This was a very inspiring talk.  Not so much because of the content of the talk itself (though it was quite cool, and seeing a bit of Spore was great) but because it really got me thinking about the future of networked games, how we are really at a nexus of redefining what it means to be a multiplayer game.  There is this huge cloud of players and hardware out there and it is a new frontier, still largely undiscovered, to figure out what kind of gameplay that can facilitate.

Spore: Pollenating the Universe: User-generated content in Spore

Caryl Shaw

Shipping Sept 7 in US (2 days earlier in Europe). 

In the past… we thought…  sharing would be 100% under the hood, little visibility except on the website.  Aesthetic matching system, limited control.

That was working (made block city all by itself!), but one day a light went off… team was making a lot of really cool stuff.  What we wanted to do was organize it.  “Sporepedia” – a front end to all that content pollination stuff.

So now:  encourage content discovery, reward achievements, expose the best stuff, and give the player the ability to manage their content.

Seeing new creature, get a sporepedia card for it.  Achievements to encourage re-playability.  Modeled after Xbox Live.  Comparing yourself to your buddies is good too. 

“Quality” age, event count, average user rating from that creator, feed count (Sporecasts).  Actual peer rating is just one metric among many. 

“Power to the people” – let players control their own landscape.  Ban stuff you don’t like. 

Browsable, searchable, sortable.  “Buddies only” filter. 

Spore webpage (MySpore) – info, buddies, widgets.  Myspace + Spore.  Take your spore stuff to Facebook.  MySpore page in the game as well, webpage delivered from server integrated into the game.  Do these social / content tasks without having to leave the game to go to the web.

Social Networking in Spore – asset tagging , in-game comment system.  In-game storytelling.  Upload to YouTube. 

Comic book creation software, t-shirt / mug printing, 3d prints.

EA login system not user friendly, so put the guts of it into Spore rather than a direct port. 

Jump in at any time period, don’t just have to start out with micro-organism.  All editors unlocked from the start. 

Cool skeleton creature creation editor tool.  Animated, dynamic.  Nice touches about where you put eyes doing the “right thing”. 

“Theme sets” in Sporepedia.  Paint creature like a Gamecube (from a Gamecube UFO). 

“Test drive” mode, just walk a creature around in the editor.  Want players to feel connected to their content.

Direct upload to YouTube (or just save the AVI locally).  Email postcards to friends.  Capture animated avatar.

Sporepedia allows “test drive” to decide whether you want to add stuff to your world.  Some creatures are “published”.  You can publish music as well.  All the content is a PNG file, you can email it to someone and they can just drag and drop it in.  About 30k.  Can also generate a higher res version. 

Epic Asparagus = fun.

Spore Store.    Offer pre-orders, advanced versions of things, platform versions, etc.  Advertising in game without player leaving.  Buy t-shirts with your creatures.

Game shows a preference for getting stuff from your buddies.

“Sporecasts” – themed groupings of content that anyone can make or subscribe to.  People wanted to aggregate content by theme in Sims 2, learned lesson from that.    Set a Sporecast as a theme to seed a lot of content in your game initially. 

Not allowing users to share music files on the server for copyright issues.  Helps the fansites, who can be the avenue for sharing that content. 

Q:  “SporeDSCast”?  Content shareable between platforms?  Not between DS and PC.  DS version is just the creature game with a paper-art style.  Once other platforms are there we want to explore sharing between those versions.   Mac and Windows can share.

Q:  Concerns about being too easy to populate?  Too much content to manage?  Quality mechanisms will help manage that automatically.  Cull information from that – not keeping content that no one is using, delete it ff the server.

Always can create something new, or can choose from Sporepedia. 

Aesthetic matching is good tech – “get more like this”. 

Interactive music editor.  Brian Eno worked on this (as well as procedural music).  Pick a back beat, add in ambient sounds and then create an anthem with specific notes.  Save out to Sporepedia. 

Using Atom (new form of RSS) for a lot of this stuff, so expect to support an ecosystem around that content.