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. "

Comments

So in essence...

[Channard]

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.

Re:So in essence...

[MilenCent]

Sounds simple, but it's really very hard to come up with a workable system for players to create *all* content, and have them be rewarded for it, in a way that's not vulnerable to abuse or technical issues. Second Life's the best we've seen, but even there it's possible for one player to bring down an entire server.

You understate the situation as well. Non-trivial player-made content would require a lot more than a basic MMORPG framework to make workable (it'd require a user-visible scripting language), you'd still have to front the sizable server, storage and bandwidth costs, and you'd have to hire people to teach people how to use the scripting language and create good software, and also kill damaging user-spawned processes (imagine sysadmining a system with thousands of simultaneous users).

Yet, ultimately, player-created content is the only MMORPGs can evolve. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar learned that lesson way back in Habitat (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html):

The first goal-directed event planned for Habitat was a rather involved treasure hunt called the "D'nalsi Island Adventure". It took us hours to design, weeks to build (including a 100-region island), and days to coordinate the actors involved. It was designed much like the puzzles in an adventure game. We thought it would occupy our players for days. In fact, the puzzle was solved in about 8 hours by a person who had figured out the critical clue in the first 15 minutes. Many of the players hadn't even had a chance to get into the game. The result was that one person had had a wonderful experience, dozens of others were left bewildered, and a huge investment in design and setup time had been consumed in an eyeblink. We expected that there would be a wide range of "adventuring" skills in the Habitat audience. What wasn't so obvious until afterward was that this meant that most people didn't have a very good time, if for no other reason than that they never really got to participate. It would clearly be foolish and impractical for us to do things like this on a regular basis.

A little further:

Propelled by these experiences, we shifted into a style of operations in which we let the players themselves drive the direction of the design. This proved far more effective. Instead of trying to push the community in the direction we thought it should go, an exercise rather like herding mice, we tried to observe what people were doing and aid them in it. We became facilitators as much as designers and implementors. This often meant adding new features and new regions to the system at a frantic pace, but almost all of what we added was used and appreciated, since it was well matched to people's needs and desires. As the experts on how the system worked, we could often suggest new activities for people to try or ways of doing things that people might not have thought of. In this way we were able to have considerable influence on the system's development in spite of the fact that we didn't really hold the steering wheel -- more influence, in fact, than we had had when we were operating under the delusion that we controlled everything.

That strikes me as a lot more interesting, in the long run, than World of Warcraft, despite its strengths. Even computer-generated content, which drives most MMORPGs these days, has the disadvantage in that it tends to stop being interesting after a short period. (I DON'T think it's necessarily bad, but developers will have to loosen their stranglehold on game design and invent something almost Roguelike in nature, I believe, to make it work best.)

Source

[Ramble]

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.

Player-made contact back around 1980

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

I doubt it

[Kohath]

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).

Re:I doubt it

[AaronBaker2000]

I think that the 100,000 Second Life players would probably disagree with you. Second Life is made up entirely of user created content. None of it has to be pre-approved and it is rarely policed. The policy of Linden Labs is that player created-content is owned by the player. Not only does this keep players happy, but it shields Linden Labs from copyright lawsuits.

Also, all online games come with a warning from the ESRB: "Experience may change during online play."

-Aaron

Re:Unsurprising

[DorkusMasterus]

What you say, you say in anger, but the truth is that more often than not, they're acting with their pocketbooks, rather than actual desire to produce banal product.

The truth is that it's costly to develop a revolutionary idea in gaming, especially when this idea must be implemented in a MMORPG or something. Therefore, player-created-content is extremely valuable to a publisher, as this gets the more radical ideas/quests/items/etc. out there, without having to waste developer time on ideas that would not be successful.

Not to mention, if you put some "special license" info in the EULA of the game, players would know that any content created within the context of the game would become property of the publisher, and therefore releaseable in further versions as standard (much like many objects in "The Sims").

This allows for expansion packs or downright upgrades to be made at literally zero cost to developers (excepting testing, perhaps).

Point being, they can see what works in a very realistic sandbox environment, without investing much, if any, capital for that research. It's brilliant, really.

While it doesn't excuse companies from making generic content, it ushers in a new era of "open-source" gaming that while is indeed more work for players who want to create: it finally gives you the freedom to make that game or scenario you always wanted to see, or play, but that you know the developers/publishers would NEVER risk putting out. I think it's cool. And if it works with Blogs (You mean I have to write my OWN news and commentary?) and other Web 2.0 stuff, you can definitely believe that people will be excited about bringing that level of depth and involvement to their own emotionally-invested gaming experience.

SimCity 4 learned this two years ago

[Jurph]

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.

Morrowind - Ashes of the Apocalypse

[chigun]

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.