Will Wright, the designer of so many of the greatest games of all time (Simcity, The Sims, etc.) has a new game concept that could potentially blow them all away.  But it's not just a game idea, it's also a philosophy on making games.  Let's talk about the former before talking about the latter.  The game idea sounds incredible.  In fact, I could imagine it being potentially the best game ever made (for people like me anyway) if it can live up to that potential. Given Will's track record that seems a definite possibility.

The game is called Spore. In Spore, you start out as basically being bacteria.  In an almost Pac-Man-like setting, your little bacteria has to run around and feed itself while avoiding predators.  As you feed yourself, you are rewarded by being able to reproduce and enhance yourself a bit further by designing new pieces for yourself.  Eventually, you are able to build entire bacteria cultures which in turn get more and more complex until pretty soon you've built an entire world of sentient beings. And pretty soon you're running that world and going out into space. It's a pretty amazing concept.

The second part is the part that I think is more important.  Will Wright has been around since the beginning and he's watched with some trepidation as the game industry has ballooned into requiring dozens of content producers in order to make a modern game.  Game budgets are starting to look a lot like the budgets for a major motion picture. This has had some serious negative side effects such as the loss of originality and creativity because the risks of doing something unproven are so much higher as well as driving away smaller players.  Game studios are increasingly looking more like game factories.

But with Spore, Will is trying to make a game in which the exciting content is created by the user.  The development team integrates the content creation into the game as part of the fun.  The user, in essence, is creating the content instead of teams of developers/artists.  Now, the articles I've read have made this sound revolutionary.  If it is Spore that gets the game industry to wake up and start realizing that content creation can and should be part of the game play when possible rather than purely something to throw hordes of overworked developers at then it is revolutionary.  But this concept has been the core of Stardock's business model since 1999.

Our last game, The Political Machine was one of the best selling PC strategy games of 2004. It was nominated for strategy game of the year by Computer Gaming World. Published by Ubi Soft.  In other words, a pretty major title release for last year.  However, we created the entire game with only 3 full time people on it in 6 months. That includes putting together the multiplayer features (including a game lobby) and developing a 3D engine.  We did not license any third party technology.  So how is this possible? It's possible because we made use of the content and tools that our existing non-game software creates such as DesktopX (www.desktopx.net). These tools and the content they create allowed us to focus purely on the underlying game mechanics while streamlining actual content. The player, in this example, does not create very much of the content so it's not very analogous.  But the tools we used to create the content are so advanced and powerful (far more so than any game project could justify) because they exist in the other market we develop software for -- the desktop customization market.

In the desktop customization market, developers such as ourselves create the software and then user communities create the content.  In short, our users are our partners.  One such product, WindowBlinds, has millions of users.  It allows users to change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  However, we don't actually create much of the content to change the Windows environment.  Instead, is relies on the content creation abilities of its user community.  That user community congregates on websites such as WinCustomize.com and Neowin.net where people create content for programs like it and share it with one another. These aren't obscure sites by the way, they receive millions of unique visitors each month.  Outside the game industry, the concept of empowering your user community to create and share content is well established.

In our next game, Galactic Civilizations II, much of the content will be created by the player themselves.  For example, one of the most popular features with beta testers is the ship design feature.  Instead of us designing, modeling, and then rendering hundreds of ships (at great cost to us) for players to choose from, we instead give players pieces of ships in almost every imaginable shape and size.  Players then put these pieces together -- creating their own unique ships. Just like with programs like WindowBlinds, empowering the user actually makes the program more appealing.

Similarly, the user interface is just a bunch of DesktopX objects (in .dxpack format even) allowing users to just go to the DesktopX website and start changing it completely.  By providing libraries on our websites, users can trade and use all kinds of things we never would have thought of.  In the end, we expect most of the content for the game that people are using in years to come to be created by the players themselves.  After all, who's better situated to know what the player wants? The player or some game designer?

In our upcoming, unannounced massively multiplayer RTS, we are able to greatly decrease the cost while at the same time trying to make the game much more appealing to players by putting much of the content creation in their hands.  When you're creating virtual worlds, giving the players the tools to design, skin, customize their world is a win-win for them and for us.  Instead of having to design, model, and texturize hundreds of buildings and units, we merely provide a handful of basic types and put the rest in the user's hands.  Another bonus - it keeps file sizes smaller.

The game industry should be looking at their customers as partners.  Given the direction we've seen in the past few years, that's going to require a lot of change.  Consider the out of control copy protection schemes.  If we can't get game companies to stop looking at gamers as potential thieves, we'll never get them to empower users to be their partner in game content creation.  But hopefully, as we're starting to see with the back-lash on copy protection and DRM schemes, there will be enough economic incentives to encourage gaming studios to start designing their games in such a way that the player generates and controls the content where possible.