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Games of the Future - User Generated Content
The biggest news of GDC 2007 was almost certainly the bright future of the PlayStation 3. Home was interesting, to be sure, but the title that captured the imagination of attendees was Little Big Planet. Edge had a thorough look at the game in their April issue, and now it seems like there might be a downloadable version of the four-player game used to demo the community/toybox at the conference. This 'games 3.0' thing has a lot of people sitting up and taking notice, including Flash and Shockwave developers. GameDaily spoke with MTVN's David Williams about the user-generated content possibilities being added to Shockwave.com and the AddictingGames sites. "In yet another sign of the web 2.0/game 3.0 phenomenon, one of the new features of the site is a game upload feature. User-created content is bound to have an increasingly profound effect on this industry. Already, the company has received 200 new game submissions in the past month, empowered by a game sponsorship program, which pays developers of popular games for integration on AddictingGames and provides them with enhanced distribution and marketing."
I think one of the main problems would be filtering out games created by experienced flash developers and new, young developers just looking for a quick way to get noticed.
Especially since the sites mentioned seem to be very well known
How does this differ from WiiCade? Will PS3 games be able to access the PS3 controls like WiiCade games can with the Wii, or will they be entirely keyboard controlled?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Most of the games available for the PS3 created in this fashion would just be some crap look-what-i-can-do games and will overshadow the true gems that will appear on the system.
Which I single out not because it was the first or the best. I pick it because I bought the game solely for user-generated content (actually more the promise of user-generated content at the time I purchased it). The game itself was well-made and well-polished deathmatch, and I did play a few hours of it, but was already pretty bored of the format. Yet I can't even begin to calculate the amount of time I spent playing q3 fortress, navy seals, urban terror, true combat, and a smattering of other mods.
Without user-generated content I would call Q3 one of the most dissapointing games ever. With the user-generated content it is one of my favorite games ever.
So that's nothing new, but supporting user-created content on a console is new, especially supporting in the sense of actually funding some of their development and advertising and such. Sounds like a great idea overall if it works.
The enemies of Democracy are
Game 3.0? I must have been asleep while 2.x came and went. Can someone please tell me what the first two iterations were (TFA didn't elaborate). Thanks.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Didn't we already see this on the PC for years now?
I believe Half-life pretty much sold just for the mods the last 5 years or so.
I like muppets.
When I read the title, my first thought was of the game, Legend of Mana, where new sections of the map could be unlocked through gameplay, and positioned according to the user. I thought of how this might work in a networked world, where unlocking another user's game map requires designing a game map yourself. The game would be part quest, and part map and character design tools. An infinite map could be created as long as users were creating.
Find yourself a good storyline to explain why certain people can create landscapes, maybe add in a little bit of politics and conflict around these abilities, and throw in a good amount of professionally designed side quests to keep things fresh, and I would think you would have a huge seller on your hands.
And this is the first thing I thought of. Imagine if people sat down and really took the idea "user generated content" into really wild directions... Imagine the possibilities.
So maybe you can see why I was disappointed by what the article was actually talking about.
Having worked on a major game title that gave users the tools to build content some 6 years ago, I can honestly say that like most everything else about today's internet and it's "user-generated" content (blogs, photobucket, etc): the ratio of quality to utter crap is so low that the signal is almost completely lost in the noise.
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official. There were a slew of others that we unofficially reccommended. But the vast majority of it was either total newbs goofing around with the tools, learning projects by the more serious designers, or deliberate crap by the kinds of people that find such things funny.
So if a publisher relies on user-created content to sell a title (like, oh, say, the original Neverwinter Nights), they need to have enough in place to start with to make it worth plunking money down on for the first wave of users. If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
In the case of Neverwinter Nights, they had enough to get the ball rolling and the community designers had enough time to learn the tools and start turning out some good content before interest in the game completely faded away.
But the history of games is littered with the countless discarded husks of those who tried this path and failed.
> User Generated Content
Hence the "penis fairy" outfit in Second Life.
Yeah, I wish I were making that up.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is yet another instance of describing something as a "breakthrough" only if you've had your head up your butt for the last, oh I don't know, decade or so. I'm not a PC fanboy, but I do get sick of people claiming this is a new phenomena when in fact user generated content has been pushing the future of gaming for a long time.
Not only has this been done already, but it (in regard to consoles) it was done in a much more open and standard environment that you didn't have to pay extra for (in the case of the XBox360).
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
For those unfamiliar with the term, "user-generated content" translates from the marketroidese as: "tits, blithering idiots, and viral advertising". cf. LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube and other OddLy CaptialIzed websites. It remains to be seen how this type of content will be transitioned into videogame form. I'm sure it will be yet another huge leap forward for human culture.
If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
Well, sometimes there's a niche that it's worthwhile scratching.
Virtually all the content in Second Life, There, and Activeworlds are user-created. Comparing the three may show you where you went wrong:
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official.
These three games make compesating the developer an integral part of the game. The amount of paperwork the developer has to go through to get compensated differs... in SL you just set a flag on the product and peope can buy it. In There you have to go through an approval process. And Activeworlds is in between. The amount and variety of user-created content varies in direct proportion to how easy it is to make and sell stuff.
If they have to wait for you to notice that it's "cool" and compensate them "in some fashion", you're running in a sack race against racing bikes.
Second Life is not a game any more than a telephone line is a conversation. Games are entertaining diversions. When they become more than that, they become art, employment, or both. Second Life is not a game. It is a new medium for creative expression. Your computer is the brush, Second Life is the canvas, and the Internet is the distribution mechanism. When computers first came out, some people created games, but just because someone invented a new way to create content, you didn't see people saying, "In the future, games will involve writing programs." That's retarded because any sane person will tell you that only sick individuals think programming is fun enough to make a game called Robot Odyssey that involves programming robots to solve a series of progressively more difficult tasks...
(I'm a 15 year software developer, so I'm being a bit facetious here--but still, I know what I do for a living is not a game and if I build something in Second Life or create a mod for Wow, I am not playing a game even though I might later play a game with what I built--also, Robot Odyssey was awesome.)
I think a good example would be the Far Cry series of games on Xbox. The included map editor could let you make incredibly detailed maps, with decent controls, unlike anything else out there on consoles.
DJCC
As if there hasn't been a large modding community for games in the last 10 years... :p User driven content outnumbers original content by quite a bit in games which were designed for extensibility. Quake, NWN, etc.
Obligatory plug for my mod: www.customtf.com. =)
... when you can just track popularity? Let the cream rise to the top. If you want, give people ways to tell their friends about their favorite mods. People will anyway, of course.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I don't believe the future is user-generated content. Sure it is a nice option to include with a game and many people enjoy it and some good content will come from it. And it is a nice way for people who aspire game development jobs to get started and have something to show on their CV.
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However, I believe the future lies with computer generated content. What if the computer could generate a new map for you? A new story-line?
I think that game developers should focus their energy in developing methods of generating all sorts of game related content. It'll take many years before content can be generated which can be compared to human-generated content but I think it will be worth the effort!
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There's no "Games 1.0 and Games 2.0". Games 3.0 is just a buzzword based on Web 3.0, which is all that interactive, user generated web stuff which is "more than just Ajax" (which was Web 2.0). It's all bullshit anyways.
Look at the other "user content" ventures that popped up, like YouTube or MySpace. Building on the creed "When you build it, they will come" it added "and will finish it for you, for free".
User generated content has one huge advantage for the one building the framework: Less work, less expenditure while at the same time providing the same amount of value. And, actually, so far it was not really bad for the games that allowed it. Quite the contrary. Imagine CS without the ability to build your own maps. Granted, the "best" maps were still mostly the ones that came with the package, but in the end, a lot of shooters and RTS games thrive on the concept of being able to create your own maps.
The only unpleasant effect I forsee is that the creators of the framework will claim the UGC as their own and sell it. I can well see you making a great map for some game only to find out that the side owning the framework sells it without compensating you. If they want to be really anal about it, they will even force you to buy your own creation to use it.
And the worst thing about it is that they could.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
User generating content: Don't waste your time with that one. Here, try my new gun!
Other User: Sweet! What does it do?
User generating content: It shoots 256 bullets a second for 65535 damage each!
Other User: Awesome! Have any armor?
User generating content: Sure! Here's this c00lio armor, same look as the armor the big boss wears, only it is AC 256, and blocks 256% of incoming attacks!
Other User: WOWWWWWWEEEEE! This game roxxxxxx0rzzz!
(2 minutes later)
Other User: This is boring.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.