Berlin - Most video games are so labyrinthine that, to the casual player, the games provide seemingly infinite room to explore. But truly dedicated gamers eventually reach a game's limits. While that once meant moving onto the next game, for many games that's no longer necessary. "Create your own game" is the latest motto among game designers as brand-new games like Little Big Planet and other current titles are turning video gamers themselves into video game developers.
Christoph Adrian has been a gamer from the industry's infancy. In the 1980s, he was putting the joystick through its paces on the Commodore C64 - and even then, just playing wasn't enough.
"I was never interested in staying within the limits of the video games," explains the 26-year-old student from Berlin. He channelled his aggression by checking the program code of the games, looking for flaws he could exploit.
"Quake was the first game in which the errors were really hyped," providing tinkerers like Christoph Adrian with real opportunities to make the characters do things like jump higher or run quicker. "This developed into disciplines like the trick jump or the speed run," he says. Edits like those turned the brute shoot-em up Quake into a test of skill.
That was clearly not the intention of the developers at the time. Since then, however, the game makers have come to embrace the practice, with more and more titles explicitly inviting the gamers to try out their own levels.
One current example is Sony's recently published title Little Big Planet for Playstation 3: "Gamers can modify any level, adjusting it to their desires and ideas," says Guido Alt, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment. "This includes the use of objects already in the game - or the integration of self-made ones, such as by using photos," Alt says.
Or it's possible to put together complete levels right away for the jump 'n run mode using the idiosyncratic lead character, Sackboy. No knowledge of video gaming programming is necessary: The levels can be created using the controller itself. The wide variety of prefabricated elements means that the design options are practically endless. It's also possible to integrate things like self-photographed elements. Happy with the results? Put it online for the community to use. In return try out levels from other gamers.
Kristian Metzger from the video gaming web site eurogamer.de is highly critical of turning gamers into developers and believes the process is not as easy as the manufacturers promise. Changing game content and mechanisms requires a solid knowledge of video games.
"If you want to do more with Little Big Planet than just fool around a little, you'll have to work intensively with the underlying principles," Metzger says. That means that this kind of tinkering is likely to remain more a hobby for the minority of truly passionate video gamers.
Yet Little Big Planet is not the first game whose developers put in a mechanism for home modifications. "There is a modification for Half Life 2 named Garry's Mod that provides functions like those found in Little Big Planet," Metzger says. Players are welcome to give their fantasy free rein up on a movie screen of sorts. "In principle it was possible to use the underpinnings of Half Life to develop completely new concepts," Metzger says.
Two titles from game developing legend Will Wright are currently making waves through the creative freedom they offer players: the city building simulation Sim City Creator and the broadly lauded Spore. In each case, it's not just the environment but the creatures themselves that can be "frankensteined" together by the player.
Anyone who finds all this tinkering distracting can relax: "There will always be two variants: The classic game on the one hand and the open worlds on the other, providing the gamer with much more decision-making freedom," Kristian Metzger says.
For Christoph Adrian, the gamer from the early days, all these options are exhilarating. "What always bothered me about video games was the pre-defined narrowness," he says, adding, "With games like Little Big Planet or Spore, this has finally come to an end and challenged the gamers to show their creativity."
