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[Omar Ismail]

I know there are a lot of game developers, and aspiring game developers on the site, so I figure it would be cool to have discussions about specific game design issues.

I had difficulty coming up with a title for this thread, but essentially the issue I want to talk about is how to deal with user generated content from a single player perspective. I.e. if you have a game where you make movies and the better the movie the more points you get. Or music composition, the better the song, the better you do. Etc. Or having to make a movie that is "sad". Or having to draw a picture that is "abstract".

The problem with this form of gameplay is that it's almost impossible for a computer algorithm to "judge" a creative work. Therefore there's no way to use the creation of creative works to be used for game progression.

Right now I'd say that Forza 2 has come the closest to merging creative content and game progression. The auction house lets people make their works and then auction them off for in-game credits where they can purchase newer and better cars. But it's still not the CORE part of the game.

My suggestion is a variant of the Forza system. Essentially we have to acknowledge the fact that computers can never judge creative works. However, humans are exceedingly good at this. So let people do it!

Let people judge the creative works. But make it work within a system so people have incentives to both submit content AND judge. The way I see that being accomplished is that if you want your work to be judged, you first (or simultaneously) have to judge somebody else's work. Also make it so that you're not REQUIRED to have your work judge before progressing through the game.

So let's say we take a game where you're making movies. The studio wants you to make an action film, a drama, and a comedy. You could make the action film, submit it for judging (judging someone else's film in the process), and while you're waiting for the one you submitted to be judged, you can go and start making the drama. Once somebody judges the action you get your money based on how they liked it and can make even better movies.

 

[urk]

Youtube: THE GAME

 

[Campster]

It depends on the game, really, and the sort of metrics that you're judging things by. Sure, it's not really possible to design an algorithm that can judge a movie the way a human can - and even if it did, tastes are so different and interests so varied it will still seem random.

But if you tell the player that the game is interested in certain aspects of you work, you can usually come up with a pretty good algorithm. Pokemon Snap, Dead Rising, and other games that ask you to take pictures of the gamespace teach you a lot about how to properly frame photographs. It wouldn't be hard at all to come up with similar algorithms for determining how editing impacts the pacing of a film, or how cinematography can elicit certain reactions.

We're a long way off from a single-player game that lets you create a movie and have an AI judge it as if it were a human, but there are still plenty of things that can be done if you constrain your definition of "better" or "worse" to specific fields.

 

[Omar Ismail]

Pictures are pretty easy to judge since it's just straight up image analysis. And even then a well composed picture might score poorly if it didn't meet the game's strict criterion (number of enemies in frame, concentration of enemies, etc). Computers don't have a concept of beautiful, imaginative, etc. But games SHOULD let people be judged on more creative aspects that are more emotive.

And it's funny that Urk mentioned YouTube the game, as the "gamelike" properties are one if its huge selling points and factors of success. If that can be further developed and refined into a real game, I think you'd have something special. It doesn't have to be movies either. It can be any creative work.