Power to the People

It's also entirely the wrong way to approach this development in consumer behaviour. The vast, vast majority of consumers don't want to get together into small development teams to develop their own small titles. Instead, they want to be given the power to play around within existing games - to create within the contexts of the worlds they love, and build new content that they can share with friends.

What I'm talking about, of course, has existed in some form on the PC for decades. I'm talking about building new levels, new character models, new weapons and new puzzles - some of which may be minor changes to the game, some of which may be large, involved mod projects. Most of it, of course, will be rubbish - but some will be superb, and taken as a whole, the offering will be compelling. This, at least, true videogame user-created content would have in common with its counterparts in all other media.

Moving this entire ecosystem - all of this openness - onto console platforms would be a key step forward. As it stands, most PC games don't offer any kind of discovery system for user-created content - it's a haphazard case of searching for content, and then installing it by dragging it to the right folder on your system. Content rating and reviewing, let alone safeguards against malicious content, are practically non-existent. All of these things could be solved relatively easily by a platform holder dedicated to this ideal.

It's a shame then that for some publishers - and most platform holders - this is a concept which is essentially terrifying. It means turning the games you ship into creative tools in their own right, by polishing up and releasing cut-down versions of the development tools themselves. It means allowing users to muck around with your IP, bending it and twisting it to their own ends - something which is essentially a brilliant, fanbase-supporting idea, but which gives the legal departments of most publishers apoplexies.

More than anything else, though, it means allowing content for your game to be distributed free, gratis and for nothing. There's no revenue stream to be made from user-created content - not directly, at least - and in fact, there'll be a cost incurred in implementing and operating it. The benefits, instead, will be in a boost of health for an entire product line - a happier fanbase, a wealth of free promotion, a long lifespan for your existing game and a huge level of anticipation for your next.

Some publishers get that. EA's Sims business unit gets it; those at Sony involved with LittleBigPlanet get it. If that carrot isn't enticing enough, though, don't worry - the stick will be along shortly. Videogames have taken a huge chunk out of the audience figures for mediums like television among key young audiences, but the next big thing isn't on the horizon any more - it's right here, and getting bigger by the day.

User-created content on the Internet, everything from YouTube to Flickr, from blogs to MySpace, from Flash games to MP3 mash-ups, is absorbing more and more time from the generation videogaming would like to have called its own. If this industry is going to sit back en masse and act as though encouraging a select few to put shareware-style games on consoles is enough of a response to this revolution, then gaming risks taking a serious blow - knocked off its perch, ironically, because the most interactive medium of all refused to let its audience interact.