(2) On DIY gaming - a lot of people got their hands on the LittleBigPlanet beta last week - what's the potential here? Is DIY gaming the new 'thing'? Will everyone become a game designer now or will it just inspire a certain creative few?
I don't think the masses are creative enough to make this a "thing." The tools are easy to use, sure, but it's difficult making a level that's actually long and balanced enough to be called "fun." So I think a lot of people will dip their toes, find out what a pain in the ass level designing is, then back out and just play what the dedicated minority will supply them.
I like to keep my gaming old-fashioned. I like single-player experiences, and letting game developers build worlds for me. I think I am in the minority on this one. Obviously, putting the creation aspect of gaming in the players' hands is the next big step. Gamer input can only help to make games better, and we all benefit from some amazing creations. I'll let the rest of the world create spaces for me to play in!
Good level design is an art that's difficult to master, even with LBP's simple yet powerful tools, so I suspect that the majority of people who buy the game will dabble with creation before abandoning in favor of playing the levels made by more dedicated creators. But part of LBP's genius is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. People can re-mix levels. They can redecorate levels. They can collaborate with superior creators. So while more people will ultimately play than create, I think you'll have a much larger number of creators than for typical mod-able games.
It's definitely a big trend in all forms of media, games included. Like anything, the better designers will rise to the top, but everyone will get an equal opportunity to show off their game making prowess (mine sucks, fyi).
To some extent you could say things like Oblivion and all those "Choose Your Own Adventure" style games are kind of DIY games, so it's not really new. Far Cry also had an element with a pretty deep map maker. However, things like Spore and LBP are more advanced allowing you to make everything in the game pretty much. Whether everyone will become games designers now is unlikely because those games are designed to be simple to manipulate and create worlds in them, which is a lot easier than actual game design.
DIY Gaming has always been around, since the days of the Doom total conversion mods like Star Wars DOOM and Alien DOOM. People have been using the tools provides (or not provided) to tailor their game experience the way they want it. LittleBigPlanet is no different except that the entire game is designed around this concept. I can't comment too much as I haven't played LBP yet, but at it's core you aren't really designing a game in LBP. You are still bound by the restrictions of the developers, it's basically a really open ended level creation tool.
Well, comparing LBP to something like Spore you're immediately hit with the similarities: being about to "create" significant portions of your gaming experience. But I was also doing this with Stunts and Excitebike 15 years ago. Today's games offer some unique advantages: procedural generation (Spore's infinite library of creatures) and distribution (LBP's stunning online level "marketplace") in these two cases. Both of these offer a new model of user-generated content thatI'd be very surprised if we didn't see more of in future games.
I am one of those people who has trouble being creative with these DIY games. I did alright with Spore, but I wouldn't consider anything I created mind blowing. With that said, I'm still excited about Little Big Planet as I am looking forward to what others create. I already saw videos of World 1-1 in SMB & some kind of Chocobo Racing recreated in Little Big Planet.
The promise is that everyone's 2D platformer game design dreams come true with a game like LBP. The pitfall, as I've seen in the beta, is that everyone's so quick to publish the levels they create that the lack of iteration and polish in these amateur creatoins is going to expose us to playing a lot more broken stuff. It already has made me value the polish that comes from the pros.
In a world where YouTube was supposed to give people a voice and possibly yield the next Speilberg, the idea of giving someone access to simple creative tools is frightening. I suppose I'm just pessimistic when it comes to people's creative sensibilities; we could see some amazing stuff come out of LBP, but we we could also see quite a few disasters. Everyone prove me wrong!
As much as I'm enjoying LittleBigPlanet I don't know that I'm creative enough to make my own levels. I'm glad the game is focused on the user-generated content because there are obviously many creative gamers in the world who can do some fantastic things with the tools. DIY gaming works well because of the connected gaming experience. If a game offers players the chance to create and share content it needs to have an organized and thoughtful way of presenting it to other users -- that is becoming the issue with created content. Hopefully LBP and even titles like FarCry 2 can combat those issues to extend the experience beyond developer content.
Reader Comments (1)
Wow. Excitebike came out 15 years ago? I'm old.