Spore, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a piece for the "Global Literacy 2008" special edition of Newsweek magazine. In it, we argued that the Internet is the new sweatshop, by looking at properties ranging from YouTube to Spore that are being built on top of use-generated content. Since we could only use brief snippets of these email interviews in the print edition of Newsweek, we thought you might appreciate reading the game-related Q&As in their entirety. First up is Will Wright, discussing his forthcoming game Spore.

Why was user-generated content so important for Spore?

We’ve seen over and over again that when players are creating the content for the games they play the empathy and emotional connection with the game is much higher. Film does this by getting using actors to emotionally connect us to the experience, games have other avenues available. You never really hear game players telling each other about the cool cut-scene they saw in the games they are playing but they’re always talking about the cool unique things they discovered to do on their own. By focusing on giving the players narrative freedom the game becomes more immersive and they show a much higher degree of ownership and authorship over the experience.

For Spore we wanted to give the players high diversity as well as a huge universe to explore. The only way we could possibly achieve this was to in essence "outsource" the majority of our content production to the players.

Based on your experiences with The Sims, what are some of the factors that motivate people to create content and share it freely with others?

Creating the content is just the first step in getting players to own the narrative of the experience. The really important stories in games aren’t the ones that are crafted by the game designers but by rather the unique experiences that players create as they play. When players create content or narrative, the entire activity switches over at some point from simple entertainment into a more complex form of self-expression.

We gave the Sims players the ability to make and share stories and movies from within the game. At first these stories were predictable super-hero fantasies and such, but over time they evolved into deeply introspective and meaningful dramas. One very memorable one for me was a woman using the Sims to describe how her sister was trapped in an abusive relationship but eventually managed to get out of it. It was clear that she was using the game as not only a form of psychological processing but also as tool to try and help others in similar situations.

How long did it take Spore to hit the 500,000 creatures created milestone? How much faster was this than you anticipated?

Based on the closest data we had (The Sims 2, which released a character creator tool a few months before release) I was hoping we would hit 100,000 creatures by the time we shipped the game in September. Instead we hit 500,000 on Thursday evening, two days after the creature creator was officially released. Our largest Sims fan site (The Sims Resource) had a big celebration when they hit 100,000 user created objects a few years after The Sims was first released. We hit that number in Spore in about 2 days.

What's your best estimate of how long it would have taken a typically-sized team of artists at Maxis to create 500,000 creatures?

Well our team of about 100 had created about 15,000 assets in our database in the last 6 months of development. But that was using our next-gen Spore editors as well. Using traditional tools like most game developers (Maya, 3d Max) it would typically take a professional artist a couple of days to make a Spore-like creature. A large art team might have as many as 50 artists working on a project so to create 500K creatures that team would have taken about 55 years.

What did you learn from other user-generated sites like YouTube that was relevant to Spore?

One of the fun things about YouTube is just browsing it with no particular target in mind. It’s like free associating inside of a million people’s dreams. In the later stages of development we started putting much more emphasis on features to browse and subscribe to content from the Sporepedia. We’re finding that once you have collected a lot of creative content other activities become entertaining as well. Grouping, tagging, rating and browsing can all become fun “meta-games” on their own if the tools are geared for it.

Are there any other advantages to building Spore around user-generated content besides the sheer volume of content that players will create? Do you have any plans for this content outside of the core game?

We have a lot of plans for using this content in other ways outside of the main Spore game. Now that we are getting a better sense of how vast that content will be (the creature editor is just one of many in the game) we’re looking at scaling up our ambitions in that regard.

How important are tools and taxonomy to successful user-generated content?

I think for Spore the important part was to regard the editors as fun toys that someone would want to play with rather than tools that you need to go through a training process with. It’s basically taking the fundamental principles of game design into the tool space (so that learning how to use them is the fun part, and that even failure should feel entertaining).