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Brave New World of Open-Source Game Design
Greg Chudecke writes "The New York Times recently ran an article on game companies that get design input from gamers. The article is branded as 'The Brave New World of Open-source Game Design.' The title may be a little misleading as it isn't exactly like the game design is open source for editing, however it is interesting that gamers are getting an opportunity to shape the games they play."
Indeed. The correct title is, Finding Syngergies with Valued Customers Through Web 2.0 Social Methodologies.
The scary part is that title actually makes sense. 0_o
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So the 'input design input' is basically beta-testing. It is in NO way open-source, by any of the definitions people use. A game company asks people to play the game before it is released and then uses their input to adjust the game? Shocking!
I don't know how this is considered "new". It's been going on for at least 6 or 7 years. I know because I've been involved from the community side of things since then with EA on their Need for Speed titles. In fact EA flys community webmasters out to thier studios quite regularly and puts them under NDA's to talk about what's coming up and what they think, especially on thier bigger franchises. As webmaster of Racerplanet I've had lots of interaction with the developers, mostly EA but other Publishers have stopped by the forums at least over the years.
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Before we all start hyperventilating and berating the NY Times for their faulty definition of "open source", let's remember who their audience is. Using "open-source" to refer to a development process where the customers get much more ability to view and modify the content "en route" is not technically a correct definition, but it's a succinct phrase that people understand; it gets the point across.
Think of it like the difference between "hacking" and "cracking". Yes, mass media uses hacking "incorrectly" 99.9% of the time, but they are using the definition that people can understand: to insist they do otherwise is linguistic snobbery.
So no, there is no willful ignorance (or Microsoft plot to water down the definition of open source) at work here, they're just making things plain for their readers.
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It's still not that radically new a concept IMHO. Most games are involve one or more of the following:
1. are made by gamers in the first place. The reason why so many people want to work in the game industry, even at ridiculously low wages, is that they are gamers in the first place. So not only you have one or more gamers involved before even writing the first line of code, you'll have actual gamers actually writing those lines of code, scripting the NPCs, drawing the cut scenes and textures, designing the levels, and writing the dialogue.
Sometimes it's even people who love the thing that the game is themed around. E.g., the way I hear it, Statesman (of City Of Heroes fame) is actually a genuine die-hard comic fan. And he plays video games.(E.g., supposedly he got the much maligned ED idea while playing a platformer on his GBA.) And he made a video game about comic-book superheroes. I'd say he was very qualified to give input in the conceptual design phase there.
(Though true enough, you often can tell when a company just gets into a genre none of them played or liked, by their building an awful game based on awfully wrong assumptions.)
2. involve some focus groups, other forms of dialogue with gamers, etc.
Heck, Sony for example seems to be pushing really hard to please female gamers and pulls stunts like having a player play Queen Antonia Bayle of Qeynos for the various events. (Sorta like Lord British's character in UO, but this time it's not the character of a dev, but of an actual girl who plays EQ2.) Plus, gives a lot of attention to female gamer guilds and the like. I'd be genuinely surprised if they don't get at least some occasions to voice their concerns and such.
3. involve experience, including player input, from previous games.
E.g., Statesman's new project is Champions Online, another superhero-themed MMO. I should think he took with him a lot of the experience of what worked and what didn't work for the players in COH, and a lot of player input received along the way.
E.g., Raph Koster IIRC worked on a MUD before joining UO, and then took his experience with both over to SWG. (Ok, ok, so I guess sometimes experience doesn't precluse fucking up;)
4. indiscriminate player input can actually be bad, if not verified by other means.
E.g., Blizzard makes the servers generate a _lot_ of statistics, so they can know exactly which class killed which other class too often, what spec did more damage to a given boss, etc. So they can actually use hard data to check if some class's complaints or wishes for more power are justified, or just whining. That long period of fine-tuning and tweaking they gave all their games after release, was essentially very much based on player input... just not (only) the post-on-a-board type. They looked at what those players actually do in the game.
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