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Games Entertainment

Player-Made Content Is The Future 82

Posted by Zonk from the build-your-own-dang-game dept.
ZDNet reports from The Entertainment Gathering conference last week, giving out some perspective on the future of games as it's seen by Will Wright and J. Allard. From their points of view, player-made content will be king in the coming years. With the expense of making games primarily due to the cost of content, allowing players to build the game they want to play will be popular ... both with designers and players. From the article: "Players' eagerness to go beyond the conventional boundaries has been seen in almost every online game. In the first major massively multiplayer game, Ultima Online, developers saw their swords-and-sorcery stories expanded by players who opened taverns to host online friends and create theater groups to perform 'A Christmas Carol' inside the game. That behavior helps create new content for the game and gives players a stake in the game to keep their interest piqued longer--a critical thing for online games in which players pay a subscription fee every month. "
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Player-Made Content Is The Future

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  • So in essence... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @01:43PM (#14651987) Journal
    1. Produce a basic MMORPG framework. 2. Get players to crank out the meat of the game for free, yet still get charged subscription fees 3. Profit.

    • Re:So in essence... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Nos. ( 179609 )
      Aside from the monetary aspect, this has been going on for years. Look at the mod community for most of the FPS. Heck, I remember user created content on a bunch of MUDs at least 10 years ago.
      • Can we say "Forgotten Hope" or "Desert Combat"? And those are only two examples for FPS.

        If RPGs are your game of choice, how about some of the user made content for Neverwinter Nights? that was spectacular!

        There were more than a few games that started as mods. Those mods are what got people buying the games later into their life.
        • Was? We're still playing (& building) here guy. I'm involved with a group of people trying to bring Dark Sun (or as close as we can make it) to NWN. Our next big Hakpak will be released the end of this month, come join us [athasreborn.com].

          Jaysyn

        • And let's not forget Morrowind, which has a HUGE mod community fanbase. There are several total conversions for the game, as well as user-made mods that allow for literally 50+ more hours of gameplay, in addition to simple game tweaks/enhancements, of which there are hundreds. That game is now almost 4 years old, and sites devoted to the mod community get at *least* daily updates with new mods.
      • There were so many damn Quake mods back in the day.. Anyone remember the rocket launcher that shot dobermans? or the Descent-esque spaceship that you could fly around in? The grappling hook for Quake II was also a pretty great little deathmatch mod. Those were some great times. And let's not forget the original Half-Life really bringing modding to the light, spawning some of the most popular user-created (at the time) mods of all time.
        • Anyone remember the rocket launcher that shot dobermans?

          Anybody remember the Doom mod where the enemies were all Barney?

          That was years later than many online, multi-player, user created worlds.
      • Actually, the way I see it modding has come down in recent years. First there's consoles, which allow for very little/ no modding to begin with. Then even in PC games, a lot of time they don't make the tools available to do the mods. When they do make the tools available, they are much too complicated for the average user to be able to use.

        • Re:So in essence... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jchenx ( 267053 )
          Obviously consoles are going to be a lot more locked down than PCs. You can't easily hack into the filesystem (or expect your users to), so any mods are going to have to use whatever tools the game developer makes available. Additionally, using a controller is a lot more annoying than using a mouse to manipulate things.

          As for PC games, I agree that they're becoming really very complex. (See Neverwinter Nights for example) Most gamers, with full-time jobs, just aren't going to have the time to dive into mods
        • When they do make the tools available, they are much too complicated for the average user to be able to use.

          Or they're too expensive. The 3D packages that these studios use, like Max and Maya, can cost multiple thousands of dollars. The chances of studios writing custom modelling software or writing exporters for low-end packages like Milkshape and Blender are extremely slim. They seem to be content with having all of their user-created content built with pirated copies of Max.

      • The primary example of this in fact is the MU??s like MUSHes and MUCKs, because you could do in-game programming... and object-oriented programming, no less. Hell, even when I was a teenager and totally clueless about programming I wrote enough code to have a vehicle which had a separate control module, and they each had "triggers" on them so they could communicate back and forth. A-yep, that's right, I build a little program (which itself was just a nested collection of objects) on top of an object-orient

    • Re:So in essence... (Score:4, Informative)

      by ThePolkapunk ( 826529 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:16PM (#14652384) Homepage
      This MMORPG already exists. It's called Second Life [wikipedia.org]. Almost all content in Second Life is player created.
    • Ahhh... so you've played Second Life, I see...
    • Yeah, and so what's the problem with that? You may not have noticed, but lots of people out there like to make things. Not everyone who makes furniture does it just to earn a living, some of us do it for fun. A digital world allows us not only to create things that we could never make in the real world, it also allows us to easily share with many others, and work collaboratively with people all over the world.

      What makes games so much cooler than TV is the interactivity. This is just taking that to the next
    • Honest to God that's not at all what these people are saying. What you've described is the design document for Star Wars Galaxies. (As described by its lead designer before its launch.) We know that doesn't work. What Wright is suggesting is much more interesting, but I can't imagine how you'd adopt it to the MMO framework. (Which isn't a bad thing, why do we have to keep making the same games over and over?)
    • If someone is smart enough to design a game that can do steps 1 and 2, then they deserve step 3.

    • Re:So in essence... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MilenCent ( 219397 )
      Sounds simple, but it's really very hard to come up with a workable system for players to create *all* content, and have them be rewarded for it, in a way that's not vulnerable to abuse or technical issues. Second Life's the best we've seen, but even there it's possible for one player to bring down an entire server.

      You understate the situation as well. Non-trivial player-made content would require a lot more than a basic MMORPG framework to make workable (it'd require a user-visible scripting language), y

  • Just like the old MUDs (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Player created content is one of the great things from the past.
  • I think there is always a desire to go beyond what was put down in the first place. The advantages mentioned above are obviously postives, although i was supprised that they didn't mention the fact that it can make a game go forever, when you keep people coming back you can make more money on the game but also you give the players more as it continues and grows beyond the original "levels"...

    I also like the idea of being able to set up a theatre group, and I'm reminded of when a Chineese girl died playi
  • With the steadily decreasing quality of the content coming out of mainstream studios, is it any wonder than player made content is on the up?

    • Re:Unsurprising (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DorkusMasterus ( 931246 )
      What you say, you say in anger, but the truth is that more often than not, they're acting with their pocketbooks, rather than actual desire to produce banal product.

      The truth is that it's costly to develop a revolutionary idea in gaming, especially when this idea must be implemented in a MMORPG or something. Therefore, player-created-content is extremely valuable to a publisher, as this gets the more radical ideas/quests/items/etc. out there, without having to waste developer time on ideas that would no

  • Source (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ramble ( 940291 )
    We're already seeing this with the Source engine, half the fun is Half-Life 2, the other half is the mods made for it. It's basically an open-source development model ported to games, and this can only be good.
  • SWG tried this, and the userbase screamed for more content, and we all know where that lead...
    • Actually, this is entirely different from what SWG did. It's diametrically opposite. They solicited opinions, and blatantly ignored them. What this article is talking about is player-created-content.

      Meaning, if you want it in the game, you can make it in the game.

      SWG limited the player-created-content, not expanded it. That's why there was such an uproar.

      If they would have implemented this instead, I believe you would see many more players at SWG, because the players would have ownership in the
    • Back before the CU or NGE, the Pex the events coordinator had an excellent forum thread about wanting to include player-made content tools in the game in the form of writable datapads (like the books in Ultima Online), player-programmable quest NPCs, "reward chests" that could be hidden through-out the world with access privledges, and other great ideas.

      Sadly, from what I know (I left the game a little over a year ago), none of these ideas ever got implemented.

  • I remember when I was one of the players in an Australian game system run on one of their mainframes in Melbourne A.C.T., called Galaxy and it's sequel Galaxy II.

    At the time I lived in Canada and had a double-hyphenated last name - me and some Kiwis from New Zealand spent a lot of time creating civilizations, species, and bizarre things (like my Ford Corporation, run by Ford Prefect, which sold high-tech (level 15) robot-assisted spaceships, orbital spaceports, and plug-in robotic pilots/gunners/navigators/
  • The two best examples of this outside the MMORPG realm are Escape Velocity and Rome: Total War. My suitemates play a mod of RTW called "Total Realism", which is practically a rewrite of everything except the basic engine and the GUI. I would say that the plug-ins for EV Nova have doubled or tripled my enjoyment of the game, because there were so many plug-ins that changed things that it was like playing a different game each time.

    That, I think, is the key. No one will want to play $50 for a game they'll

  • I doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:02PM (#14652236)
    Player-made content is always going to be buried in a sea of vandalism and coyright violations unless it's policed and all content is pre-approved.

    Games can't allow you to violate copyrights, because the game companies will be the ones who get sued. By the same token it'll be next to impossible for any game with lots of player-made content to have an ESRB rating other than AO (adults only).
    • It's really just a matter of good wording in an EULA. (and no, I'm not making a Sony joke. ^-^)

      With a well-worded and specific EULA, players will be bound to the idea that what they create for this world (or anything that goes over the servers) is therefore owned by the development company or the publishing company, and no longer you. You can take credit for it somehow (the proper way, IMHO), but you'd give up rights by releasing it into the game world.

      You couldn't run the mod without using their sof
      • With a well-worded and specific EULA, players will be bound to the idea that what they create for this world (or anything that goes over the servers) is therefore owned by the development company or the publishing company, and no longer you.

        Or the more logical route, is that anything uploaded is the opinion or owned by the people who posted them so when the FBI or RIAA/MPAA show up the game company can go "Oh, but this isn't ours... The player did this and by our EULA (and hopefully common carrier status wh
        • I hear ya, and I know that was half tongue-in-cheek, but I would still think that the publishers/developers would rather have a chance to own player-made content to use in future versions/other games/etc. and would risk the legal stuff.

          What I would see as most likely, is again, in the EULA, some form of legal verbage that stated that you could not create illegal, copyrighted, or whatever. That way you avoid lightsabers in Everquest IX, or Elminster as an NPC in a SWG game. :)

          THEN, the companies would
      • I should have been more specific. Example: Players in a Mythic Entertainment game violate a Disney copyright. Disney sues Mythic Entertainment.

        It's already happened in City of Heroes.

        • To be fair, though, City of Heroes built in exact duplicate sets of original Marvel characters. You could equip them identically with a / command that was removed.

          Still, making a huge guy, wearing only shorts, with green skin and purple shorts, well...you tell me if that's infringement or not. Shorts, giant superhero body size, and (almost) arbitrary colors are available in any decent system.
    • Player-made content is always going to be buried in a sea of vandalism and coyright violations unless it's policed and all content is pre-approved.

      What about Counter Strike model? Play content does have its bonuses.

      Well there was that thing over the Trade Mark of the Colt Line of weaponry, but they resolved that.

    • Re:I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AaronBaker2000 ( 480581 )
      I think that the 100,000 Second Life [secondlife.com] players would probably disagree with you. Second Life is made up entirely of user created content. None of it has to be pre-approved and it is rarely policed. The policy of Linden Labs [lindenlab.com] is that player created-content is owned by the player. Not only does this keep players happy, but it shields Linden Labs from copyright lawsuits.

      Also, all online games come with a warning from the ESRB: "Experience may change during online play."

      -Aaron

      • Any game that relies on player based content is likely to be distributed digitally, and the ESRB sort of becomes irrelevant. Partially because of the digital distribution (you don't have to meet any retailer guidelines), and partially because the content is so unpredictable. No doubt, if this takes off, there will be attempts to make moderated and more child-friendly "universes" for games(SL has a Teen Grid for example), but they'll be marketed as such, and the ESRB rating would just be redundant.
    • Well, a lot of the player created content for Dawn of War is going to based on Games Workshops Warhammer 40K IP, and so far they aren't complaining about any of the mods being made of which they are well aware. The Steel Legion mod is very good, I like it better than the official expansion Winter Assault and some of the other mods, like Thousand Sons are coming along nicely.

      It seems that Neverwinter Nights is the same deal. There is so much existing official and player created Pen&Paper AD&D stu

      • Well, a lot of the player created content for Dawn of War is going to based on Games Workshops Warhammer 40K IP, and so far they aren't complaining about any of the mods being made of which they are well aware.

        Games Workshop is surprisingly lenient regarding use of its creations in third-party computer games mods - scroll down to the 'Modifications, Total Conversions, and Games' section. An excerpt:

        "Any game or mod must be a "total conversion." In other words, you must not use our intellectual property (l

  • It's Natural (Score:4, Insightful)

    by airship ( 242862 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:03PM (#14652252) Homepage
    This is really just natural evolution. As online games become more popular and realistic, they become more like the real world, where all content is developed by the 'players' every day.

  • Just look at Neverwinter Nights (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:07PM (#14652298)
    Neverwinter Nights was very much geared towards player-created content and has done quite well over the last few years. Thousands of player created modules have been made and there's a number of persistent worlds still running years after the game came out.

    These last few years I worked on a few campaigns [adamandjamie.com] that were well-received, and am working on a new a new campaign [adamandjamie.com] for Neverwinter Nights 2.

    I think player created content works well for certain genres, and requires an almost mystical process to attract the right community. I got tons of value out of UT2004 and the original Half-Life. Other games like Doom 3 and Morrowind didn't quite pan out as much as I would have liked. I think it requires the game developer to actively encourage the community, as well as having a solid core game, wide install base, and easy-to-use tools. Tricky business.
    • NWN is a good example, and the fact that most of the fan-made content is available on a single site (Neverwinter Vault), with public ratings and sorting systems, helps ameliorate the common problem with player-made content: the high signal-to-noise ratio (or more accurately, the crap-to-gold ratio).
    • Yeah...and you can even use NWN to make your own multi-server MMORPGs by using portals to connect multiple worlds together. The Aurora toolkit is amazingly powerful in what it can do; I didn't really appreciate that fully until I took a look at some of the game worlds that are running out there, ranging from the astonishing (cases where players implemented all the 3.5 ed. rules into the game system on their own, not waiting for NWN 2 to do it for them) to the downright scary (there are a truly remarkable nu
  • I think the future of TV will be video game like episodes, where a player/viewer can interact in a virtual reality episode story, turning the "broadcast" into a choose-your-own-adventure Sims type game. Every game will have a set and entertaining ending though just in case the player sucks, or doesn't want to participate on a given day.

  • SimCity 4 learned this two years ago (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jurph ( 16396 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:13PM (#14652353)
    If you head over to Simtropolis, you'll see a thriving community of user-made buildings, most of them "growable". That means that in your SimCity, you can have Starbuck's and McDonald's and Home Depot "grow up" naturally into your city layout. You can have an apartment complex that looks just like where you live; you can have less-famous (but still striking) landmarks that may or may not exist. There are architecture styles, like Baltimore Rowhouse, that the original game never included, but which look fantastic and add realism to the city.

    If the developers had tried to put a Starbuck's in the game, they'd have to license the logo and the trademarked architecture; if they tried to make all the thousands of obscure local landmarks in mid-sized American and Asian cities, the production costs would have tripled and the game would never have been released. As it is, Starbuck's gets free advertising and the game gets a realistic facelift.

    There are also functional content upgrades, like Ground Light Rail (the original game only has subway, el train, and heavy rail) and retaining walls that block traffic noise from freeways. I wouldn't play the game without these upgrades, but I'd absolutely buy another SimCity title knowing that the mod community will polish it and make it shine.

    Simtropolis' bandwidth isn't free, and I've PayPalled them donations to keep their server up; in this way, my donations have essentially turned user-created content (from which I can pick and choose) into a second, self-directed expansion pack for the game.
  • While I think it'd be great if developers/publishers opened up the games even MORE to the player community to allow them to personalize the game more... I also think it'd be EXTREMELY BAD for any game to rely primarily on player generated content. Why should I shill out $50-60 for a game where I have to create the actual meat of it (or other players)? I already spend my work time programming, and my hobby writing stories, why would I spend my leisure/relaxing/fun time making content for a game when I won't
  • Player-Customized content is more like it. TFA isn't saying that legions of basement dwelling mama's boys are going to crank out new models and textures. It's saying that the player should have more customization, and that customization should be shared with other players. Which is already the case in a lot of MMOs (things like custom houses). I think it's true, but even more so, I think the real drive is a non-static environment. Players want to see their work mean something. Not clear a city of a ghoul in

  • I have a new policy... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:28PM (#14652526)
    I'm officially ignoring anybody that says some single thing is "the future".

    Player made content is in the past (Late '70s, early '80s), in the present, and will be in the future. It's a niche. It will exist. Just because some guy can't figure out how to make content for a huge game in an economical way doen't mean it's the 'one true future'.

    Yes, player made content is the future. Pre-made content, randomly generated content, and content free games are the future too. They'll all exist in the proportions they've always existed in, and people said the exact same crap about the first 3D consoles as they're saying about the latest thing to be called "next-gen".
  • Most of the player-base isn't composed of qualified writers/artists/etc. Which would be why for every decent NWN module, Quake map, etc., there are a dozen terrible ones you have to sift through.

    The whole reason that content is getting more expensive to create is that our standards are getting higher. We want more detailed models and environments, AND we want better design. Gone are the days when id could stick a model that looked like a turd with red eyes into Doom and have it become a legendary game baddy
  • I was just thinking last week how much fun it would be to have a game released with a game engine that would allow expansion and customizing that allows users to download and play others content. I'm not just talking maps. I'm talking game mechanics.

    At the height of the Myth II craze, there were tons of maps and game variants that you could play on Bungie.net. There were all of the WWII varients including some with tanks (definately NOT in the original Myth II game). I remember one that's not that old

  • Books in MMORPGs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kawolski ( 939414 )
    One of the best things I remember from Ultima Online was the ability to be able to buy blank books, write in them, and make copies to sell to other players. I'm disappointed that this hasn't been implemented in other games.
    • Heck,.. I miss everything about Ultima Online... I have dabbled in a few others since then, but nothing captured the immersion that UO could - pretty impressive, considering how poor the graphics were.

      First off, there were no levels. Pretty much every other fantasy MMORPG follows the EQ "level" concept. I hated this... leveling up your character became the object of the game, rather than the immersion in the univers. UO used a skill system - no levels. If you used a skill, it tended to go up. If you d

  • I might be working with my english prof to produce a set of Shakespeare based video games and it occured to me that no one has done this yet...

    It seems like something that would make a very interesting long term project, starting with the basic premise and theme and extending continuously to try and represent more and more of the nuance of the work...

    The reference text is widely available and even the interpretations and criticism nescessary can be easily found.

    I'm sure there are many similar sets of
  • Like others have probably commented this is straight from the MUD playbook. Realistically this is the only path for developers to take. As we can tell with alot of the mods for existing games out there that there are alot of talented people out there who would love to create content in their spare time.

    Also, if you have a player base in the millions like MMORPGS it makes perfect sense to let players develope their own content. Even if only .05% of 1M people build content thats like having 500 developers.
  • Any such game is definitely in the "fantasy" genre :-)

    We hear this "user created content is the future" thing like every three months, and I think it's nonsense.

    Sure, everyone would like to create a "Hello World!" MMOG and sit back and watch the players turn it into World of Warcraft.

    Ha ha. Fat chance.

    I'm still waiting for the glass I broke yesterday to reassemble itself spontaneously too.

    Most players don't have that much imagination, most player created content will be crud (like 95% of everything), and e
  • I've seen player made content, especially in a game like Second Life. Much of it is pretty sad. Some of it is exceptional.

    It really depends, imo, what type of MMO you are talking about.

    Games like The Sims, Second Life, and other "social" MMOs can thrive easily on player made content. Those games are mostly about playing an alternate persona. At least in Second Life, fashion was everything. You were looked at by what outfit you wore more than your ability to actually have social skills. So, those that

  • I've been playing WoW for ahwile, after coming from a background of heaving MUSHing, and I can say that one of the things that I enjoyed about MUSHing was the ability to build my own domicile and business. I probably enjoyed it even more than the game playing itself. Not only was it "intro to coding logic", but once created I could show off the object or the building as a fruit of my own creativity to friends, which lead to a "sense of space." I would feel actually more comfortable talking to someone, ei
    • where everything down to the colors of the clothes is predetermined

      This is why I refuse to get into WoW or most MMOs these days. In FFIX, without spending extra gil--and we know how much of a problem that can be in that game for those of us who didn't buy it--you couldn't get unique-looking armor.

      Hell, _Quake_ had the ability to dynamically change certain colors of the skins--I don't know if it's hard to implement or what, but why do so many games not take advantage of this? This is a game that came
  • I bought Morrowind for my PC solely so I could try out the mod Ashes of Apocalyps ( http://mods.moddb.com/4379/Ashes-of-Apocalypse/ [moddb.com]). I was really excited because the mod description made it out to be like an updated Fallout. In many respects, it was and I was pleased with it. Eventually though, I tired of it and played just regular ol' Morrowind. Since that glorious day I have bought all expansion packs for it and eagerly anticipate Oblivion. In my case, the mod scene truly drove sales on multiple lev
  • I think that Blender www.blender.org will become a major player in this niche. A completely free tool that any game maker can bundle with their game, that can do modeling, texturing (procedural, image or paint based), and rigging and animation.

    LetterRip
  • Here is a good example of player created content Ryzom Ring [ryzom-ring.com] It is an expansion to a current MMORPG Ryzom [ryzom.com] From the looks of it, the engine looks pretty good and it looks like the contiunity is not going to be messup. It would be pretty cool if blizzard came up with some sort of engine, even one that was a standalone that people could mess around with and post/turn in stories or scenarios
  • player-made content will be king in the coming years.

    When given the opportunity, players already sink hundreds of thousands of manhours of development time into building game worlds. No company can afford to match that with paid hours, nor can any small group of developers match the sum of that creativity. The construction process creates a somewhat chaotic and hapazard world, sure, but if you structure it right even chaos will tend to flow smoothly.

    In effect, the players will entertain each other with thei
  • This phenomenon isn't only limited to online / offline role playing games, but has found its manifestation in the simracing world as well: rFactor [rfactor.net] is an open racing simulation where the developers (ISI of F1 Challenge fame) actively encourage and support community mod development and involvement, be it in the creation of new cars or racing tracks.

    While rFactor hasn't yet taken the simracing world by storm, it's a very interesting contender, given the "moddability" and mod track record of previous ISI titl

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