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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. "
Player created content is one of the great things from the past.
Aside from the monetary aspect, this has been going on for years. Look at the mod community for most of the FPS. Heck, I remember user created content on a bunch of MUDs at least 10 years ago.
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
Obviously consoles are going to be a lot more locked down than PCs. You can't easily hack into the filesystem (or expect your users to), so any mods are going to have to use whatever tools the game developer makes available. Additionally, using a controller is a lot more annoying than using a mouse to manipulate things.
As for PC games, I agree that they're becoming really very complex. (See Neverwinter Nights for example) Most gamers, with full-time jobs, just aren't going to have the time to dive into mods. So either the tools have to be ridiculously dumbed down, or you just have to hope that there are enough hardcore individuals willing to mod your game, despite how complicated the tools may be.
I think that modding games is quickly becoming one of the best ways to get into the games industry. Heck, a lot of the times, the mod engine/script is developed first and is what the developers use to make the actual game content (so the game is essentially just one huge mod itself). So by modding the game, you're essentially working on it as well. There are certainly lots of examples with the Half-Life engine (Counter-Strike, etc.), where modders got full-time jobs for their efforts.
-- jchenx