'Games 3.0' Is Nothing New

At Next Generation, author Matt Matthews points out that gamers have been 'making things' for a while now. Sony's Phil Harrison touted the 'Games 3.0' vision at his GDC keynote last month, saying that the new thing is gamers making their own entertainment and sharing it with others. "[Harrison's view] ignores an important fact: the tools of game creation have been given to players over and over again for almost a quarter of a century, since at least 1983. The lessons learned since then will be instructive as Sony again puts the players in control." He goes on to discuss titles like RPGMaker, Pinball Wizard, and some of the famous mods that have changed the industry.

What's new?

[cxreg]

Accessibility. Could you see your average non-geek using "RPGMaker" or "Pinball Wizard"? Clamor all you like about the superiority of PC gaming, but that type of thing is NOT mainstream.

Sony isn't inventing this concept, certainly, but making user-created content a quick-and-easy thing *is* a new concept. Other examples are Spore and Line Rider [wikipedia.org]

Frivolous version numbers

[CelticWhisper]

I hate to be the wet blanket here, but what's the deal with this trend toward "versioning" things that don't need to be versioned or for which version numbers make no sense? "Web 2.0?" "Games 3.0?" Especially since as far as I can tell, there's no good goddamn reason to assign arbitrary version numbers to entities which are constantly changing and evolving as it is.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon or maybe I slept through "Marketroid Bullshit 101," but I fail to see any point in taking something like the web, which is simply a term used to refer to the (arguably) most human-readable facet of the Internet, or games, which come in all shapes and sizes as it is (much like websites) and slap a version number on them. It reeks of "hey, Jim, wanna inflate our stock prices overnight and take that Tahiti vacation we've been eyeing for the past 6 months? Or hey, we could use a few new espresso machines in the managers' lounge"

A game or a website can have a version number. Just keep the damn things off of categories, classes, genres, and other intangible/abstract/nebulous concepts or entities that have no clean-cut and intelligent basis for versioning.

Rampant already

[king-manic]

Well, FPS's have had this running rampant for years. Argueably the most popular multiplayer game ever (counter strike) started as user made content. Morrowind/oblivoin has as much mods as actual content fromt he developer. 60% of all games on battle.net for warcraft 3 is custom maps. Might be new to the console but PC has had this rampant for a long time.

I own a Ps3 and it does "itch" for the connectivity of Home TM. It feels like a full fledged computer with a web browser, store, and multiplayer but no IM. With IM and chat rooms and it may push the PS3 from "nice but not now" to "must have." User made content delivery may spark the content creators. If Sony allows content creation on a PC to be brought over it may be even bigger for them.

well how about back in 1983

[snuf23]

Pinball Construction Set [mobygames.com] was easy to use for pretty much anybody. As was Racing Destruction Set [mobygames.com]. Adventure Construction Set [mobygames.com] was more complex but still didn't require anything like scripting.
This "Games 3.0" concept has been around just about as long as the industry. I think the question of ease of use and making it mainstream is complicated. The more you dumb down the editor, the less you can do with it.