Playing by creating
David J Edery
| |
 |
Send to a friend | |
David Edery recently became the Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade, and is a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS). Prior to joining Microsoft, David was the CMS Program's Associate Director for Special Projects, during which time he co-founded the Convergence Culture Consortium and managed Cyclescore, an exertainment project fusing original video games and stationary exercise equipment. Edery also pens Game Tycoon, a business-centric video game industry blog. In "Playing by creating", he tells us why we should be excited about user-generated content.
| |
Game developers have been harnessing UGC for years by sharing the same tools they use to create game content with the consumers who buy their games. I still recall – with great fondness – the first time I used the Doom level editor to create a new challenge for my friends, way back in 1993. And thanks to brilliant designers like Will Wright (Spore) and savvy companies like Bioware (Neverwinter Nights), UGC has remained at the forefront of the industry's consciousness.
Unfortunately, discussion of video game UGC (in the press and at industry events) typically revolves around a single point of interest, i.e. "UGC makes games more interesting" or "UGC can help drive sales". But the opportunities – for industry and for society as a whole – are more numerous than that. The following is a longer list of business and social reasons to be excited about user-generated content in video games.
UGC can extend the life (and increase the sales) of games
The most celebrated aspect of UGC is its propensity to drive the sales of video games long after they should have declined under normal market conditions. The most famous example of this phenomenon is Counter-Strike, a user-created mod of the game Half-Life that, for several years, has managed to remain the most widely played online first-person shooter in the world – driving Half-Life sales to record levels in the process. In their attempts to replicate this phenomenon, several companies have gone to increasingly great lengths to engage creative consumers. One well-respected developer, Bioware, even made the tools for its game Neverwinter Nights a central component of the game's development and marketing strategy. Consumers were informed upfront that the tools, far from a secondary benefit, were a core reason for purchasing the game, and that community content should be a primary source of entertainment.
UGC can result in entirely new gameplay experiences
Users do not simply modify gameplay; when given the opportunity, they occasionally give birth to entirely new gameplay experiences. A notable example is the game Tringo, created by a user of Second Life. Tringo became so popular within Second Life that it was ultimately licensed for development on the Game Boy Advance. While no other games created in Second Life have matched Tringo's commercial success, an ever-increasing number of user-created games are appearing in online forums every day.