Replay: The History of Video Games (56 page)

There were mods that would turn into full-blown commercial games.
[5]
One, the
Autumn Tower Defense
map created for the 2002 strategy game
WarCraft III
, even spawned a new genre – the tower defense game wh
ere players had to stop enemies crossing the map by building defensive towers with archers that shot them as they ran past. Internet games
Flash Element TD
and
Desktop Tower Defense
, both launched in 2007, honed the concept and popularised the genre.

Some mods even caused game companies major embarrassments. In 2003, Dutch hacker Patrick Wildenberg was playing around with ideas for modding the PC version of Rockstar Games’ 2004 crime game
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
when he discovered a hidden sex game. Rockstar had dropped the interactive sex scene from its game prior to its release, but the difficulty of removing it from the millions of lines of computer code that formed
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
, meant the company simply disabled that part of the game. Wildenberg created a mod called
Hot Coffee
that switched the half-finished sex game back on and released it onto the internet so players could try it.

The
Hot Coffee
mod appeared just as Rockstar was busy defending itself against claims that the
Grand Theft Auto
series had inspired a number of violent crimes in the US. Wildenberg’s mod poured petrol onto the political firestorm already raging around
Grand Theft Auto
. Democrat Senator Hilary Clinton demanded a Federal Trade Commission investigation and accused Rockstar of stealing children’s innocence. Rockstar’s initial claim that the sex game was nothing to do with them quickly fell apart as other hackers uncovered it in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game. For Rockstar the
Hot Coffee
mod was a disaster. It prompted the Australian authorities to ban
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
and Europe’s game age rating organisation to increase its age rating to adults only. In the US, Rockstar pulled the game from the shelves while it set about removing the sex scene entirely to try and calm down the outrage.

Despite the
Hot Coffee
incident, by the middle of the 2000s whole games were being designed around the idea of player content creation. British game designer Peter Molyneux’s 2005 game
The Movies
embraced the machinima movement to create a business simulation where players ran a movie studio but also got to create machinima films, using virtual actors and sets, that could then be uploaded them to the web.

To help deal with the expected rush of online content, Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios hired former press officer Sam van Tilburgh as a full-time community liaison officer who would vet the players’ films and manage relations with
The Movies
’ player community. “When you think of making movies, most players will want to create their favourite flick or even use stars they admire,” said van Tilburgh. “In the first few months of
The Movies
, the number of
Batman
,
James Bond
and
Star Wars
-titled movies was astronomical. We had to remove thousands of movies every week due to copyright infringement.”

Despite the rip offs,
The Movies
also spawned one of the highest-profile machinima movies created during the first decade of the 2000s:
The French Democracy
, a 13-minute film created by Paris resident Alex Chan.
The French Democracy
was Chan’s reaction to race riots that hit the French capital in November 2005. It told the story of a group of Parisians of African descent whose encounters with racism in their day-to-day lives reach boiling point when two black teenagers die while being chased by police. “It stood out because it made a point, it was a personal message about something that was relevant in the global world news coverage,” said van Tilburgh. “Alex was living in Paris and experiencing what was going on and what loads of people were only seeing through their television screens. It grabbed people’s imagination. For me that’s when video games enter the mainstream and can become art. When they convey a message that makes people discuss certain issues in their or other people’s lives.”

The integration of game and player creativity tools that
The Movies
sought to achieve would be taken further by Media Molecule, a UK game studio formed in 2006 by a group of former Lionhead staff. Media Molecule had formed off the back of co-founder Mark Healey’s
Rag Doll Kung Fu
, a crazed and amusing martial arts game featuring toy-like fighters controlled like puppets that Healey wrote in his spare time and released in 2005.
Rag Doll Kung Fu
was a surprise hit, but Media Molecule had a more ambitious title in mind for its debut: a game that let players make games. “Right from the start content creation was definitely one of the aspects for the game, but we didn’t really know how much it was going to be,” said Healey. “We had this slight internal struggle with ourselves. On one side it was ‘we just need to make a really good platform game and get people to make stuff as well’, on the other it was ‘this should be a totally full-on game creation kit kind of thing’.”

Sony Computer Entertainment solved the dilemma when Media Molecule went to its London offices to demo their prototype game. “We were slightly nervous about talking about the content creation too much and scaring them,” said Healey. “A part of us thought they might go for something that’s more traditional and safe, but Sony picked up on the content crion side of it. That was obviously a pivotal moment in realising this was an important part of what we were doing.”

Encouraged by Sony, Media Molecule created the PlayStation 3 title
LittleBigPlanet
, an incredibly powerful game creation tool capable of producing a wide variety of 2D games that hid its complexity beneath an inviting and unthreatening scrapbook visual aesthetic. “Designing the content creation aspect was a process of iteration,” said Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans. “We started with very, very crude tools and they were basically completely physical – there was a hair dryer to melt things, a paint roller on the end of a long stick. You literally had to run around to paint. We got quite far into the project before we realised that it was not fun enough. So we had to do several about-faces, several rewrites. The physical thing was too much, so we ended up swinging too far the other way and made this incredibly complicated system. That was about a year into the three years of development; we were a third of the way through. We had already thrown it away once and now we had to throw away this very complex system. There was this stamping system, where you stamp things down to fix them in place, and that was the only fun bit of creating at the time. From that we extended the idea of stamping stuff down to the whole create mode. Everything that you create is essentially a process of stamping stuff down, smearing out shapes or cutting.”

LittleBigPlanet
’s game creation system paved the way for a burst of player creativity rarely seen outside of the PC game scene. By the end of July 2009, eight months on from the game’s November 2008 debut, players had uploaded more than a million levels to
LittleBigPlanet
’s social networking-inspired portal where others could download and play their work. “It’s amazing, just totally amazing,” said Healey. “It’s far more prolific than I ever thought it would be. Probably the first thing I was really impressed with was the calculator thing. It’s obviously not a fun level to play or anything, but just knowing that some mad guy spent time to work out how to make a functioning calculator in the game. I was in awe of his OCD’ness. And then there were the guys who clubbed together to redo
Contra
, the old arcade game. It’s just unbelievable really.”

The social networking websites that inspired Media Molecule’s creation sharing system were also an important influence on Wright’s
Spore
, an evolution-themed game that took the player-as-creator concepts of
The Sims
to a whole new level.
Spore
put players in charge of the evolution of a lifeform from primordial zooplankton to space-travelling civilization. As well as evolutionary biology, Wright incorporated a library’s worth of scientific ideas, proven and unproven, into the game. From the visual style of electron microscope imagery and panspermia theory – the belief that life on earth began when comets brought organic matter from outer space – to the assumptions used in radio astronomer Frank Drake’s calculation that around 10,000 planets in our galaxy harbour intelligent life.

Wright hoped
Spore
would advance players’ undersding of evolution, although the model of the final game was closer to the concept of intelligent design that was being used in the US to challenge attempts to teach evolutionary theory in schools. “I really just wanted to convey the idea that creatures evolved incrementally over a long period of time in response to their environment. Whether it was through selection or directed evolution was really a tactical question,” said Wright. “It is kind of ironic that in some sense
Spore
is showing the intelligent design thing, which is not a theological or scientific philosophy but a political tactic. If you go around asking people, even religious conservative people, nobody believes in intelligent design as it’s stated; they believe in creationism, which is different.”

The core of
Spore
was its simple but powerful creature-creation tool that let players mould their lifeforms into new shapes and add or remove appendages such as antennae, jaws, tails and eyes. Once created, players could load their beasts onto
Sporepedia
, a
Flickr
and
Facebook
-influenced website that integrated with the game.
Sporepedia
not only let players share their creations, but also imported the lifeforms created by other players into the game, quietly populating each player’s world with the work of others.

“With
Spore
one of our fundamental things was how do we make the content creation curve flatter so that everyone is participating, so that when you play
Spore
, whether you intend to be a content creator or not, that automatically populates on the web so almost everybody becomes a content creator,” said Wright. “A big part of that was making the tools not just easy to use, but fun to use. With
The Sims
we were thinking about how to make the tools easy to use. That was ok, but with
Spore
we thought if we can make the tools fun to play then you get a lot more output.”
Spore
’s fusion of content creation and social networking meant much of what players saw and interacted with in the game was created by their fellow players.

Fittingly, given its subject matter,
Spore
’s embrace of player-generated content underlined just how much the video game medium had changed over the years. Having begun life as a medium defined wholly by developers, video games were rapidly evolving into one that turned consumers into artists. Games had become interactive not just in terms of the experience of playing, but interactive as a medium, subject to constant reshaping, modification and extension by those who used it.

[
1
]. Pattern 159, for example, argued that every room in a building should have natural light on at least two sides.

[
2
].
Alter Ego
was released in two separate editions: male and female. In keeping with the low proportion of female game players in the 1980s, the male version sold far better.

[
3
]. The idea of games that could record and playback the action had been knocking around for several years by 1996. It had even formed the basis for Disney Interactive’s 1992 PC flight sim
Stunt Island
, w
here players got to arrange props and cameras around the game world before taking to the skies to perform stunts that could be recorded and played back later.

[
4
]. Fragging is online gaming slang for killing rival players.

[
5
]. Canadian student
Minh Le and American student Jess Cliffe’s
Counter-Strike
mod for the first-person shooter
Half-Life
was probably the biggest of these. Created in 1999,
Counter-Strike
was an urban showdown between two teams of players – one playing terrorists, the other a counter-terrorist squad. It became a runaway success and by the early 2000s an estimated 1.7 million people were playing it online every month.