This month’s guest blogger is Alan Au, a game industry freelancer, academic, and advocate. Having grown up in an era of interactive entertainment, he is now exploring the connection between games, technology, and society. More importantly, he’s having a good time doing it.

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Welcome to the age of participatory culture. With increased access to technological resources, people are discovering that they can create as well as consume. Of course, this is nothing new. However, the difference is that people now have unprecedented access to development tools and content creation utilities. Scenarios and tweaks are increasingly giving way to mods and total conversions, and the boundary between hobbyist development and commercial development is becoming harder to define.

In some ways, this is a throwback to the past and the era of the designer/developer. In the early days, one or two people could sit down and bang out a game for the personal computers that were just beginning to hit the market. Game companies were groups of two or three people who might gather together in a garage. The successful ones might even ship out floppy disks by mail along with a hastily photocopied instruction booklet. Of course, the technological landscape has changed dramatically since then. Those cheeky little ASCII-based dungeon crawls have transformed into full-blown multimedia spectacles complete with complex 3D models, painstakingly detailed textures, fully landscaped environments, dazzling particle effects, full symphony soundtracks, and real-time internet multiplayer. In short, the bar has been raised.

Advancement has actually occurred along two separate tracks: technology and content. The technological advances of the mid-1990s were astounding, and it’s no wonder that technical development outpaced content development early on. CD-ROM storage and cheap memory meant that developers were no longer limited to text and images. Multimedia had arrived, and games were there to take advantage of it. Sure, the early attempts were still fairly crude, but full-motion video and CD-audio paved the way for “talkies” with high-production value cut-scenes and narrative. Graphics also made a dramatic leap forward with the introduction of 3D graphics hardware for the consumer market. Again, game developers rushed to take advantage of the new technology. As expected, early 3D games were still rather primitive, but it was only a matter of time before the hardware, and developer expertise using that hardware, evolved to the point where reasonably detailed 3D models could be rendered in real-time. The creation of standardized tools, data formats, and application programming interfaces also helped to ease the burden of technical mastery. The technological bar is still high, but it’s once again within reach of the hobbyist developer.

Of course, the technical aspects of game development only make up part of the equation. The other part, content, has traditionally taken a back seat to the technology. After all, it’s much sexier to advertise a screenshot or a cinematic than it is to promote a storyline or a level layout. As a result, tools and interfaces for content development have also lagged behind their technology-driven counterparts, but the gap is slowly narrowing. Early modding was often just a fancy way of hacking into proprietary data files to swap out a texture or text string. The standardization of data formats helped to make advanced content, like 3D models, more accessible. However, in most cases, there was still the matter of fooling the commercial game engine into loading the custom content. This is all changing now, as developers are making purposive efforts to facilitate the process of altering and adding custom game content. Companies are releasing content generation tools, like level editors and file specifications, for the express purpose of aiding in the process of content creation. Some games even include mechanisms for incorporating custom content via in-game menu options. Developers are actively encouraging people to create and add custom content to their games, and so it’s no wonder that it’s becoming more difficult to differentiate between consumers and developers.

Both the technical and content aspects of game development have undergone a tremendous amount of growth in recent years. While this has led to the development of high quality games, it has also raised the bar for aspiring game developers who must first overcome the technical challenges of content creation. The good news is that game companies are increasingly embracing user-created content and making development tools accessible. Consider that consumer content has provided inspiration for commercial development of features and interfaces. In some cases, entire commercial games, like Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2, were originally conceived as mods of existing games. In other cases, like Second Life, user-created content actually forms a core part of the game experience. In this era of participatory culture, many consumers actively want to create content, and now they increasingly have the tools to do it.

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Want to be a guest blogger in my army of free content providers? Just send me a message at troy DOT goodfellow AT gmail.com.