More games need to be (not have, be) toolsets that the player can use to create and share. That's what toys used to be for, when I was three; now, games are just challenges and the designer gets to have all the fun. I don't think TF2 is fun anymore; every match feels the same. Fuck, you can barely even customize yourself in World of Warcraft.
Oh goody, now's my turn to shine.
Right off the bat, it was clear that even
Microsoft understood the importance of letting the people make the games - even if they're going about it in an extremely narrow fashion, the fact that all this XNA stuff exists at all is a clear indication that people are starting to realize it's important to let amateurs make games.
Thursday morning I saw Soren Johnson attribute
Civilization IV's success to the extraordinary lengths to which his team went to make the game extensible by the players. Obviously this is modification rather than creation, but it's another sign of the increasing importance placed on amateur participation in the game development process.
Shortly afterward, Rod Humble showed off an in-development version of
The Sims Carnival which to me seems to be exactly what you two are asking about: this is a website where anybody with five minutes and, optionally, some JPEGs can make a simple Flash game, and an hour or three in the offline editor can make you a totally original one. The first half of his presentation was an exploration of the fact that every single game that predates, say, 1900, and a good portion of the games since then, are in fact modifications of earlier games whose rules have been lost to time. His biggest central point was that the act of creating games cannot be separated from the act of playing games. And this guy works for
EA.
The last, biggest panel of the conference was Raph Koster and his programmer whose name I've forgotten showing off Metaplace quite convincingly. I'm going to assume you all know that Metaplace is two things: a generic protocol for making persistent multiplayer online games, and a private, commercial website where games made using such a protocol can be hosted. I don't think I need to point out how true to this spirit of "democratization" it is to have an MMO not tied to a particular client, where the server-side logic is CGI, and where the central place for showing these things off includes a robust set of parametric tools that make non-programmers.
There was a panel about Facebook that I didn't have time to see, and some others that clearly touched on this issue.
So let's go over what I saw: an increasing awareness that people
really want to make games and
really want to play games that amateurs have made; an awareness of the examples set by YouTube and Facebook that can let developers monetize free user-created content; and not
one but
two enormous services intended to open up game design to non-programmers like your grandma, both of which have some undeniably impressive tools working for them. I'd say there's three but XNA is a bit more advanced than that - which, I think, is a good thing, because you need a spectrum of tools at various degrees of sophistication.
One such project would be an interesting but doomed anomaly. Two projects indicate that different people are seeing the same trends and thinking about similar solutions. Three means that it's about to become a trend.
I maintain that it's enough for the true visionaries to have free rein, high ambitions, and budgets that won't allow corners to be cut. The projects that I saw underway at GDC give me great confidence that this is the case, more so now than ever before.
I'm happy to agree with the first, sentence - could we get some examples of the second? I mean seeing as I'm not one of the ones that went to GDC. All I've seen so far is stuff like the neat personalization effects of better character creation in APB.
Aside from the above, I suppose in this case it's more like Marketing now sees enough money in customization and user participation that Design's best and brightest can convince them that it's important.
Audiosurf was released the week before the conference, and
everybody at the GDCA either loved it (even those who hadn't bought it yet, because there was always somebody nearby who had). It was a concrete example of how user-generated content can make your game awesome. There was Soren Johnson's talk about how he'd managed to make everything, especially the AI, work with modded versions of Civ 4; there was Clark Davies attributing the entire commercial and critical success of the
Wipeout games to the customizability and social stuff those games have; there was the fact that the best game of the year,
Portal, was made without any Hollywood-style meddling with the concept. Looking back over the panel listing at all the ones I didn't get to go to, I have no doubt that there's more than a few there that would support this point further.
Captain Bland's Monotonous Adventure IV-XIX will still be made. There's no question of this. But a developer who sees the value of participatory games and who has the skill to design one now has the vocabulary and the evidence to convince marketing that it's not just one guy's artsy hunch, but something that you can make money off of. GDC represents the zeitgeist of the entire development community, and participatory development of that sort is on
everybody's mind.
Even ignoring the people who went off and started their own companies to pursue this notion, like Raph Koster did, you've still got a trend in this direction. If
Electronic Arts can get on the bandwagon, not once but
twice (with
Spore and
The Sims Carnival) then I'd say that the bigwigs are beginning to come around. There's probably never going to be total unrestrictedness for professional non-indie developers, but a big, new idea has been drummed into Marketing's head.
