For years now I’ve been interested in games as tools for creative expression.  I like games where you don’t just develop a skill, you create something as you play.  Once you have created some bit of content, it’s possible to reuse and repurpose that content; to leverage it.  There is one obvious game to talk about, an elephant in the room, but I’d like to start with a simpler example.

Recently I’ve been playing a web-based game called Billy vs. Snakeman.  It’s a parody of various anime series, but it’s also a fun game in its own right, with some clever features.  In its most basic elements, BvS deals with developing your character over time.  You increase “your” stats and collect items; these stats and items allow you to pass challenges within the game.  The interesting point here is that you’re not just experience the game, you’re also creating a piece of content–your character.  That character exists within the database whether you’re logged in or not.

BvS has a feature called the Arena where you can “fight” other characters.  In truth, this isn’t really like a player vs. player (PvP) thing; whether you win or lose, you don’t affect the other character at all.  (There are more PvP-oriented aspects of BvS, if you’re into that.)  When you perform the “Fight in the Arena” action, a character is randomly chosen from the database to be your opponent.  That character and your character are compared to see how they perform against a random challenge; ties go to your character.  If you win, you get “Arena Reputation”, a currency that can be spent on certain items (items that can only be purchased with Arena Reputation).

The interesting thing here is that the second character is simply a piece of content that exists in the database.  The other player is not notified and is not affected in any way.  However, that player has spent time building up the character’s stats and items, as well as creating a customized name and possibly an avatar image to represent that character.  So each character is an interesting piece of content, and the characters are leveraged to create an interesting experience for this particular feature in the game.

Now for the more complex example–Spore.  Spore consists of five phases, but in terms of this post they each have the same game flow.  When you play Spore, you are creating something–a cell, a creature, a building, a spaceship.  Usually these bits of content have restrictions on them having to do with gameplay; for example, creatures need legs and feet to move around, so all created creatures have legs and feet (unless the player specifically tried for a pathologically strange one).  With that in mind, and the social and technical design of the “creator” subprograms, most of the content looks appropriate; that is to say, creatures look like creatures that can walk around, buildings look like dwellings where creatures could live and work.  (Whether the content is socially appropriate is another question entirely!)

Once content is created, it usually gets shared to the Spore servers (user settings can change this).  What this means is that your creature gets uploaded to the server, then it can be downloaded into someone else’s game.  Then when they wander their galaxy and explore alien worlds, they might find your creatures living on those worlds.  Similarly, when you wander your galaxy, you find it populated with creatures created by other players the world over.

As we can see by now, Spore was built around the idea of leveraging content created by users.  User-created content is shared to make other users’ games more interesting.  The content is used in a “faux-multiplayer” way.  You meet other users’ creations as if they were other players playing the same game that you’re playing.  They answer the challenges of the game in their own ways, and you get to see the result and compare it to your own strategy.

The faux-multiplayer idea has one big advantage–it’s easy to design.  You can take one user’s data and treat it as if it existed in another user’s game world.  You can have both sets of data following the same game rules.  This is fun because it can inject more interesting variety into the games; the assumption is that the process of play guides the players to create interesting content.  One pitfall is that players might arrive at the same answers to the game’s challenges, resulting in everyone’s data looking the same.  This is an issue worthy of its own post, but let me say that Magic: the Gathering has addressed this problem better than anything else I’ve seen.  Magic is solely a multiplayer game where each player plays with a customized deck of cards; there are well-nigh unlimited combinations of cards that would stand a chance of winning, each with their own strategies.  Therefore creating a deck is itself a piece of creative expression that gets pitted against an opponent.

Now that I’ve gone over the basics, I’d like to speculate about new directions.  The way I see it, content leveraging can be divided into two segments; you encourage users to create interesting content, then you adapt that content in such a way as to improve the experience for someone else.

At this point I’d like to talk about a couple of web-based games I’ve created.  First is Phantasma; in this game, players portray wizards inhabiting a magical castle.  The emphasis is on developing your stats through “research”, learning spells and creating enchanted items.  Next is Chaostorm, a more abstract sort of game focused on creating items with procedurally-generated “recipes”.  Players can ultimately create “Scopes”, which assist them in finding items they need, and “Battle Items”, which boost their stats for PvP-ish contests.  Of course, because I’ve created both these games, I have access to all the content for both of them.  In Phantasma is a location entitled the “Kipatsu Shop”, known for selling items from “other worlds”.  In this case, the shop sells items from Chaostorm!  Randomly selected Chaostorm items are used as templates to create Phantasma items with appropriate power levels and prices.  Chaostorm Scopes are sold in Phantasma as “Elemental Scrutinizers” that assist a wizard’s research into the magical discipline of Elementalism, and Chaostorm Battle Items are sold as “Elemental Projectors” that increase a wizard’s spellcasting ability in that same realm.  The name and description of the item are imported directly from Chaostorm (with “Elemental Scrutinizer/Projector” prepended to the item’s name).  In this way, the content from Chaostorm is used to create interesting new items for Phantasma, in a carefully controlled process.

Chaostorm is a game designed to encourage users to create interesting content.  However, even less “experimental” games can yield intriguing bits of content.  As we saw with BvS, a player character itself is the sum of the player’s choices, their answers to the game’s challenges.  A long-time player of BvS has created an elaborately customized piece of data that represents a personality within that world.  This would hold for all sorts of games classified as “RPGs”, whether multiplayer or not.  Other games yield different types of content; SimCity is an obvious example.  (Will Wright came up with the idea for SimCity while designing maps for the background of a helicopter game; he liked designing cities so much he made a game out of it.)  With SimCity the player is tasked with creating a city.  There are a slew of city-building games that imitate this design; Caesar, Cleopatra, Stronghold, et al..  However, strategy games such as StarCraft have city-building elements as well, even if they’d be more likely to call it base-building.  There are any number of space-trading games that feature customizing one’s starships.  Oblivion allows one to purchase dwellings and fill them with furniture, although there isn’t much in-game encouragement to customize your home exactly how you wish.  As I see it, there are two ingredients for interesting content creation; there must be restrictions to guide your users into creating content that makes sense, and there should be enough possibilities that not all content is identical.

The second part of the process is adapting the content for new purposes.  I believe this is the part where there are still great possibilities for advancement.  Once you have a city, for example, you can have the character walk through it–but that’s easy.  What if there was a game where the player bought a city in a bottle?  SimCity Societies allows the player to create cities that have different “stats”, such as Spirituality or Industry.  Perhaps the city in a bottle is an item–the character could wear it around their neck in the “necklace slot”.  And cities with high Spirituality would provide bonuses to MP or Magic stats, while cities with high Industry could increase Strength.  Or, you could have an item that represented another character–made into a voodoo doll, or maybe an item that provides a link to their strength.  And that would provide some customized bonuses depending on the other character’s stats.  The point is that there are many different types of content that games require, and many of them can be “filled” with data provided by other games.

(EDIT: I wrote a little more on this subject for Part 2 of this article.)