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Since the advent of Spore and its integrated community and automated content sharing, there has been a great deal of excitement surrounding the idea of the “massively single-player game,” where indirect interaction with numerous other players enhances a game’s solo experience.
Although currently limited to propagation of superficial user-created content and hampered by the shallow and disjointed gameplay experience they are paired with, Spore’s connectivity features are clearly fraught with potential and will inspire many new applications for player-to-player connectivity beyond traditional online gaming.
Many of the ideas that follow build on Spore’s noteworthy accomplishments; others are inspired by its missed opportunities. Still others are related only tangentially to Spore, if at all, but they all fall within the bounds of innovative uses of connectivity in single-player games.
Why Spore Is Awesome
On a basic level, Spore’s content sharing isn’t new or unique. Many first-person shooters have game servers that automatically send players missing levels when necessary. High-profile games like LittleBigPlanet and lower-profile ones like 3D Ultra MiniGolf Adventures allow players to create and share levels.
And is downloading new levels, characters, and other modifications via an in-game browser really that conceptually different from downloading them from a website or, in more primitive times, a BBS?
What makes Spore special is the robustness and universality of its system. It has beefy features like Sporecasts (essentially, a subscription to a specific content stream) and tracking of other players’ gameplay interactions with your created creatures. And, more importantly, there is no barrier to entry; all you have to do to send and receive content is log on and play the game.
Creating content is nearly as easy; because creature editing is necessary for gameplay, the game turns each player into a content creator.
Content Creation Through Gameplay
Spore’s arrangement is not quite ideal, however, because gameplay and editing are two separate activities. In essence, the game forces players to create content with an editor in order to play the game; editing is not the game itself.
While the editor can be great fun in itself for many people, the ideal situation is for players to create content simply by taking normal gameplay actions and making normal gameplay decisions, not by using discrete creation tools.
For example, if Spore were a game about manipulating the environment to influence computer-simulated creature development indirectly, the player’s creatures and worlds would still become unique entities, shaped by a combination of algorithms, the player’s gameplay actions, and random factors.
The player would still be generating interesting content for the rest of the player base, but in this case it would involve no specialized content tools, only normal gameplay.
Ideal Uses
Of course, in some games, gameplay and editing are more closely intertwined than they are in Spore. For example, gameplay in SimCity consists primarily of using an editor-like interface to build a city. Other examples of such games include Dungeon Keeper (dungeon customization tools), Tecmo’s Deception (trap placement), and The Incredible Machine (placement of objects).
These types of games, and any games where players can shape a game world into something unique, are usually well-suited for an automated content-sharing system like Spore’s.
While created content in Spore has little value beyond visual variety, user creations that are made through gameplay, affect gameplay, and are noticeably distinct from one another can add significant value and increase a game’s life span.
For instance, if SimCity were designed such that interactions with neighboring cities were complex and varied with the nature of those cities, user-created cities could keep those interactions interesting and unpredictable across many games.
Each game could randomly select a handful of neighbors from among hundreds of thousands of user-created cities, each one hand-built by numerous gameplay decisions over many hours or days.
Designing Around Advanced Content Sharing
To take full advantage of this concept, games could be designed such that content created though gameplay in one aspect of the game could be shared and used by other players in another aspect of the game.
For example, shaping one game world at the macro level can create and customize other game worlds at the micro level. This concept can also be seen in games such as UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka XCom), where the bases you build in the game’s management mode can become unique battlegrounds in the tactical mode, and in Dwarf Fortress, where abandoned fortresses from the management mode become ghost towns ripe for exploration in the game’s adventure mode.
However, games that seek to employ this kind of content sharing need to be designed from the beginning to share content in a way that adds value and doesn’t interfere with existing gameplay and world design.
If we wanted to make an XCom-like game, for, example, we would need to allow more customization of bases to ensure that player-created bases are distinct from one another and therefore add value when shared. We would also have to alter the game design to incorporate those bases somehow, such as by automatically importing other players’ bases into the game world and making attack/capture/destruction of these bases a game objective.
And if we wanted to make a Dwarf Fortress-like game, we could allow characters in the adventure mode to travel to and explore other players’ game worlds, linking them through portals, stitching pieces of them onto the fringes of the player’s world, or constructing entirely new worlds out of diverse fragments. More on that later, when I get into some of the other connectivity ideas.
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http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060505/sheffield_01.shtml
Image is instead of trading cards and/or shareing the same machine ANimal Crossing Synced up over the Internet and did it automaticaly like a podcast?
I've been thinking along these lines, too. Spore seemed to me to be a testbed for the gameplay possibilities of the linked concepts of user-generated content (UGC), automated content sharing, and procedural generation: a good starting point, but not the final answer. It would be a shame not to develop more games using those core elements in new ways based on the lessons learned from Spore.
The idea of moving content creation from a distinct editor mode into live gameplay strikes me as a very good one. It should be noted, though, that this has an important effect: it increases the granularity of user-generated content. In other words, separate editors are good for making big, complex piles of content such as new levels or mods (as in existing games that allow users to create new content). Editors that are built into dynamic gameplay (as in Sim City) tend to produce UGC that's much smaller in scope.
That's actually a Good Thing if a design goal is to get more users generating content. Keeping the content simple not only makes a UGC system accessible to more players, it helps constrain the size of the content to be automatically shared across a network.
Another key principle I'd suggest for a game that truly takes advantage of content creation, content sharing, and procedural generation would be that users should be able to easily edit the content created (or edited) by other players. Because it is always easier to edit than to create, allowing users to edit the content of others should make content modification even more accessible to more players than a game that promotes creating new content from scratch.
And if, as noted above, simple editing of content is actually defined to be the gameplay? In such a game, what one person creates would be only the starting point for content -- any content considered especially good or entertaining would spread virally among players, and would be improved continuously. For those gamers who enjoy keeping score, the number of times their creations or edits are instantiated could be used as the basis for rewards for playing. (This is similar not only to Second Life's model; it also resembles the "usage XP" that was a feature of the original Star Wars Galaxies.)
With an appropriate structure of rewards for creative action to promote participation, a game based on these two principles -- small edits as gameplay, and serial editing -- could be a pretty fascinating experiment in social play and evolutionary creativity.
Heck, it might even be fun to play. :)
Thanks for the comments.
I wonder if creating content though gameplay decisions necessarily generates content more granular than content created explicitly within an editor. While a typical editing tool certainly allows for manipulation of fine details, content generated through thousands of gameplay actions (as well as through the whims of the game itself) can create content at least as complex and heterogenous as handmade stuff. The key difference is that an editor allows a creator to build things exactly to specifications, whereas gameplay decisions can result in a final product utterly dissimilar to the creator's vision.
Obviously, many types of content will always need to be hand-built, and many/most games aren't suitable for the content-through-gameplay angle. Indeed, the latter will always be at least somewhat dependent on the former. I'm not advocating the replacement of one system with another. As you say, the key is to get more users generating content (and, just as importantly, using generated content). In games with a discrete editor, such as TES: Morrowind, the content creating and using community was just a small fraction of the total player base. In Spore, it's almost certainly a bigger percentage of the player base than in any other single player game.
You're right about the ability to edit gameplay-generated content. I argued the same thing in my "Stories from the Sandbox" article, although I think the best analogy (putting toppings on a pre-made pizza crust vs. making a pizza from scratch) was in one of my follow-up comments rather than the article itself. Let the computer do the grunt work to create something that is roughly the desired shape, and let the player put on the finishing touches.
You're also right about the value for incentives in encouraging participation in the system. In some cases, the variety (visual, gameplay) adds sufficient value to justify the system's existence, particularly if little or no effort is required from players to participate. However, positive feedback and a sense of ownership of created content can do nothing but help. I love how Spore tracks events involving your propagated species, though unfortunately the species carries with it no personal mark beyond its name and visual characteristics. I want my Black & White creature to poop on other players' villagers' houses like I've trained it to do, and then send me video reports! The gameplay incentives you describe are completely absent in Spore. What if your species could send you slaves or tribute from races it subjugates in other dimensions, or technology it acquires, resources and artifacts it discovers, or maps to regions it explores? What if your ships gained power, or you were paid a royalty, when other players adopted them? As is almost always the case, new ideas are probably best in new games that are built to accomodate them, so Spore's probably not the ideal example here. But you get my drift.
As you suggest, there are other ways to encourage content creation beyond having the game shoulder most of the burden of actual creation itself. The more ways, the better! Automated creation and delivery systems, easy-to-use editors, gameplay incentives...but that's expanding the discussion a bit beyond the original topic, which admittedly is itself a little bit broad. Up next, applications for distributed computing!