets players create their own planets, creatures, and civilizations. Everything in this virtual universe - from creature physiology to architecture to war machines - is player created.
These player-created planets and civilizations are then distributed to other players, creating a virtual universe of content. If Spore sells like The Sims (which I think it will), it is possible to have this universe filled with MILLIONS of unique planets and civilizations. This amount of content could conceivably keep you occupied for years, decades even.
Wright says all of this is possible because the data packets with the virtual DNA of each species/civilization are relatively small, perhaps in the realm of 10 K/B.
More revolutionary than the game itself is the design strategy Wright is employing. Maxis is only creating the technical algorithms that allow for EASY content creation. Prior to such algorithm-based game design, player-created content has been for the more technically inclined...
Instead of creating content, future game designers will instead be creating TOOLS that allow end users to make their own game. This is extremely important because, as Wright notes, development costs are only increasing. What better way to increase profits than to let the players design their own game?
Player-created content is by no means a new idea, but Wright's goal of democratizing it is. Plus the idea of a massive, virtual universe -- full of different civilizations and stories -- gives me goose bumps.
Will, you're a genius.