The best compliment I can pay anyone is this: "I wish I'd done that." Everything else falters slightly, maybe only very slightly, under the most unforgiving scrutiny known to sentient life. And if it's not perfect, I reflexively start thinking how I'd do it differently, in the same way I reflexively breathe. Judge my judgmental nature all you want, but in all likelihood you're pretty similar. What is different, as far as gaming goes, is that we have specific outlets for our opinions. We can actually take an existing game and do things differently, change it, make it better. Better even than the original game, if we're right.
In the last four years, developers have hit on two cheap and easy value-added modes to make up for the measly 6-8 hour games they shoot out. First and foremost is Infinite Mode, a.k.a. online multiplayer. Second and growing is user generated content. Here, developers give you the keys to the kingdom and let you make your own fun. Build an avatar, build a level, populate it, play it. That's two slices of chocolate-covered Awesome right there for anyone wanting to enter the amazing field of professional game design... a free starter kit comes with your game! Not only are level editors rapidly becoming standard elements, equally mandatory is the ability to show off your design chops by uploading your work so friends and fellow gamers can run it.
Nintendo DS games like Skate It (which cleverly made mod elements into unlockables) and Scribblenauts put those features on a tiny DS cart. Braid and N+ represent over on Xbox Live Arcade, to name just two, and A-list releases are increasingly following suit. This brand of crowdsourcing is a hallmark of The Sims, Second Life, Spore, Mod Nation Racers, Far Cry 2 and LittleBigPlanet, which alone clocks over a million user-made levels barely a year after its release. Hey, when a throwaway like LEGO Indiana Jones 2 encourages players to make and share content, you know this is a big thing.
Problem is, it's getting way the hell out of hand. It used to be fandom run gloriously amuck. Now it's a business model that takes advantage of that fandom.
A wily developer doesn't have to waste time and money coming up with new maps, new puzzles, new skins, new challenges. There's an army of player-designers eager to step up and do it for them. For free. That's an amazing thing, a laudable thing, that kind of enthusiasm and passion and ability put into action. Sure, most lack a certain polish and many compare unfavorably to used cat litter, but if just one percent of those LittleBigPlanet mods genuinely kick ass, that's an additional ten thousand levels for a game that shipped with only fifty or sixty. All without developer Media Molecule or publisher Sony lifting a finger... and without them paying those inventive, creative fans anything more substantial than the million-mod brag.
Imagine trying to pull that crap on the designers who worked on the retail release.
This is the age of user generated content. Blogs, vlogs, message boards, Flickr, YouTube, you name it. Everyone is a creator. But lest we forget, we don't own the games we buy. You can rip Batman: Arkham Asylum all you want, hack the code, build up a new prison wing housing the Penguin, Clayface, Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, and anybody else you like, but you don't own those characters. DC Comics does. You're playing with someone else's toys. At the end of the day, you don't get to keep their toys. You don't even get to keep the ideas you had while playing with them.
The mere act of buying and playing a game (or using any of its features) means you've implicitly agreed to the terms in its end user license agreement. Among those terms is their absolute right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, broadcast, license, perform, post, sell, translate, create derivative works from and distribute any user-made content for any purpose whatsoever without compensation, in perpetuity and throughout the universe which, yes, is indeed a legal term. Put simply, unless you skip out to the next universe over, they totally own your creative work. They can make bank on your sweat or delete it out of existence, as a few LittleBigPlanet users have discovered. Thanks for all your effort, kids.
This is crazy brilliant. This one feature encourages people to buy games in two distinct ways: Consumers feel they can exercise their creative muscles, and they'll get a metric ton of free content for their game buying dollar. Maybe that rate of exchange is fair enough for some people. You make one level, download twenty or a hundred others. Then you have the communities that form around fan modding, adding a certain value that goes far beyond any kind of monetary compensation.
And it has to be said, as far as I'm aware, only one company so far has actually packaged and sold a fan mod for serious profit. That would be Counter-Strike. A couple of guys named Minh Le and Jess Cliffe hacked the Half-Life code and made one of the most popular multiplayer shooters in the world out of it. Valve, the developer behind Half-Life, could've stomped it out. Instead, they hired Le and Cliffe, put Counter-Strike on shelves, and everybody got slightly rich.
Are you the next Jess Cliffe? There's a grand tradition of code monkeys homebrewing away on their computers for the sheer fun of it. Possibly they have Le and Cliffe in the back of their minds, but I doubt it. They do it because they love it, without any real expectations past sharing it with an appreciative audience and five minutes of adulation. Some developers have always encouraged this back-alley movement, too. Bungie released the Forge and Anvil editors for their Mac shooter Marathon Infinity twelve years before everybody went ga-ga over Halo 3's Forge editor, and that was back in the days when every game engine was a unique little snowflake. Not the case anymore. More games run on licensed engines than proprietary ones nowadays, and homogenization of code has opened the door wide for anyone with some programming skill.
I can't help thinking that's a purer form of the exercise, simply because it often cuts the developer/publisher out of the equation. It's entirely a fan endeavor. Fan mods are hosted on fan sites, and freedom of expression is total. Which is good, because Sony lawyers would instantly zap most of it right off their boards.
ASCII cake still = lie. So you find pearls of nerdcore genius like indie developer Joe "Cymon" Larson's ASCIIpOrtal, a full version of Portal made in ASCII graphics... for which you can mod your own text-based levels. You get the SOL Group spending six years on a genuine Arwing-flying Star Fox sequel, complete with co-op and online multiplayer matches, to take the place of the criminally unreleased Star Fox 2 (and erasing the taste of the pseudo sequels we got instead). Here's hoping they don't find out what "SOL" really stands for when Nintendo gets wind of Shadows of Lylat and rapid-fires injunctions at them. A smart Nintendo exec would take a page from Valve, buying and distributing Shadows for the Wii and putting the SOL crew on the payroll.
Then there are the clinically insane modders posting new maps and campaigns for Left 4 Dead on the PC. My personal favorites turn common infected into Teletubbies and set a level in Princess Peach's castle from Super Mario 64, because a zombie apocalypse is exactly what the Mushroom Kingdom needs. Except now we're getting rumblings from Valve about taking that PC fan-made goodness and porting it to Xbox Live. I'm all for sharing the love, but first they'll filter out content exactly like my two favorites, and then they'll charge gamers for what's left. We are talking XBLA, after all. Ah, but this is Valve, so they're also talking about cutting the mod designers in on the action.
That's where user generated content needs to go.
Friend, if you produce something of value and somebody's financially benefiting from it, you have every right to financially benefit from it as well. Maybe that's my mercenary heart talking, but I believe a strong effort ending in quality results should be rewarded, period. And yet, when Blizzard announced plans to let StarCraft II modders charge money for their created content, a big chunk of the internet took umbrage, as it always does. The communities will become competitive and break down! Shared techniques will give way to jealously guarded secrecy!
Spare me. For one thing, charging for content will be optional, not mandatory. A few mentor-types will always gladly pass on their knowledge because that's what they do. And if some design tricks aren't as widely distributed, it forces people to come up with their own tricks. Variety is always fine by me. The better questions, and most of the protests, are about the practical details.
Understand, these are two different models. Valve isn't offering an opt-in/out choice as yet, and it's unclear whether they intend to port all the user-generated Left 4 Dead levels or cherry pick mods for XBLA release. Certainly, that's a tighter and cleaner, if less populist, approach than Blizzard's wild west "leave everything up to the users!" plan, which is less a plan than an invitation to a hanging. Unless there are a few stamped-in-stone guidelines and at least some oversight, nothing about StarCraft II's Battle.net 2.0 is going to make sense. Prices won't be consistent, good content won't get noticed through the chaff, nobody will know what to charge, what to buy, or what to do.
Then there's that little money issue. Considering the developers and publishers hold all the cards, I can see how negotiating percentages in good faith might seem a little dicey. On the other hand, thanks to the end user license agreement, they technically don't have to kick anything your way. That they want to is, at the very least, promising. Again, if they're smart, they'll make the deal slightly more than fair to encourage more modders to work harder on their game, as opposed to a different game that offers more favorable rates. Could a pricing war break out over this? One can dream.
Frankly, I'd institute a system where a modder must submit their content to the for-pay program, agreeing to certain guidelines and financial terms up front. Forget any ideas you had about case-by-case negotiation; not gonna happen. I'd standardize retail pricing based on the amount and type of content, and pay out a decent percentage based on sales. If the mod's especially large and/or especially good (some of those Left 4 Dead modders are producing the equivalent of an entire L4D game), I'd allow for notching up the contract to something more formal, including marketing and submission to review sites. But above all, I'd make sure the modder got full credit for their work, by name, and I'd give them access to all the download numbers. Not just for transparency, but so they can link it when they decide to send in their CV to Activision or EA or Ubisoft, and point right to the $50K in revenue their mod generated.
Honestly, if you're okay building a quickie level for your beloved game and donating it to the community, go to it and good luck. But those easy-to-use GUI interfaces have opened up the modding floodgates like nothing else before - I haven't even touched on Xbox Live's Kodu Game Lab, a build-a-game XNA primer you can get for five bucks -
and they're generating soft revenue right now. That's about to make the switch to hard cash. When that happens, who gets paid how much becomes a very serious question. It's good at least two companies are thinking about real answers, but more need to join the conversation. If the big companies simply decide to press their ownership "rights" and screw the very gamers supporting them, I guarantee gamers will screw them right back with a major dose of non-participation.
And where's the fun in that?
