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Games Entertainment

Games of the Future - User Generated Content 44

Posted by Zonk from the make-your-own-game-leave-the-designers-alone dept.
The biggest news of GDC 2007 was almost certainly the bright future of the PlayStation 3. Home was interesting, to be sure, but the title that captured the imagination of attendees was Little Big Planet. Edge had a thorough look at the game in their April issue, and now it seems like there might be a downloadable version of the four-player game used to demo the community/toybox at the conference. This 'games 3.0' thing has a lot of people sitting up and taking notice, including Flash and Shockwave developers. GameDaily spoke with MTVN's David Williams about the user-generated content possibilities being added to Shockwave.com and the AddictingGames sites. "In yet another sign of the web 2.0/game 3.0 phenomenon, one of the new features of the site is a game upload feature. User-created content is bound to have an increasingly profound effect on this industry. Already, the company has received 200 new game submissions in the past month, empowered by a game sponsorship program, which pays developers of popular games for integration on AddictingGames and provides them with enhanced distribution and marketing."
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Games of the Future - User Generated Content

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  • David Williams about the user-generated content possibilities being added to Shockwave.com and the AddictingGames sites.

    How does this differ from WiiCade [wiicade.com]? Will PS3 games be able to access the PS3 controls like WiiCade games can with the Wii, or will they be entirely keyboard controlled?
  • Most of the games available for the PS3 created in this fashion would just be some crap look-what-i-can-do games and will overshadow the true gems that will appear on the system.
    • Fortunately, networks of people usually manage to create ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Think of it as a "YouTube" for games: most of the good YouTube videos get discovered and are spread around via word of mouth/net.
    • You mean, unlike the ones created by professionals?

  • Games of the past, e.g. Quake 3 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Thursday May 10, 2007 @04:38PM (#19075081) Homepage
    Which I single out not because it was the first or the best. I pick it because I bought the game solely for user-generated content (actually more the promise of user-generated content at the time I purchased it). The game itself was well-made and well-polished deathmatch, and I did play a few hours of it, but was already pretty bored of the format. Yet I can't even begin to calculate the amount of time I spent playing q3 fortress, navy seals, urban terror, true combat, and a smattering of other mods.

    Without user-generated content I would call Q3 one of the most dissapointing games ever. With the user-generated content it is one of my favorite games ever.

    So that's nothing new, but supporting user-created content on a console is new, especially supporting in the sense of actually funding some of their development and advertising and such. Sounds like a great idea overall if it works.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by morari ( 1080535 )
      Generations Arena is the only reason I even still bother to install Quake 3 :P
    • I'm thinkin' the article is referring to games built from the ground up with the tools built right in the game. Yes, Quake 3 has a lot of user made content, but that wasn't the primary design goal of id, and you need to no way more about game making than simply drag and dropping stuff around the level than in games like Little Big Planet or similarly in Spore.

      I was just reading about Drawn to Life [ign.com] for the DS at lunch (ok, so lunch had been officially for a little while). The little developer working on i
      • If they want to base a game around user generated content, they need to make it easy for users to generate content. I designed a bunch of levels for Descent. Designing a simple level was very easy. You could even do very complex things very easily because of the way the editor worked. Everything was cubes (stretched and skewed as necessary, basically 6 sided shapes) but changing the dimensions, shape, and connection a bunch of cubes, you could make just about any level. I tried designing levels in Desc
        • Sounds a lot like the DN3D level editor, except.. more 3d. DN3D had an interesting feature though, for all its faults: You could have rooms that went through where other rooms would be if purely physical. There were quite a few 720-degree turns and such.
          • You could do this with the Descent Level editor too. The level editor is called Devil. I hooked it up on dosbox a little while ago. Actually it crashed dosbox, so i ran it under freedos in vmware, but Descent would only run at usable speeds in dosbox, so I set up a disc image file to transfer files between them. Anyway, one of my favourite things to do, was to put a floating cube in a room, with a door on it, and when you entered the door, you entered another room of the same size, with a similar cube in
  • Game 3.0? I must have been asleep while 2.x came and went. Can someone please tell me what the first two iterations were (TFA didn't elaborate). Thanks.
    • Games 1.0 is everything up until Games 2.0. And Games 2.0 is the PSTriple, cuz it has 4D and RIIIIIIIIIIIDGE RAAAAAAAAAACER!
    • The real disappointment is that since we are still using Web 2.0, we will have to wait a long time until we can get our Games 3.0 over the internet.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Pikoro ( 844299 )
      My guess?

      Games 1.0 was 2d and sidescrollers
      Games 2.0 is simulated 3d and more first person interaction
      Games 3.0 is moving to more user generated content and interactive games as well as "real" in game physics for things like water, real time raytracing, etc...

      • My guess... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by LKM ( 227954 )
        There's no "Games 1.0 and Games 2.0". Games 3.0 is just a buzzword based on Web 3.0, which is all that interactive, user generated web stuff which is "more than just Ajax" (which was Web 2.0). It's all bullshit anyways.
    • Games 1.0 Paper
      Games 2.0 Paper-rock
      Games 3.0 Paper-rock-scissors

      Get the idea?
  • Didn't we already see this on the PC for years now?

    I believe Half-life pretty much sold just for the mods the last 5 years or so.

    • Yes, we've had it on PC for years but very few people have been able to make money from it.

      With DRM and micro-transactions you can have all that stuff you use to get for free for a small fee.

  • Severely disappointed by the lack of imagination.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dominion ( 3153 ) on Thursday May 10, 2007 @04:45PM (#19075191) Homepage

    When I read the title, my first thought was of the game, Legend of Mana, where new sections of the map could be unlocked through gameplay, and positioned according to the user. I thought of how this might work in a networked world, where unlocking another user's game map requires designing a game map yourself. The game would be part quest, and part map and character design tools. An infinite map could be created as long as users were creating.

    Find yourself a good storyline to explain why certain people can create landscapes, maybe add in a little bit of politics and conflict around these abilities, and throw in a good amount of professionally designed side quests to keep things fresh, and I would think you would have a huge seller on your hands.

    And this is the first thing I thought of. Imagine if people sat down and really took the idea "user generated content" into really wild directions... Imagine the possibilities.

    So maybe you can see why I was disappointed by what the article was actually talking about.

  • Very Low Signal to Noise Ratio (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Drogo007 ( 923906 ) on Thursday May 10, 2007 @05:05PM (#19075531)
    Having worked on a major game title that gave users the tools to build content some 6 years ago, I can honestly say that like most everything else about today's internet and it's "user-generated" content (blogs, photobucket, etc): the ratio of quality to utter crap is so low that the signal is almost completely lost in the noise.

    We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official. There were a slew of others that we unofficially reccommended. But the vast majority of it was either total newbs goofing around with the tools, learning projects by the more serious designers, or deliberate crap by the kinds of people that find such things funny.

    So if a publisher relies on user-created content to sell a title (like, oh, say, the original Neverwinter Nights), they need to have enough in place to start with to make it worth plunking money down on for the first wave of users. If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.

    In the case of Neverwinter Nights, they had enough to get the ball rolling and the community designers had enough time to learn the tools and start turning out some good content before interest in the game completely faded away.

    But the history of games is littered with the countless discarded husks of those who tried this path and failed.

    • Get enough signal and you still win... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.

      Well, sometimes there's a niche that it's worthwhile scratching.

      Virtually all the content in Second Life, There, and Activeworlds are user-created. Comparing the three may show you where you went wrong:

      We did get one or two gems that were good
    • That's where the AddictingGames thing comes in -- somebody to sort through the crap to pull out the nuggets of gold, and then to promote those games so that everyone can find them. If it works, it could be a great way to solve the signal/noise problem, bringing great homebrew games to people.

      That has always been a problem with user-created content, in particular "mods" to games like quake or ut. This signal/noise problem exists, and the odds of people finding the same awesome mod as you is small so great
  • > User Generated Content

    Hence the "penis fairy" outfit in Second Life.

    Yeah, I wish I were making that up.

  • Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hellboy0101 ( 680494 ) on Thursday May 10, 2007 @05:08PM (#19075571)
    This is yet another instance of describing something as a "breakthrough" only if you've had your head up your butt for the last, oh I don't know, decade or so. I'm not a PC fanboy, but I do get sick of people claiming this is a new phenomena when in fact user generated content has been pushing the future of gaming for a long time.

    Not only has this been done already, but it (in regard to consoles) it was done in a much more open and standard environment that you didn't have to pay extra for (in the case of the XBox360).

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AutumnLeaf ( 50333 ) on Thursday May 10, 2007 @05:23PM (#19075777)
      Longer than that, you young whipper-snapper.

      Many a player leveled to 20 and created a wizard, and then a realm for his fellow players to explore on MUDs. And while I appreciate the high-production value of WoW, I miss the days of very clearly exploring different projections of other people's minds. Granted, many realms were boring, but there were some truly genius ones too.

       
    • BUT DUDE! HALO is the best game ever. No other FPS shooter had good controls, and story and multiplayer? I mean come on dude. It's not like there's some game out there named after radioactive decay that has similar gameplay and a multiplayer only game type that people are going crazy over.

      Ok enough of that, here's my problem with User generated content. Sony and Microsoft don't want it. They want user generated content, that they approve and can charge for, but I've yet to hear them say "we're willing
      • I agree. I don't think the console, at least the console with its current business model, can support user generated content in a meaningful way. MS and Sony both rely on the sales of licensed games to make their money...and while nintendo may turn a small profit on each unit sold, even it needs the game license fees to make any signfigant money. You think they're going to extra any money out of modders...that work for free? Thats assuming that a good amount of them will take the time make something worth d

  • Second Life is not a game any more than a telephone line is a conversation. Games are entertaining diversions. When they become more than that, they become art, employment, or both. Second Life is not a game. It is a new medium for creative expression. Your computer is the brush, Second Life is the canvas, and the Internet is the distribution mechanism. When computers first came out, some people created games, but just because someone invented a new way to create content, you didn't see people saying

  • I think a good example would be the Far Cry series of games on Xbox. The included map editor could let you make incredibly detailed maps, with decent controls, unlike anything else out there on consoles.

    DJCC
  • As if there hasn't been a large modding community for games in the last 10 years... :p User driven content outnumbers original content by quite a bit in games which were designed for extensibility. Quake, NWN, etc.

    Obligatory plug for my mod: www.customtf.com. =)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mlts ( 1038732 ) *
      Even before Quake, there used to be thousands of maps available for DOOM (a game that didn't have an official .WAD/level editor at the time.) ID even shipped a CD, and I forgot the name, which had both a top 10 list for WADS to play, as well as a directory with hundreds of levels.

      I love games which are easily moddable. For example, if C&C: Generals or NWN were not so easy to modify, I would have played it for about 24 hours or so, then uninstalled for space. However, just writing maps and modules for

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BobNET ( 119675 )

        Even before Quake, there used to be thousands of maps available for DOOM

        There still are [doomworld.com]...

        ID even shipped a CD, and I forgot the name, which had both a top 10 list for WADS to play, as well as a directory with hundreds of levels.

        Sounds like Master Levels [wikia.com], which was a set of 21 good levels (some of which were made by authors who would later be hired by id Software to work on Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom), but also a couple thousand not-as-good levels which were basically dumped from the idgames archive of

  • I don't believe the future is user-generated content. Sure it is a nice option to include with a game and many people enjoy it and some good content will come from it. And it is a nice way for people who aspire game development jobs to get started and have something to show on their CV.

    However, I believe the future lies with computer generated content. What if the computer could generate a new map for you? A new story-line? ...

    I think that game developers should focus their energy in developing methods of
  • Look at the other "user content" ventures that popped up, like YouTube or MySpace. Building on the creed "When you build it, they will come" it added "and will finish it for you, for free".

    User generated content has one huge advantage for the one building the framework: Less work, less expenditure while at the same time providing the same amount of value. And, actually, so far it was not really bad for the games that allowed it. Quite the contrary. Imagine CS without the ability to build your own maps. Gran

  • ...user-generated content...

    User generating content: Don't waste your time with that one. Here, try my new gun!

    Other User: Sweet! What does it do?

    User generating content: It shoots 256 bullets a second for 65535 damage each!

    Other User: Awesome! Have any armor?

    User generating content: Sure! Here's this c00lio armor, same look as the armor the big boss wears, only it is AC 256, and blocks 256% of incoming attacks!

    Other User: WOWWWWWWEEEEE! This game roxxxxxx0rzzz!

    (2 minutes later)

    Other User: This

    • User generating content: Did I mention the armor causes so much damage in the attacker, that, if they die, it actually resurrects them and kills them again, multiple times if necessary?

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