Thu 17 Apr 2008
User Generated Videogames
ByI dislike User Generated Content as much as the next sensible, non-New Media executive.
When it comes to videogames, it’s fine to pack in level-editing tools for would-be designers to play around with, or to include rudimentary replay editing functionality to allow players to share their lol-accidental-friendly-kill moments with the rest of Youtube.
But the main attraction should always be professionally designed levels. After all, it’s the in-house game designers who best know the intricacies of their engine and who can exploit it in the most interesting ways; at least until the super-nerd consumers get fully accustomed to what’s possible weeks and months after the game’s initial release.
UGC functionality in videogames should be there to extend the life of a product once everything else has been exhausted. If Halo 3’s Forge has demonstrated anything, it’s that for every gem of an idea there will always be ten thousand duffers to wade through, and there are scarce few people who have the time or inclination to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Every now and again a kid will hit the gameplay jackpot, toying and experimenting with the boundaries of a game editor in such a way as to open a unseen door to whole new caverns of fun, but always, always this should be a product of optional features.
In Treasure’s exquisite new DS game, Bangai-o Spirits there’s a level editor that allows players to upload their UGC levels to the publisher’s Japanese website and trade them via .mp3s played into the DS microphone. To introduce the feature, the bolshy in-game character states: “Urgh. Stage-editing is for losers”.
I like that. Treasure reveals one of the most innovative and interesting ways for people to swap UGC content with a line of dialogue pointing out how ridiculous and mostly pointless the whole thing is. This should be every developer’s attitude to UGC. Super cute characters and The Go Team on flutes will only take you so far, right Media Molecule?
Despite the growing popularity of UGC content in videogames, it’s in no way a new thing. The best examples of the console ‘create ‘em up’ are usually those which sell themselves as explicit genre editors, thus neatly defining their purpose as tools rather than games.
ASCII’s RPG Maker series has long been a popular way for genre fans to create their own Japanese-style role playing games, although the difficulty of sharing console save files has always prevented a community from really taking off. (Incidentally, in one of the PlayStation versions ASCII themselves packed in a sweet little RPG they’d designed with the tool in which you played as a stock 16-bit RPG enemy troll. Each day you’d have to go out to the fields and wait around for a hero to come along and challenge you to a fight to further his quest. In terms of the JRPG premise, this neat flip is effortlessly the most inventive idea I’ve seen before.)
Likewise, Japanese developer Athena has a series of ‘Make Your Own Shoot ‘Em Ups’ under the Dezaemon moniker. These ‘games’ are strictly tool-sets with maybe a couple of bundled-in examples from the dev team of what is possible with the building blocks therein.
The PlayStation version of Dezaemon recently became available on the PS3 Store along with the new functionality to share UGC levels across the network. With the right filters and peer review system in place the 1 in 10,000 good levels might just be worth the purchase but again, the difficulty is sorting the wheat from the chaff.
One way around this is for a tool-creator to initiate a competition in which the best level designs are highlighted and win prizes. Browsing Youtube for examples of Dezaemon levels, I came across the prize-winning effort above.
What’s interesting is the name of the creator: Daisuke Amaya, aka Pixel. Amaya-san created Japanese indie favourite, Cave Story (Dōkutsu Monogatari), a legendary freeware PC title released in 2004. It’s difficult to work out the dates of this but, as the prize-winning Dezaemon entry appeared on the Super Nintendo version of the game, it seems likely that this was a level he created in his younger developmental years.
If anything, this shows that UGC functionality in games certainly has value in providing a platform for young console players to cut their design teeth with rudimentary tools. But even with the most flexible console-based tool set, the number of possible games that can be made are necessarily few. Even if there are theoretically unlimited possiblites, all UGC levels and games from a tool like Dezaemon will be shades of one another in terms of style and core rules.
So, while I welcome UGC toolsets, I’d always take the narrow finesse of Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga over the osentibly gigantic freedom of a UGC shoot ‘em up creator any day. Or, as Treasure themselves put it: “Urgh. Stage-editing is for losers”.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:22 am
Do you consider it a coincidence that Half-Life, which was packaged with perhaps the most powerful level editing software that any game has ever been released with, also was the basis for perhaps the most successful UGC scene of all time? This includes modding that led to games that Valve eventually picked up and turned into best sellers: Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, etc.
Even that software was clunky child’s play compared to what could be released, but with ideas like yours no one wants to put in the effort (or is afraid of the competition).
UGC isn’t just a way for nerds to extend the life of your game. It’s a way for people to do your job better than you do because they have the passion to do so and when developers embrace that, they profit from it.
Welcome to the 90′s.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:43 am
You’re right in saying that the HL level editing software contributed a great deal to videogames over the long haul.
But would it have been so successful if it had just been a tool and had not had the HL single player story to drive the game, engine, rules and mechanics into the gaming consciousness? Of course not.
My point is that, by all means include UGC tools in your games but aways make them a secondary feature. After all, the pool of talent able to create meaningful and quality things from these tools will always be relatively small and narrow.
That said, this was a grumpy and facetious post that wasn’t meant to dissuade or discourage content creators so much as ask developers work at better filtering tools (just look at how Bungee’s lack of efficient filtering has made so much Forge content impenetrable) and to not rely on UGC as the sole driver for a title. So apologies if that’s what it did.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I agree with that. But it also seems true that even developers aren’t likely to pick up software if it’s not packaged with a good game.
Both the pros and the UGC crowd is looking for evidence that it’s worth spilling cash for. They want to see a well done product that proves the software, a player base that will pick up their content, marketing support from the company that created it, etc. A good game is the best advertising for good development tools.
I think UGC is as much a mini-industry as you can get. The possibilities tend to be smaller and therefore the investment is smaller, the product is worse, and the profits are null.
It would be silly to bank on UGC, but it also seems clear that packaging a great game with great UGC potential is a guaranteed hit for years. And of course there are the long term benefits of earning a dedicated fan-base, a talent pool, and cheap ideas and development pursued by amatuers competing for your attention.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
This is definitely an interesting post. I don’t want this to seem like a Sokay invasion, haha.
I’m all for user generated content. It opens the door to new ideas, things that the software creators could have never imagined. Valve of course is the best example, some of their hits were based on user generated content.
On the subject of Halo 3. I bought into the hype and got an Xbox for Halo 3. I beat the game and was mildly satisfied but I basically never played it again unless I had company over.
Recently I had my cousin over. He loaded up his Gamertag on my Xbox and had his friend send him some of the custom maps he had downloaded. They weren’t on par with the maps Microsoft are charging $5 each for, but they presented new ideas that you wouldn’t get with a commercial game. One was a simple Smash Bros style map, a platform floating in the air with a ton of items popping up. I had no idea that you could even do that with Halo 3. My cousin and his friend played that stage for an hour, screwing around. Playing the game the way they wanted to play it.
I consider Smash Bros another great example of user-generated content, solely based on the way you can configure your matches. There’s a ton of ways to play the game. I find that many people have different “house rules”. I was playing Brawl over at a friends where they considered having items turned on heresy. The kind of customization allows for the players to make the game their own, by playing it how they want to play it.
It may suck to have to wade through a bunch of shit content but that’s what friends are for. Luckily we don’t have to experience the cold darkness of the internet alone. I didn’t have custom Halo 3 maps my Xbox so my cousin got his friend to send him the maps that he had on his Xbox. All viral like. I like to believe that truly good content won’t go unnoticed, the worthwhile content will be passed on.