Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2005 saw the real impact of having an open-source spirit working for the larger
online communities, producing more and more free tools
6
that would allow people
with low technical skills to create. That's when the concept of user-generated con-
tent (UGC) appeared, and free distribution gained allies with the birth of YouTube.
During 2005, discussions started among the game community for the necessity of
player-generated content (PGC) in order to respond to the high-content demand of
the next-generation consoles (PS3 and Xbox360). Companies were afraid of being
unable to deliver the detailed content permitted by these new generation consoles.
Will Wright, creator of
Sims
, appeared in the front line with
Spore
, an evolutionary
game with in depth layers of AI, the so-called “procedurally generated content”.
7
Wright's goal was to develop an intelligent world, which would be able to interact
with the creative desires of the players. With a bunch of editors within the game,
players would become creators “from scratch”,
8
of their own worlds, their own
games.
Then during the second half of the decade, new Web 2.0 tools started to appear.
Albeit existing authoring multimedia tools, and networks for sharing and distribu-
tion, there were still limits to the creative process in the sense that past the facilita-
tion of sharing with the world and facilitation of programming you still needed to
bring into play all the assets you wanted to integrate (text, images, audio, animation,
and video). Thus you still needed literacy on the creation of the assets. Consequently
a lot of Web 2.0 tools started to develop their interest in providing technology with
knowledge embedded in order to suppress this lack of literacy - tools like
Mindmeister
for idea organization,
Picasa
for photo editing,
Sumo Paint
for illustra-
tion,
ComicSketch
for comics,
SketchUp
for 3d,
GoAnimate
for animation,
Animata
for real-time animation,
Animoto
and
Masher
for video,
Audiotool
for music, or
Creaza Audio Editor
for sound.
9
All these creative tools allowed for the creation
process within collaborative settings, and build for community sharing. Most of
them used databases of media elements, mostly built by other creators online, in
order to ease the creative work. These new creative tools were opening new dimen-
sions for the facilitation of creation by general people and at the same time making
possible self-discovery.
6
At the moment we can fi nd hundreds of free online tools available on the Web, tools that serve
media as text, photography, music, video, and games. Examples can be found at
http://www.
7
Game Developers Conference of 2005 was a rich gathering of discussions on the subject of pro-
cedural content. Will Wright conference on “The Future of Content” marked that year. Read more
at
http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2005/features/20050315/postcard-diamante.htm
8
idem.
9
All these tools can be accessed online and free. Sumo Paint can be explored at
http://www.sumo-
tested at
http://goanimate.com
, Animata at
http://animata.kibu.hu
, Animoto can be accessed at
http://animoto.com
,
SketchUp at
http://www.sketchup.com
, Masher at
http://www.masher.com
,
Audiotool can be used at
http://www.audiotool.com
, Audio editor can be accessed at
http://www.
creazaeducation.com/audioeditor
, and Mindmeister can be accessed at
http://www.mindmeister.
