When it comes to the future of gaming there can be little doubt that it will be a socially engaging activity that blends fantasy and reality in unprecedented ways. One of these ways, however, will be the amount of development that will be in the hands of the fans themselves. Giving the users the tools they need to create their own content will change the very meaning of gameplay and what it means to be a gamer. This exciting, new approach to games stands poised to bring about a new era in gaming, but it also brings with it the potential of a veritable nightmare for developers, publishers, and content producers, alike.

Little Big Planet, an as yet unreleased Playstation 3 game, is a game that epitomizes user-generated content. Big Giant Games, the developer working on Little Big Planet, is promising that users will be able to interact and play in an environment that is completely open. The focus of the game will be on levels that are built and designed by players as they play them. By adding and manipulating objects in the game they will be able to shape the world in any way they can imagine. The game certainly has a lot of people excited as speculation abounds on the types of levels and gameplay concepts players will come up with, but that speculation sometimes tends to focus on the negative aspects of what such an open system could allow. All manner of offensive, objectionable material has been considered — and for good reason. Give a pair of unmoderated, idle hands some paint and an empty canvas and you might just get the next Mona Lisa — or, you might end up with subject matter too steamy for even a men’s room stall in a run-down truck stop. Give a few thousand pairs of hands the same tools and the ability to collaborate online and it’s easy to see where this can go. For every level steeped in brilliance, that sets the standard for the type of gameplay a game like Little Big Planet hopes to produce, you can bet there will be at least a dozen that are completely unacceptable by anyone. There are, however, deeper concerns than crude jokes passed between friends in a video game. Consider the repercussions of intellectual property theft.

There was a group of amateur game designers that were hard at work on a modification for the PC game Quake. They wanted to completely redesign the content of the game — maps, character models, weapons, sounds, and other effects — to resemble the world of Aliens Vs Predator. The idea was to create a whole new game that would pit players against each other in a battle between the Aliens, Predators, and humans of the popular movie franchises. There was only one problem: what they were doing was completely illegal under copyright law. While iD Software, the developer that produced Quake, allowed for users to modify their game, the Predator and Alien properties are each owned by 20th Century Fox. This group of amateur designers were not authorized to produce a modification for Quake based on such content and were quickly issued a cease and desist order. At the time, the case was so famous that, as subsequent modification projects were shut down, it became known as being “Foxed”. This same scenario has played out with other franchises and other games over the years and it’s really only a matter of time before it happens again. As tools become more accessible and developers continue making games that encourage user-generated content, industrious enthusiasts will take every opportunity to recreate their favorite worlds and scenarios in such games. Imagine if someone were to recreate World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., content owned by Nintendo, in a game like Little Big Planet, a game set for release on Sony’s Playstation 3. With a channel of distribution as wide and free as the Internet, such a level could easily spread to thousands of Playstation 3s as gamers download it on demand. The question is whether the rightful owner of such content, Nintendo, would demand the content pulled and if it would have any legal right to do so. As this new frontier in gaming emerges, these are questions that may soon be answered.

Thankfully, the future is not yet determined; wonderful possibilities do abound just around the corner. Just as in the past, for every copyright infringing modification that will be destroyed by a team of rabid lawyers, a handful will be produced that actually revive and prolong the lifespan of the original games they modify. Half-Life, a PC game released by Valve in 1998, is an excellent example. As the game grew in popularity more and more amateur developers looked to take advantage of the game engine’s capabilities for their own modifications. One such modification was a team-based combat game that featured terrorist/counter-terrorist squads that were pitted against each other. The game’s focus on realism and tight, close-quarters combat was seen as “refreshing” in contrast to the largely cartoonish “deathmatch” style gameplay championed by games like Doom and Quake. Because the modification was freely available, all you had to do to experience it for yourself was get your own copy of Half-Life. This single fact boosted sales of the award-winning game long after the initial buzz was over. In fact, the game became so popular that Valve sought to purchase the rights to the modification and turn it in a stand-alone, retail product. The game has gone through several iterations since then but is still widely played to this day. Indeed, Valve owes much of its success to the idea that embracing your fans creative desires and giving them the tools they need to create such modifications is a good idea.

Like Valve and many other savvy game developers, Big Giant Games knows the power of user-generated content. Whatever the risk may be, Big Giant Games thinks it’s worth taking such risks if it means getting back vibrant, new ways to play their games. If this new level of emergent gameplay is, indeed, the future of games, then gamers and developers stand to gain a lot more than they could possibly lose due to objectionable material or litigation. Perhaps Little Big Planet won’t be the industry shaking game it hopes to be, but as more games attempt to blur the line between gamer and developer, the future of gaming looks to be very exciting.