Use Case VI

gaming as a creative process

Areae - MMORG meets Web 2.0 - for The Guardian's gamesblog:

[g]ames have a lot to learn from the way the Web works today, from almost every angle. Some of those lessons are the same ones that other content industries are learning rather painfully: about new distribution models, digital delivery, the value of free content, DRM, and so on... and others are about things like different development practices, "launch early, launch often," rapid feedback cycles listening to users, that sort of thing

In this post, one of The Guardian's games journalist interviews the renowned games designer Raph Coster, about his recently announced MMORG-meets Web2.0 game Areae. Coster points out that game design has not advanced much in the last decade, in terms of the interactivity it allows users (the meta-interaction ,that is): games are continually designed as closed gardens: proprietory clients with no interoperability; whereas the whole growth in online activity is premised on the exact opposite - openness, interoperability, client agnosticism. He also notes:

Practically everyone is a gamer -- it's really a question of what games they feel comfortable playing, be it bridge or Battlefield 2142.

secondly, we have:

Engagement Marketing: An Interview - from Henry Jenkins' weblog

Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.

The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

in this interview, the noted gaming/ cultural theorist Henry Jenkins talks with Alan Moore, a proponent of what Moore calls 'engagement marketing':

Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.

Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

The overlap between these two articles should be obvious, and is certainly fortunate. I'll add another link, this time to Raph Koster's blog, and a post he made titled User Created Content, where he writes:

The lesson here is that everyone is a creator. The question is “of what.” Everyone has a sphere where they feel comfortable exerting agency — maybe it’s their work, maybe it’s raising their children, maybe it’s collecting stamps. Outside of that sphere, most people are creators only within carefully limited circumstances; most people cannot draw, but anyone can color inside lines, or trace. ... We must not forget that casual users aren’t stupid users, they’re just not adept at, or willing to invest in, that that particular system. They are likely heavily invested in creativity in some other aspect of their lives.

And whilst I'm here (although I feel as though I should save this link for a post all of its own - I may well post about it separately later), a list the business case for user created content, from Xbox Live planner David Edery: User-Generated Content - the List.

The takeaway here, is twofold: firstly, one of the major, if not the prime, use-cases for game design has to be user-created content, or user creativity. The second is that any prospective game platform that doesn't take this as its starting point has already failed, before it was even born.