When we use the term ‘play, create and share’ to describe how gaming has changed over the years, do we mean the past or the future?

Are we talking about its return: the transformation from retail boxes and linear levels into a dynamic online experience? Or its demise: the death of magazine code-sheets and BASIC before propriety software’s takeover?

Anyone who toyed with Logo, a BBC Micro or an Acorn Archimedes will know that creative gaming is nothing new, just as sharing your own content is as familiar to the internet as to a 1980s playground. Infinitely bigger, of course, and without doubt just as exciting.

In a sense, gaming has come full circle, reinventing its old freedoms as ‘user-generated content’. Whether it’s LittleBigPlanet, virtual thingamajigs such as Whirled and Metaplace  (we’ll explain shortly), or rapidly evolving toolsets and portals such as Game Maker, the old impulse to develop is being put right back where it began: in the hands of the consumer.

Why now, though, after so many years of hardcoded play? What’s brought an end to the dark ages? Why are we talking about Microsoft’s XNA and its latest democratising venture, Boku, just as Sony places its fortunes in LittleBigPlanet? Why the sudden urge to become the YouTube of the gaming world? And who, come to think of it, invited Apple anyway?

“It’s a new generation of publishers,” says Sandy Duncan, CEO of the rapidly blooming UK start-up YoYo Games. “Most publishers are a funnel, right? They restrict the flow of content, and quite rightfully so because the market isn’t ready for it. Retail can only have so many boxes on the shelf, whether it’s the publisher restricting the content, the retailer or the platform stakeholder. Microsoft don’t want to have ten football games on Xbox at the same time, though that’s more about flooding the retail channel than anything else. The appetite for games is actually larger than you’ve ever seen, but it’s constrained.”

Duncan should know. During a15-year tenure at Microsoft he established and ran the Xbox business for Europe, where already he could see the writing pretty much on the wall. YoYo, which he co-founded in 2007, became the exclusive distributor of Mark Overmars’ Game Maker for PC, and now serves more than 27,000 games made by visitors to its website.

“If you’re printing games on DVD then there are massive limits on publishing,” he adds. “So it used to be that Michael Jackson’s new album came out and, goddamn it, you just couldn’t get any capacity at the CD pressing company. That situation happens because none of the platform holders own the companies that dupe the discs. So there are all sorts of natural limits to that process.”