Jun 13, 01:57 AM

Gaming 2.0

The concept of Web 2.0 is the lastest thing on the internets lately. In short, it is pretty much about creating value through connecting people and having content created by the community, not a single company. Blogs, folksonomies, and wikis – its all the rage.

But as Bertrand Le Roy points out , this has been going on in the gaming community for years. What do you call the entire modding community? User-generated content! Mods, custom maps, clans – companies have nothing to do with them, they are bottom-up inititatives. Why spend all the time telling players what they like when instead they can tell you? Has anyone ever heard of that one mod… what was it called again? Oh yeah, Counter-Strike, that’s the one.

The biggest draw for many games today is not the actual game release itself, but the community that forms around that game and gives users a reason to keep coming back.

For the future, I think the main challenge for game companies to take advantage of this is facilitating this user-generated content. To make a mod, you have to have a relatively high level of knowledge about programming and graphics. Recent entertainment software to improve on this would be Second Life and Spore. But even with Second Life, the learning curve is still pretty high. Outside of a fairly constrained system like in Spore, I am interested to see what new strategies companies will use to promote user content.

The improvements should be in:
1. Minimized adoption costs (low learning curve)
2. Ease of use (convenient and not time-consuming)
3. Ease of sharing (distribution methods that make it easy for creators to share their creation and for others to access it)
4. Recognition (people should get credit for their creations – maybe introduce reward systems?)

-Jon
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