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Is Crowdsourcing the Next Big Thing In Game Design?
An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"
Let's look at that as an example. What a great success that was. (This is sarcasm guys)
In certain circumstances, this could be an amazing and powerful tool for creating some truly genuine creativity. However, with all that power comes a metric ton of suck. This will take off like "player made" MMO's have taken off.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
The problem with allowing the general public to make content for a game is that you get content the general public makes. If you really want to play in Penisworld, be my guest, but as for me, I prefer content with coherent design beyond the capabilities of Joe Nobody.
... more flying penis attacks. Won't someone think of the children?
"Powers. I have them."
Sure, it couldn't have been less interesting so any changes would make it more interesting.
A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"
And I'm inclined to disagree. I enjoyed going through the pre-made content, more than any platform game I've ever played.
which is totally what she said
Its fine to take suggestions and inputs from the audience but asking the audience to create the game for you is insanity (pun!). You will always need the team or the leader or the person in control of "the vision" to make the tough calls when there is no right decision to be made. One of the weaknesses in "crowd sourcing" is that everyone is ready to offer their idea too few are around for the repercussions.
For the last time, YES.
Anything that takes power out of the hands of game designers and puts in into the hands of executives will do very ugly things to games. Not only will crowdsourcing increase executive meddling but they'll have a ream of expensive bullshit to back up their own personal bullshit. Since they paid some knob to get them that ream of bullshit they're damn-well not going to ignore it. Every project will start to resemble game of the year X because that's what the crowd is infatuated with at that time.
I hope the next big thing in video games is another video game crash and another NES like resurrection where gameplay quality is more important.
A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!
You go right ahead. I buy video games because I want to play them, not because I want to make them and then play them. If I wanted to do that, I'd still be collecting Lego sets.
I don't want to sound elitist, but artists are good at what they do because they have a gift for and they practice. I used to know a writer for Valve way way before he ever hit it big time and the guy just had talent in spades. He was just an artist through and through and everything he did he imprinted with his own style that was usually just pretty damned funny. While it might be nice to think that anyone can go and create a great experience given a good editor, the reality is that these things are really more like another way to scrapbook, home movies or karoake, and likely to produce a great work is absurd. The people that make them are a league apart and they deserve to get paid for what they do.
This is my sig.
"My pizza came with a rebate coupon for ice cream. I think it would have been better without the coupon."
Well don't fucking use the coupon then. It's that simple.
At that rate you may as well just sell programming books and IDEs instead of games. While I do enjoy some fan work it's rarely up to the same standards as the people who've spent hundreds or thousands of hours building a game and understand the full dynamics of the game engine.
I know someone is going to point out something like CounterStrike or Theif's Dark Loader but let's be honest, these are a bit more than simple level creation and they happen to be a small fraction of everything out there today. There's simply the ones that got it right in a sea of badly designed mods and maps.
I remember when Half Life 1 came out and we got a map pack with a few hundred maps it was fun to see some of the ideas out there but when it came right down to it there were more maps that were unplayable than ones that were just as good or better than the stock deathmatch maps. The rest of the maps in the pack were normally based on a gimmick and once you figured out their weakness it turned out to be a complete slaughter for whatever side was unfortunate enough to spawn in a particular area of a map.
So, I'm sure there is tons of great content for any game that allows mods and map creation but it's a pain to find it. Some sites do offer ratings on their offerings but, unless there is a large community to rate these releases, they're often not very insightful. The community is maturing. I'm sure that more content being released today for any given game is better than the stuff offered up even a few years ago. And it's good to see old favorite maps being ported to games with better engines and game play. It still doesn't mean that a few well designed maps/levels of a game aren't in order. The input of the game designers in way of their own vision on how the game should work is priceless to modders and map makers. It also makes those of us who just want to play a game much much happier.
For my part, a game shouldn't be a hobby. I just want to shoot someone in the head, not study a game engine. I'd code my own game if I wanted to put effort into it.
Sorry to be long winded about it...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I agree that if you open up game design and asset design to players you will tend to get a metric ton of crap, but there is a good argument for opening up the design process for commentary by players.
There are a lot of frustrated designers out there with a lot of ideas, and a lot of people who have played a ton more games than me. When I'm considering how to proceed with a part of the design for my next game, I tend to blog about it and canvas opinions. I get a lot of very well thought out design ideas and suggestions, and some of them have and will make it into the final game. (http://www.gratuitousspacebattles.com)
As long as you aren't making any pledges that the player ideas will take priority over the designers 'vision' (horrible term), then I think there is a lot to be gained by listening to the players. They are the people who will pay for the game, after all.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
There is a recurring joke told by the person that runs Kingdom of Loathing, and he tells it (or references it) weekly in his podcast, and it goes something like this:
My development group is banding together to release a new MMORPG called "The Future". In "The Future" all content will be user created, because according to everybody user created content is the future. Everything will be provided by users, characters, classes, npcs, quests, art, even the combat system, spells, magic, and theme of the game. The game itself will ship as a large gray box in which users will be given the tools to create whatever they want.
And after a few months when the design has settled down, in "The future" players will be represented by cocks and balls, where they will travel around landscapes of cocks and balls with cock and ball trees and animals. And they will kill monsters shaped like cocks and balls with their penis swords and penis spells. Because as any person who has ever been on the Internet knows, this is what people with the spare time to create this stuff will do.
And that's "The Future".
I'm not saying user created content can't be an excellent source of entertainment, I just don't think letting users create the entire thing will work.
I mean look at Street Fighter 2. One of the main complains were throws existed at all and quite a few gamers tried to unofficially ban all throwing. Doing that pretty much wrecks the game since once they were gone it became next to impossible to really hurt a player who went completely defensive. (If they got any sort of a lead they'd just do defense the rest of the round and win by a timeout.) Of course to make things more insane alot of these people weren't against strikes that turned out to be unblockable attacks. (Which functionally is the same thing as a throw.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
This is simply open source development.
There are lots of games out there made that way, and they simply suck. Probably because of the lack of a big name that puts people together.
Civilization IV took an approach which at least overlaps somewhat with crowd sourcing. They prioritised modding when designing the game, and have subsequently included fan-made mods in expansion packs and converted fan-made unofficial patches into official ones (though they did additional work).
The benefit of this approach is the community does a lot of the work for them. Not just in generating ideas and the actual production, but in filtering out the crap.
The Aztec Odyssey example in TFA does not sound much like crowd sourcing to me. They only went halfway, effectively just having a huge open tender. The other half would have involved the crowd playing a big part in selecting the winner.
I'd say that most popular first person shooter games that support user created conten
Take Paintball 2 [1], a Quake based shooter comes with some maps created by the designers. Some of these maps are rarely played online because they're not good maps. Instead players have created maps and these have entered global distribution due to good gameplay. Players are the best judge of fun!
'Crowdsourcing' is here to stay. Knowing what makes a game fun and implementing games are different things and this is why players see that they can do better.
If games accept content contributions, the situation will be no different. Since the game is not mature enough, content will be produced afterward by players who feel they can make better maps with better gameplay.
Crowdsourcing will always exist but only after release. I think the best thing studios can do is give credit and recognition to good map creators by including it in the distribution and publicly congratulate them.
1] http://digitalpaint.planetquake.gamespy.com/
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Kongregate is an online game portal with several neat things available to players and devs. They just added the Kongregate Collabs: http://www.kongregate.com/collabs I can't wait to see what comes out of there.
Not necessarily. You've greatly enhanced this /. discussion with your valuable contribution, did you get paid for it?
So.... a bit like the same thing EA games has been doing for years?
Oh wait, no, they don't take suggestions or user generated content back, and they rarely even fix the bugs...