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'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.
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VP + Vpinmame is real cool!
VP lets build your own pinball games.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
Accessibility. Could you see your average non-geek using "RPGMaker" or "Pinball Wizard"? Clamor all you like about the superiority of PC gaming, but that type of thing is NOT mainstream.
Sony isn't inventing this concept, certainly, but making user-created content a quick-and-easy thing *is* a new concept. Other examples are Spore and Line Rider
God Fucking Damnit
I hate to be the wet blanket here, but what's the deal with this trend toward "versioning" things that don't need to be versioned or for which version numbers make no sense? "Web 2.0?" "Games 3.0?" Especially since as far as I can tell, there's no good goddamn reason to assign arbitrary version numbers to entities which are constantly changing and evolving as it is.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon or maybe I slept through "Marketroid Bullshit 101," but I fail to see any point in taking something like the web, which is simply a term used to refer to the (arguably) most human-readable facet of the Internet, or games, which come in all shapes and sizes as it is (much like websites) and slap a version number on them. It reeks of "hey, Jim, wanna inflate our stock prices overnight and take that Tahiti vacation we've been eyeing for the past 6 months? Or hey, we could use a few new espresso machines in the managers' lounge"
A game or a website can have a version number. Just keep the damn things off of categories, classes, genres, and other intangible/abstract/nebulous concepts or entities that have no clean-cut and intelligent basis for versioning.
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Well, FPS's have had this running rampant for years. Argueably the most popular multiplayer game ever (counter strike) started as user made content. Morrowind/oblivoin has as much mods as actual content fromt he developer. 60% of all games on battle.net for warcraft 3 is custom maps. Might be new to the console but PC has had this rampant for a long time.
I own a Ps3 and it does "itch" for the connectivity of Home TM. It feels like a full fledged computer with a web browser, store, and multiplayer but no IM. With IM and chat rooms and it may push the PS3 from "nice but not now" to "must have." User made content delivery may spark the content creators. If Sony allows content creation on a PC to be brought over it may be even bigger for them.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I hate to be the wet blanket here, but what's the deal with this trend toward "versioning" things that don't need to be versioned
...What's that? JetBlue doesn't take Slashdot Karma as currency?
I think you are just upset that you missed the bandwagon.
See you missed it again, watch how my "Score" goes up and up. Tahiti here I come!
As far as I could work out - in my sixty seconds of searching google - half life sold ~8,000,000 copies. Not every single one (or even the majority) of those copies would have installed Counter Strike, and out of the remaining copies that did install it, a large percentage of people didn't enjoy it.
How about World of Warcraft? With 8,500,000 concurrent active accounts? Looking at the sheer number of people who've unsubscribe it would have to own any other multiplayer game anywhere.
Pinball Construction Set was easy to use for pretty much anybody. As was Racing Destruction Set. Adventure Construction Set was more complex but still didn't require anything like scripting.
This "Games 3.0" concept has been around just about as long as the industry. I think the question of ease of use and making it mainstream is complicated. The more you dumb down the editor, the less you can do with it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I thought the concept was an elegant summary, really.
I just have to mention NWN and NWN2, since I didn't see the article doing that. People are modelling objects and monsters, making single and multiplayer modules (adventures basically), making new GUIS as well as backend tools, running persistent worlds. What I like the most about the Persistent Worlds stuff is that some game masters are running worlds that actually change depending on player actions. Some unique monsters don't respawn, or if en enemy fortress is destroyed for instance, the entry point is removed from the main map until the area is replaced with a newly modelled "destroyed fortress". A few GMs jumps around and control scripts and non-player characters to create a more living world.
MOST are just running simple hack and slash modules of course, infinitely respawning Diablo/WoW clones basically. But it shows what can be accomplished with some skilled and dedicated GMs.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die