In Control

Game 1.0, said SCE Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison speaking at last year’s GDC, meant disconnected consoles, and Game 2.0 was defined by connected games with static content, while the current movement of Game 3.0 is all about social interactions, community, customisation, emergent entertainment, with the audience members at the centre of the entertainment experience. This is the trend that Sony is betting "will power the next decade of growth in our industry," says Harrison.

Web 2.0 represents the Internet’s equivalent to Game 3.0, with the emphasis being on facilitating creativity, collaboration and sharing, with consumers changing the ways in which the web is used and claiming their own virtual space.

Sites such as YouTube, which have built its success on providing a platform for user creativity to roam wild, also crucially recognize the inherent sociality of the web, in YouTube’s case allowing people to not only monitor how many others have seen their videos, but also facilitating communication, with users leaving feedback on videos and posting messages in a type of forum. None of these features are in themselves new to the internet, but the triumph of YouTube was to bring them all together to create a community, because the myth of the Web geek as a loner is gradually giving way to the acknowledgement that social interaction is at the heart of many of these Internet-based activities. The same is obviously true of social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook in that it is the users’ ability to reaffirm themselves socially and get together with people that share similar interests and cultural practices that ensures the enduring success of these formats. What matters is being part of a group, a member of a community, or even several interlinked communities.

For a long time this pigeonholing into communities based largely around media interests was ridiculed and scorned by many, with such fan culture labelled as being detached from reality, nerdy and just plain sad, with the so-called ‘trekkies’ epitomising that image.

Yet in fan studies academics such as Henry Jenkins have long proclaimed that fans are productive and creative. Indeed for decades media fans have been manipulating media in order to produce fan fiction, art, songs, videos, costumes and every other product imaginable, and this trend has only increased with time, as any internet search on fan communities will immediately show. Being a fan has always meant being more involved with your object of fandom, putting your stamp on it, discussing and using it as a starting point for relating to other fans with similar views.

What is happening with this embracing by media industries of what is termed ‘Communal Creativity’ is that these well-established practices are being very neatly absorbed into the mainstream, blurring the divide between fans, consumers and producers. The proactive consumer, or ‘prosumer’ is the model for which next generation’s media aims, while the ridiculed fan and the passive consumer are quietly laid to rest.

In games, it is natural that the first formats to follow the trend have been online games such as Second Life and The Sims Online, in which users not only have a chance to interact with countless others, but also create - and in SecondLife’s case, own – their own content. Everything seems plastic and malleable in these worlds, from an avatar’s appearance to everyday objects and even the buildings in which these projections live, work, socialise and entertain themselves. In SecondLife it is even possible to make money out of this creativity, as gamers are allowed to sell objects and buildings they design, and can exchange their virtual currency for US Dollars.

Console gaming began taking steps in this direction to facilitate interaction between gamers with features such as Xbox LIVE which allows gamers to not only play against each other, but text and video chat via their network. The PlayStation Network and Nintendo Mii Channel follow similar paths, yet most titles, even while allowing multiple endings and alternative goals still hold on to established formats and don’t allow players to modify the fabric of the game’s world. Sony’s announcement of Home for PS3, an avatar-based real-time virtual community expected to launch this year, acknowledges its inspiration from web 2.0 titles such as MySpace and YouTube that are driven by user-generated content.

LittleBigPlanet, a community-driven game being developed by recently formed company Media Molecule, represents the embodiment of Game 3.0 according to Harrison. The game is totally focused on user-created environments where gamers will be able to explore, move, modify and create just about anything in a game where the firm resolution to avoid scripting leads to seemingly endless possibilities. The developers of LittleBigPlanet seem to recognise the types of interface that gamers are most comfortable with, and created a very instinctive creative editing tool that at first glance seems very similar to an Ipod menu, but which allows the user to take the modifying and level building as far as they want. Most importantly, however, is the fact that gamers will be able to share their creations with others in the community via the PlayStation Network, with a very similar feedback and ratings system to that used on YouTube.

All evidence points to a powerful trend that is here to stay, and the gaming industry has evidently picked up on this. The new-generation consoles have huge amounts of unexplored power as well as networks that allow an unprecedented level of connectivity. What remains if for developers to make games that take full advantage of these features and allow gamers the right mixture of freedom and structure. ‘Sandbox games’ such as LittleBigPlanet might very well achieve this and its success will probably dictate the direction of games development in the near future. Once the game is released in September it will probably be possible to judge this better, but for the moment we can only wait.