'Games 3.0' Is Nothing New

At Next Generation, author Matt Matthews points out that gamers have been 'making things' for a while now. Sony's Phil Harrison touted the 'Games 3.0' vision at his GDC keynote last month, saying that the new thing is gamers making their own entertainment and sharing it with others. "[Harrison's view] ignores an important fact: the tools of game creation have been given to players over and over again for almost a quarter of a century, since at least 1983. The lessons learned since then will be instructive as Sony again puts the players in control." He goes on to discuss titles like RPGMaker, Pinball Wizard, and some of the famous mods that have changed the industry.

Comments

What about MUSHes?

[jandrese]

Virtually every MUD and MUSH I ever played with had a way for players to create their own rooms and decorate them however they like (which was easy since it was all ASCII). These were one of the biggest draws of MUSHes in fact, since there often wasn't much else to do there. People would create elaborate recreations of college campuses or spaceships or whatever else they felt like. The quality varied a lot, but you can't discount the power of one obsessed fanboy with far too much time on his hands.