The future of user-gen includes some noteworthy players, not the least of which is developer Media Molecule and LittleBigPlanet, which has become a hype machine for the PS3. But this piece of work looks like it just might live up to the hype. Already we've witnessed the flexibility of the level-creation system (At E3, Sony used LittleBigPlanet to great effect to present what would've been a boring slog through sales figures), and the community aspects attached to this title are just as promising.
But there is another user-gen game, one that we didn't know was user-gen-centric until a few months ago: the Rare-developed Xbox 360 title, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, a game whose hook is allowing users to create and share vehicles to traverse virtual landscapes. Is this Microsoft's mass market, user-gen answer to LittleBigPlanet?
"First of all, I think LittleBigPlanet looks fantastic and I’m looking forward to playing it," says Ken Lobb, creative director at Microsoft Game Studios and namesake of the awful automatic in Goldeneye 007 for N64. "But it’s a dramatically different game. The difference really is, in LittleBigPlanet, you’re designing levels, right? So you lay out the background. ... In Banjo, user-generated content, as opposed to being levels, is really building your move set. So you’re deciding how you’re going to play your platformer in Banjo Nuts and Bolts, whereas in LittleBigPlanet, you’re deciding the level that you’re going to traverse through. So I think both are going at the same challenge in a different way. Both sound really cool, but they are at the same time very different."
At the heart of user-generated content is the idea that you are empowering players, enabling them and fostering a sense of creativity, ownership and ingenuity. But when you hand over that power willingly, it creates the opportunity for gamers to "break" your game. This happens all the time, although typically, more motivated players don't bother asking a dev for that power; they just take it, and that manifests itself in glitches and exploits.
What Lobb wants to do with Banjo: Nuts and Bolts is hand over the sledgehammer and let the gamer into the proverbial China shop. In other words, go ahead, break the game.
"I think any time you’re going to allow the user to change the way that they’re being asked to do something, you’re opening up the risk for the user to 'break' your game--not necessarily crash it, but to figure out a solution that’s dramatically better than what you originally anticipated," says Lobb. "...Actually, that’s the design of the game. ... We kind of hope that players will take and make more creative solutions to a lot of the challenges that we, even with our thousands of hours of tests, haven’t been able to figure out."