Player Generated content.

Just wondered if anyone has been developing/experimenting with anything in Blitz3d/Max that has Will Wright's "player as content creator" philosophy in mind?

Is there a link to his philosophy?

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html

I think it is on the right track but actually there is a bigger philosophy that this is only touching the tip of.

Creating a product where you try to read the customer's mind and do studies to see what the most common requirements are and come up with designs and opinions and models and ideas and preconceived styles, shapes, colors, objects and environments that you basically think the customer `might like`, based on your arrogant assumptiveness and the projection of your own likes and dislikes, is actually backwards, no matter how well informed. These are all attempts to shove something down their throat. What a customer really wants is a pure mirror in which they see themselves as a whole person, or at least in which they see reflected back creations that are an extension of themselves, able to embody every whim of creative idea that they could possibly imagine. As soon as you come up with a theme or a style or a design or anything whatsoever that is fixed, this holds back their creativity.

yep that's a fair brief summary of the "player generated content" philosophy from the player's perspective.

Also from the developer's perspective there are advantages: eg. less work has to be done on the game content by the developer. Watch the full video of Will Wright's Spore presentation for more examples: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066&q=Spore


The notion has been incorporated into many PC titles for years now in the form of providing user's the editing tools that developers used to generate the original content.

Will Wright probably came up with the first player content based game though (Sim City - I can't think of an earlier game in which you could edit content yourself) and he is pretty much the only guy in mainstream game development industry to formulate this as a game design paradigm.

In Spore, he is taking this to a new level by using virtually 100% procedurally generated player content within the game - (ie no pre-created + saved models, textures).

I've seen a lot of procedually generated stuff people have been creating in Blitz - much of it of excellent quality. But I have not seen anyone putting this power in the hands of the player in the way games like the Sims does.

So back to my original question, any Blitz3d/Max developers been playing around with these ideas? anything to showcase?

It's been tried before: http://www.gucomics.com/archives/view.php?cdate=20030627

There IS no developer's perspective, in that philosophy.

I have an idea on the backburner that is a web-site turn-based rpg. There would be a small amount of pre-created zones. A few towns, shops, items, monsters and classes and races. Then, as players level up, they gain a kingdom, which they can create as they see fit (With text descriptions or a choice of stock graphics) and then new items, weapons, monsters and such, which will auto-spread across other zones in a kind of migration... Monsters will migrate based on location. Items will become 'researched' when sold to other shops. So if you buy/find someones customly created fire-sword and then sell it to the shop in a major town, it will become available to buy at that shop.

As you level up, you'll be able to make more things. and the highest level players will be able to create races, classes and whole dungeons and towns within their kingdom. Each kingdom sits on a plot of land on a 2D grid map, which growns out from the main towns. Your kingdom forms first on the town you began at. As you encounter new areas and monsters, their assets are added to your editing potential.

It is a case of where simple rules will create complex results. All I will do is create new assets for players to use to create monsters and items. Which will basically be AI methods and elemental/status bits and other like things.

The players will also be able to create their own spells, skills, and all the things you expect from an RPG. Not to mention the map will function like a mud. Where each area will have it's own chatroom so players can converse in real time. Each area will populate with active and passive monsters/npcs and they will attack someone in the room at random, or wait to be interacted with. Players will not be able to form a party, Battles are exclusively 1 on 1.

I think Spore from a technical view looks great, but it's deceiving to think it opens up gameplay just because it plays with the idea of scale and backs it up by the using user input to create massive amounts of content. I can understand why they think its great and as a concept it is, but in reality its vast scope removes the very boundaries and rules which make games fun in the first place.

Producing content procedurally is cool, and the first thing I thought when I saw the editors is wow that would be great for creating creatures for my game. I may be wrong but I think Spore may end up as a cool content creation application, but a bland game

I don't know. I think it looks like it is potentially fun. Each meta-game has the potential to be a fun game in it's own, making the whole game feel like a linked up set of minigames. Which doesn't bother me at all.

It comes down to how much fun each meta-game is all on it's own.

I think the technical programming skills and level of intelligence required to write a program that procedurally creates that kind of content still leaves plenty of room for the developer. . . From my experience, writing the level editor is 10 times as hard and 10 times as fun as writing the game.

Personally as a game player rather than developer, I've always enjoyed the more open-ended style game play - I love RTS games, games like the Sims, SimCity etc. I also love some FPS action games like DeusEX, but I still needed UnrealEd to get the most fun out of it. . . :O)

I read somewhere (Gamasutra?) that most of the early Spore development was done through
technical prototypes. Endless prototypes, apparently. This article said that most of what
people have been seeing (E3 videos on youtube, etc) are just prototype videos that have not
yet been fully programmed with gameplay mechanics.

So, the tech demos make the game look boring, but it's not done yet. I trust Mr. Wright knows what's fun.

If the actual game (Spore) is anything like the overview he described in the original unveiling I know I will find it very enjoyable at least for month or two. . .

That's actually quite long for me, most games I only really get into for a week or so - I've only just got Empire Earth and I'm feeling that I almost done with it after about a week

Oblivion entertained me for almost two months - now I haven't played it in about a month and don't feel like going back (as beautiful as it is)

okay, I'm babbling now. I'll stop it :O)

That is where it is for me. Aside from oldschool arcade games which were built to 'come back to' later on.. that is.. when you see it again somewhere else.

Aside from those. If a game gets me to miss it and play it again. It must be great. So far. the list is printable.

Zelda: Ocarina of time.
Final Fantasy 6
Final Fantasy 10
Red Faction
Ultima 9
Ultima Online
Starcraft

No NES on the list, only cause most of the ones I keep going back to were also arcade games.. so it isn't fair.

That is about it.

I wonder if it's just because we experienced these games in our childhood*.

* Really sorry for assuming ages - for some reason I assume everyone in the BB community is between 15 and 30 - surely I must be wrong though!

I wonder if the 14 year olds of today will be having the same nostaligic feelings of things like GTA, Oblivion and whatever new-fangled popular games there are these days. I haven't owned a console in almost 10 years, so I probably wouldn't know them if they hit me with a big stick.

Here's my list that I occasionally get pangs for (I'm 27 btw) :
Zelda3,
Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World
SimCity,
CannonFodder,
Lemmings,
Warcraft3

Odd, that last one there doesn't seem to fit in with the others. . . wonder why?

And, heck, we really are off on a tangent now aren't we. . . :O)

I'm sure Spore will be excellent, and so it should be considering the time its taken. However I was just making the point that games have rules, and offering such variance often confuses the mass audience. The Sims etc appeals to many for obvious reasons, however I'm probably one of the few people around that is able to relate to ameboa based life-forms.

Another thing that annoys me is so called game designers like Will Wright that have godlike status when in reality its the coders and artists they employ that make him seem so good. I wonder how many people here given a top class team of 40 employees and 3 years and a tonne of cash wouldn't come up with something cool?

The fact is. Will Wright got the 40odd world-class coders and artists because way back when, he made some fantastic sims when he might have been working with 3 or 4 people.

Coders, especially designer coders like the ones around here, don't really grasp how hard it is to reign in 40 odd people and have them produce a coherient and complete whole.

Lead Design isn't some easy job that any monkey can do. It not only requires an understanding of all the other aspects of design, it requires the ability to lead people and inspire them to put forth their best effort.

It is no different than being a director. Or more accurately, A Writer-Director-Actor.

Oh geez, I shoulda turned off two tangents ago. I'm not even in the right lane.

People are basically trying to simulate what they think is reality, which is the physical universe.

In the old days when computer games started out, there was almost no effort to make a game look and act like it's part of a generalized physics model. There were gross inconsistencies in how things interact and pretty much every interaction was hand-coded or set up as an animation sequence which `seemed to suggest` that there is `realistic` interaction going on. The main player character would have its own control system, detecting the environment and triggering off certain anim sequences or movements based on user input. There was almost no actual real physics calculations and often even gravity was a made up response. Objects in the game interacted just because a special case scenario had been programmed to allow that interaction.

Then over time we are gradually moving away from having to specially hardcode each and every interaction, to coming up with a more fundamental underlying `science` of objects being made of smaller and smaller parts, and interacting according to a set of global rules - ie physics. This way the interactions don't have to be pre thought out or pre animated or have a special set of animations coded for them. Now you can just throw a ball into an arena and see it bounce off whatever it hits, whereas before maybe the ball didn't even have acceleration or gravity or even look like it really was a ball. That trend of moving to a generalized physics system is still underway and it is still early days.

The physical universe is all made up of heaps of tiny particles and it's because everything starts out so tiny that you can have so much variety and so many configurations that are all still governed by the same single set of rules. It's all the same physics, from a very low level upwards. We are still reaching down to smaller and deeper levels of physics simulation in games and bounding rigid bodies/boxes/polygons is still very primitive.

In future I think people will keep moving in this direction, and will start to use ideas such as objects being made of different materials, of having chemical reactions to each other, of there being different kinds of interactions and bonds and even the highly complex yet underlyingly simple foundation of `genetics` and lifeforms. Deformability won't be the latest buzzword once you have `objects` interacting at a particulate level of detail and with more properties than just spacial relations.

The reason I'm talking about this topic, which seems to be about physics and low-level simulations of interactions, is because it is and will be the foundation of an `engine` that would allow for a massive amount of diversity in the creation of player content. It allows a huge variety of possibilities more than just blobby-object modelled unrealistic looking crazy lifeforms with snap-on arms and legs, like some digital barbie doll, which is what spore basically is.

The move they've made with that game is a move toward having a lower-level of interaction based on object parts that can be put together rather than the player only dealing with already full `assembled` objects. It's just a move towards having a game world where the fundamental building blocks are small enough to allow creative variety. And regardless of what they claim for numbers of possibilities, I'm sure there is still a LOT that you cannot create with it because the `resolution` of subtle differences is not high enough.

We're going to see games starting to have physics engines, chemistry engines, material properties, biology, etc. Although physics has the current wow factor it is really the easiest and most obvious of the aspects of physical reality to model. It is much much more complex to push back the barrier of rigid bodies or deformable bodies or mass springs etc to the point where physics begins to blend with chemistry, where interaction spacially has an impact on and is dependent on a whole variety of other interactive factors, which only the much higher level lead to a huge amount of versatility.

The thing is though you can't have the average player with an average amount of awareness and only a small limited control system be responsible for building and maintaining all the limitless nuances of an entire universe. This is where things then start to become limited, not by what you can do in your simulation but by what the user is even capable of controlling or wanting to control. To increase their `potential` would be to ask that they expand as a conscious being and at the moment most people are not into that. They have to be given limitations and boundaries and guidelines and a story and told where to sh** and what to say and when. People are robots with limited control. So while you can give them this wide open universe of possible creation, it's just a huge meaningless canvas without imposing limitation on it or forcing a story or creating obstacles and challenges. That said, maybe such a universe also automatically creates such things. :-)

I'm working on using physics and chemistry simulation in a game, which sounds advanced and is, but even that falls way short as it's a very primitive version of it and I'm still glossing over a whole load of realism, leaving the rest to interpretation. Spore has an `idea` of genetics and growth and creativity, but I still think it has a LONG way to go.

I think what we're also going to see in the future, since creating a universe out of small pieces by hand is far too time consuming and complicated (you'd have to be a scientist!), I think we will begin to see `modelling tools` that are much more advanced than just blobby object modelling. ie growing things with genetics, objects that you pick some characteristics of and it generates the entire structure with fractals, etc, maybe even something holographic. Fun!

I think the answer to your question is no.