'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.

Re:What's new?

[joe_cot]

RPGMaker and the Half Life sdk? yes, fairly hard. The Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset has been out for years, and it doesn't take a genius to do it unless you're adding custom scripting. When I was 13 I was downloading custom coasters for Rollercoaster Tycoon, downloading custom houses for the Sims, etc. It wasn't brain surgery to make or to use. The new part of this is the automated distribution of said content.

Re:What's new?

[Flentil]

The Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset has been out for years, and it doesn't take a genius to do it unless you're adding custom scripting.

You hit the nail on the head there. NWN pre-release hype promised you'd be able to recreate all your favorite pen-n-paper adventures with the easy to use editor that had a slew of wizards to help a newbie do pretty much anything they wanted. In fact the wizards were very limited and anyone who wanted to make anything but the most simplistic hack-n-slash dungeons was required to learn NWN script, which is basically a watered down version of C. This is good for C programmers, but for normal people it is mind boggling and nearly impossible. It didn't help that they released it with no script documentation. It was a terrible bait and switch. It's like saying that designing a suspension bridge is easy and anyone can do it (fineprint...provided you already have a degree in engineering).

I think the author is missing the point

[bunbuntheminilop]

that Harrison was trying to make. He was drawing parallels between web2.0 and game3.0. There has been user created content in the internet for ages (message boards etc), but it has only recently really changed the concept of content/information on the internet (wikipedia etc). Game3.0 will drive the video game industry in a different direction.

I thought the concept was an elegant summary, really.

Neverwinter Nights/NWN2

[LarsWestergren]

I just have to mention NWN and NWN2 [atari.com], since I didn't see the article doing that. People are modelling objects and monsters, making single and multiplayer modules (adventures basically), making new GUIS as well as backend tools, running persistent worlds. What I like the most about the Persistent Worlds stuff is that some game masters are running worlds that actually change depending on player actions. Some unique monsters don't respawn, or if en enemy fortress is destroyed for instance, the entry point is removed from the main map until the area is replaced with a newly modelled "destroyed fortress". A few GMs jumps around and control scripts and non-player characters to create a more living world.

MOST are just running simple hack and slash modules of course, infinitely respawning Diablo/WoW clones basically. But it shows what can be accomplished with some skilled and dedicated GMs.