Care in the Community

The Game Developers Conference seems to be Microsoft's favourite venue for showing off its game-making tools. After all, it's an event designed for and attended by people who make games for a living. But MS isn't just reaching out to developers - they're hoping to turn us all into bedroom coders with services like the XNA platform and the Community Games channel.

Now they're even targeting our young with Kodu, a game-creation tool designed for kids aged nine to 12. So where will it all end? With a load of tip-top, low budget, cheap at the price games for us all to play, hopefully. Or perhaps just a load of games based around Hannah Montana. To find out more Eurogamer caught up with Matt MacLaurin, the creative force behind Kodu, and XNA Game Studio boss Boyd Multerer.

Eurogamer: Why have you designed Kodu for kids? Why not aim it at hardcore Xbox 360 players, who are more likely to have the skills and the inclination to make their own games?

Boyd Multerer: We find that having to keep things simple enough for kids to understand is a useful discipline. When people sit down with XNA Game Studio for the first time they tend to run into one of two walls. If they've never made a game before, they find there's a lot of text to read and concepts to learn and the learning curve is pretty high.

This is Boyd Multerer. Hello, Boyd Multerer.

If they know how to write code, it's pretty easy to get things moving around on the screen. But then they hit the art barrier, where they don't know how to make a character. That's pretty hard.

[Kodu] eliminates the first barrier, because even if you don't know how to write code you can follow logic. It's not directly teaching you how to write script, but you get how it works. Plus you can do that without having to come up with a bunch of art assets.

Matt MacLaurin: Right now we have a kind of neutral, playful set with these characters - they're all kind of toy-like. If all goes well, we'd like to have more hardcore packs where you can have tanks, rocket launchers and stuff like that, as well as more kiddie packs. The natural way for us to expand is to make more content available for different types of users.

Eurogamer: Earlier this year you said you hadn't decided on a way to distribute Kodu games...

Matt MacLaurin: And now we have. We've built a peer-to-peer sharing system so you can join up with your friends online and swap games you've made back and forth. We're trying to tread cautiously here, because we know user-generated content is absolutely the way of the future, but it's something we want to do in a way that's really sensitive to the concerns of parents. There are a lot of safeguards within the system to keep offensive content out, but by staying with peer-to-peer and friends lists, that gives us a moderate level of control while still letting a lot of sharing happen.

Eurogamer: But there's no peer-review system?

Matt MacLaurin: No, this is more like an email model. You can compose things, you can give them to your friends and we're not acting as an intermediary at all.

And this is Matt MacLaurin. He do like to be beside the seaside.

Boyd Multerer: In the future, we may make it so you can do things like build a level in Kodu, then build an actual game for peer review - that's stuff we're talking about for possible future versions. But at some point you have to ship.

Matt MacLaurin: This is something we see as a long-term effort, and there are just a lot of unknowns in this space. In some ways the Xbox is a closed environment, like Disneyland - you know every experience you're going to have comes up to a certain bar of really cool stuff.

With Community Games there's the peer-review model, with Kodu we're doing peer-to-peer, and it's giving us tons of data on how people will use these differences and react to them. It's really a long-term investment for us.

Eurogamer: How do you feel about the frequent comparisons people make between Kodu and LittleBigPlanet?

Matt MacLaurin: The press tends to make out it's some kind of brutal competition. I feel we're two teams taking some of the same risks and trying to achieve some of the same things. That means really just empowering end-users, and trying to share the stuff we love about our profession with our customers. In that sense, great - I'm proud to be in their company.

Is it just us, or is there something slightly sinister about that eggy stare?

On the other hand, they're trying to solve a very different problem. I think gaming is the only truly modern art-form today. Movies are pretty old, radio's been around a long time, so has theatre... Gaming has not been around long, and what separates gaming from those other media is programming. It's truly an artistic media; programming is a way to create art, and we really wanted to make a strong statement about that.

Boyd Multerer: A top goal of ours for Games Studio and Kodu is education, getting people into being able to make games. We're worried that computer-science enrolment is way down; it's seen as a nerdy thing. Everything we can do to make it fun - that's setting the whole industry up for a good future.

Eurogamer: Chris Satchell introduced the Community Games channel at GDC last year. How's it been going? What lessons have you learned?

Boyd Multerer: We're already starting to see that some of the best content is being picked up by studios and will end up showing up in Arcade, which is one of the big pulls. We're very happy with the amount of content coming through the channel, there's lots of diversity both in game concepts and styles. It will continue to be a really fun place for new stuff to emerge.

Eurogamer: There are some games on the Community Games channel which are better than some Xbox Live Arcade games. XBLA games are often indie productions too. What's the deal? Why is a game like, say, Easy Golf a community game, while Death Tank is an XBLA release?

Boyd Multerer: It probably has to do with the amount of risk you want to take as a developer, and with turnaround time. There's a big difference between giving something up to the Community Games channel and getting it ready for a worldwide release.

We've found with Games Studio that when it's time to go off and be professional in the Arcade space, people start to learn about multiple languages and a whole load of other things that kind of raise the bar. As a consumer I know that when I go into the Arcade space, everything's going to be finished and there will be different language versions. When you go into the Community space, it is rougher and a bit more risky from the consumer's point of view. But you're also going to find gems in there.

Eurogamer: But finding those gems can be a problem, and for developers, getting their work noticed can be difficult. Do you have any plans to help people promote their titles?

Here's the Kodu interface - simple enough for children and thick people to understand.

Boyd Multerer: We're working on a number of things to help with the sorting and the filtering. There's one feature, which exists right now that I think people should be using more - when you go to Marketplace on the web, all the Community Games are there. You can take people directly to your title right there. I look forward to seeing people make more of that.

Eurogamer: Where are all the Microsoft XBLA games? We've had Hexic, Fable II Pub Games and Banjo-Kazooie, but that's kind of been it for the past three years. Why isn't Microsoft producing more titles?

Boyd Multerer: You know, I don't know. One thing we're very specific about with XNA is that we're about helping people make games. We're purposely not trying to play a role in portfolio management; that's for Microsoft Game Studios.

Eurogamer: Also with regard to XBLA, the guidelines for file-size appear to have gone out the window. There's the old excuse of making exceptions for quality titles, but in the case of Watchmen that doesn't really ring true... Why not just scrap the file-size limit? We've all got broadband now, we have the technology...

Boyd Multerer: I can't really speak for why they've chosen the limits they have on the XBLA side. Again, that's a part of how they want to manage the Arcade portfolio, and we're staying focused on the development side.

I know that in the community there are also file-size limits, and partly it's because big files always have a cost. We have to somehow manage the amount of risk that the overall system is taking.

Eurogamer: Have you met any resistance to Community Games from within the industry, perhaps from professional developers who just see it as more competition for them at what's already a difficult time?

And here's the kind of thing you can create. Not exactly Final Fantasy XIII, admittedly.

Boyd Multerer: B No, I haven't heard that argument. When it comes to the Games Studio, the Community and the Arcade stuff versus the big blockbusters, it's just like the movie industry in the nineties. Indie films came out and that did not kill the blockbuster; it just made the pie bigger. The same thing's happening here. The niche game is there but so is the blockbuster, operating in a different space.

Eurogamer: Has the take-up of XNA Game Studio been as high as you were hoping?

Boyd Multerer: It was almost a year ago we passed a million downloads of the toolset, which was great. There's a lot of people busy experimenting. I suspect some of them are finding the learning curve is a little harder than they thought, if you want high production values - but that's to be expected.

Eurogamer: Isn't the question of production values an issue generally? A few years ago it was all about who could produce the best graphics, but since the Wii came on the scene the emphasis has shifted...

Boyd Multerer: There's a long-term trend that's not going away. Think about 10 or 20 years ahead. It's clear the chips are going to be really, really powerful. It's going to be about controlling your art costs, and you're going to make choices about which market you're aiming your game at and how much money you want to invest in the artwork side.

We see teams now with a 10-to-1 ratio of artists-to-programmers, and that's where all the money's going. I think we're heading towards a world where we'll start seeing 20-to-1. You can see the precursors today. That doesn't mean there won't be blockbusters and high production values - they will still be there. But developers will have more choices about what kind of content they make.