Fun by Design

Greg Mueller is an associate editor at GameSpot. He's created several maps for Far Cry Instincts, but none good enough to share online. Send him tips at gregm@gamespot.com.

If you're dismayed by the amount of litigation and politicking that seems to surround the game industry these days, you're not alone. A multibillion dollar industry is serious business, even if its product is meant to simply be fun, unfettered by the concerns of real life. In a perfect world, games and money would be as separate as church and state in France. Maybe then, Majesco would have put just as much marketing muscle behind Double Fine's offbeat masterpiece Psychonauts as it invested in Advent Rising, which was thought to be the surer moneymaker. Maybe then, the company wouldn't be the subject of the latest class-action lawsuit, either.

But this isn't a perfect world, and games and money are inextricably linked. It's the price we pay for paying the price for games...err, what I mean to say is that games have become big business because we keep buying them. Would the industry necessarily be better off if game developers were insulated from the financial burdens faced by game publishers, distributors, and hardware manufacturers? Better yet, what if publishers were removed from the equation entirely, allowing developers to create, promote, and distribute games on their own without having to worry about turning a profit? If everyone had the resources to create and distribute games, games probably wouldn't get better. In fact, we'd probably see many more bad games than we do now. But at least we'd probably see plenty of different games.

To an extent, average gamers already have plenty of fairly cheap resources available that will let them at least take a more-active role in shaping their experience with existing games, if not create entirely new ones. I picked up Far Cry Instincts as soon as it came out, and I've since put a good 10 or 12 hours into the game, although it seems like several of those hours were spent watching that damned intro movie before I realized that I had to set my Xbox clock. But actually, all my time with that game has been spent tinkering with the map editor. I've only played the single-player game for about five minutes. There's something oddly entertaining about coming up with a crazy idea or theme and building your own miniature world around it. My first map was utter garbage, but I had fun with it. Basically, I created a 1,000-foot-high pillar of land surrounded by water, and then tossed some spawn points and hang gliders up at the top. Sure it was fun for about five minutes, but it didn't work at all for multiplayer battles. So I scrapped it and gave up for awhile until I saw my cousin, who is much more patient and creatively inclined than I am, create a fun, cohesive map that was also fairly well balanced. That encouraged me to keep trying my hand at creating maps, and although everything I've made is a bit too experimental for its own good, I still have a lot of fun with the whole process.

Apparently, quite a few other people are having fun with the process too, because you can check online to see people sharing their maps. And if you visit the Far Cry Instincts message board on GameFAQs, you'll see a lot of people talking about their new map idea or sharing tips about how to get the most out of the editing tools. The fact that you can share all your creations on Xbox Live makes the whole experience that much more rewarding...but, really, it's all about playing God and being creative.

Far Cry is the only recent console game to let you create your own content, and it isn't even the first to let you share that content online. Custom content on consoles is nothing new, and it's been a way of life for years on the PC. Look at the RPG Maker series, which recently got its third and most in-depth installment on consoles. I "played" the first RPG Maker game, and it was way too involved for my tastes. But I still find the idea of creating your own RPG to be appealing in some way, and I can only imagine the kind of crazy stuff we'd see if those user-created games could be shared online with the general console-playing audience. If the concept of sharing custom content did take off, we would definitely need some kind of simple user-rating system to help us cut through all the half-assed content to get to the good stuff.

Then again, even the bad stuff could even be interesting if it were free and not too time-consuming to download and try out. It might be interesting to see a fan-made Final Fantasy where Aeris beats the hell out of Sephiroth and settles down with Master Chief and Tommy Vercetti on a chocobo farm. The subsequent copyright lawsuits alone would give forum users plenty to post about. Actually, people have created entire games based around forum communities with the PC versions of RPG Maker. Imagine if you could go on Xbox Live and download a full-length role-playing adventure about our own System Wars forum. Actually, don't imagine that. It's too frightening. But still, the idea of putting creative control in the hands of the players is an interesting one, even if the results can be truly bizarre and depraved.

Speaking of depravity, the idea of shared custom content on consoles doesn't have to be limited to role-playing games or shooters. Imagine a version of Grand Theft Auto where you could create your own neighborhood or town, then put it online and link it up with other user-created places and play across one giant combination built from different visions of what a game world should be. The result could be disastrous, with entire cities filled with the AmmuNation stores from the GTA series, Pole Position clubs, and insane jumps, but it would still be an interesting experiment.

The opportunity is there for the next generation of consoles to take user-created content to all-new levels. We've seen this on the PC for a long time now--it's a standard practice for every shooter, RPG, and strategy game on the PC to come with some sort of editing tools these days. If you took that type of open-ended potential to the more-accessible realm of console gaming, where creating a new world is as easy as picking up a controller, it could really give players a sense of ownership with their favorite games. Then again, we might all be too lazy to really make the best of such features.

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