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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."
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
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.
Longer than that, you young whipper-snapper.
Many a player leveled to 20 and created a wizard, and then a realm for his fellow players to explore on MUDs. And while I appreciate the high-production value of WoW, I miss the days of very clearly exploring different projections of other people's minds. Granted, many realms were boring, but there were some truly genius ones too.