Opinion
Collaborating With The Community
Developers who let users tinker with their IP will not only enrich their products, suggests Thom Dinsdale, but also grow their audience.
The story is the same in any line of business. We hear about target markets, demographics, purchase funnels and a whole other host of ideas - designed to condescend individuals and reduce them to little more than input data in financial algorithms.
The truth, however, is fundamentally and demonstrably different. Consumers, ironically, are loaded with the means and the will to innovate. A recent MIT paper found that in the UK over £2.3bn and 179,000 person-years were invested annually by 3m consumers in developing products for and by themselves. This is over twice the R&D expenditure of the entire private sector. Let's be clear, we're talking about everything from modifying a dog bowl to repogramming a sat-nav from the ground up here, but it demonstrates a remarkable will to innovate.
What does this have to do with games? Well this is an industry created by people doing precisely what the lady who modified her dog bowl did - took found items in their environment and repurposed them. Admittedly, the MIT staff members who created SpaceWar! and the bedroom coders who laid the foundations of the industry we recognise were taking a more explorative approach. The point is that there has always been a unique and intimate relationship between the professional and amateur sides of videogame production. This puts games in an exciting position: to take advantage of this reasonably new understanding of consumers as creative agents - where it hasn't already.
It's even possible to suggest that gamers are more predisposed to this kind of creative brand interaction. The same MIT paper cites a 2006 study which found that 23 per cent of The Sims players were active in creating new items for the game.
Big changes in marketing tend to come in the form of revelations. About three years ago, with the advent of social media, business had to come to the realisation that for good or ill, consumers would share information about their brands en masse. It was impossible to change that so brands may as well make the most of it. I think we're approaching a similar revelation - that business will need to get comfortable with the idea that it cannot control IP, that it cannot stop people messing with and sharing what they create, and trying to do so will only damage your relationship with them. The barriers to production and distribution that once separated enterprise from the public aren't relevant anymore. It's almost ridiculous to presume you can inject your product or IP into popular culture and expect people to leave it be.
The big question, then, is how companies should manage this phenomenon in a way that still protects their interests. Two projects stand out in my mind as examples of best practice.
Three words: Play, Create, Share. The mantra that LittleBigPlanet was launched upon surmised in almost poetic elegance how Media Molecule and eventually Sony understood the relationship with its consumers. In many ways LittleBigPlanet was a game created precisely to explore this idea of consumer creativity as a market force. It also makes a great effort to moot the idea of consumption as the most important part of relationship: after all, creating and sharing are two thirds of the equation. The story got even more interesting when gamers wanted to bring other ideas, external to the gaming world, into LittleBigPlanet.
Brands cried out, wanting to know why their IP was popping up in this silly, flock-covered game. This was the old and new world jarring. When you create a playground, and you let your customers be creative, then invariably they with bring other ideas and IP to play with. Media Molecule's solution was a form of licensing that allowed them to bring other IP into the game officially through add-ons. It served as an appropriate halfway house and ongoing revenue stream for the company.
What it requires is a more relaxed approach to IP. This is of course easier said than done and no one, I would argue, does it better than Valve. By going beyond simply allowing Garry's Mod to exist but also selling it via Steam (and so sanctioning it) Valve has demonstrated an understanding that it cannot control what the community will do with its product. Some of the Gmod creations on YouTube would put your average brand manager into cardiac arrest. But what makes Valve remarkable is it they has systematically used the creativity of its community to generate value for their business: new talented staff, new great IP and a stronger overall bond with customers. The success of Portal and the recently announced Dota 2 are proof of that.
The difference between a modder and an employee is clear cut. There is, however, a void between the two terms that companies and consumers will need to get used to. How should a business relate to someone who is generating value through their labour and ideas but isn't on the payroll? Dota 2 has highlighted this dilemma perfectly, as many members of the mod community have questioned Valve's right to trademark and profit from a franchise that was born directly from the community, even if development is lead by one of its prominent members. No organisation wants to be seen as exploiting the community it relies on and so will need to ensure that mutual trust is at the heart of this relationship.
The question of how to remunerate the community gets even more tricky when we look at why people mod in the first instance. We can put all motivations into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivations are derived from the very experience of doing something. For the love of it. This is where most modders fall. Extrinsic motivations are all the external incentives, pressures and nudges we find in the professional world.
Research shows that, particularly for creative jobs, suddenly introducing extrinsic motivations, such as a salary, to someone who has previously relied on intrinsic motivations makes them less driven and actually worse at that task. Naturally, when you turn a hobby into a job it often stops being fun. For more information on this please read the excellent Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn.
Whether for massmarket family titles like LittleBigPlanet or niche genre pieces like Dota 2, developers will increasingly need to wrestle with the question of how they use the creativity of their community and allow fans to take the leap from passive consumer to an essential part of the creative process. Those that can do this well, while navigating the resulting legal and PR minefields, only stand to deepen the relationship they share with their most valuable customers.