"Wisdom of Crowds" Applied to Video Games

An evolution in the video game market is taking place. We are at an inflection point, where instead of game developers producing a linear story (Mario Bros., Halo, etc.) for the user to passively ride through, the game developers are allowing the users to create the content and the games themselves.

The two examples I cite are Superstruct (article here), a Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Platform (MMFP), and Playstation 3’s LittleBigPlanet (article here).

Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORGs) have become a staple in the gaming community. No longer is it just dorky dungeons and dragons kids who play these types of games. Millions of Chinese young men without jobs play these types of games all day long in cyber cafes. What are they? Think of a combination of the Second Life game and Lord of the Rings. Second life allows players to purchase land, buy things, interact with people, and generally create an alternate life inside a computer game where the other players are people logged on around the world. The Lord of the Rings theme is not meant to suggest that these games have a Mordor or the One Ring. It is meant to suggest that good versus evil, many small quests, and banding together with other groups of individuals to complete such quests are a fundamental part of the game.

MMORGs are created and shaped by the game developers at their headquarters and periodically updated to provide new quests for the players and new items of interest (a gold sword or shield). Where this new MMFP game changes the game is that it allows the users to create the content, not just a few game developers. Think of like youtube mixed with video games. The users are given a basic structure and objective (in this case a 2019 scenario similar to SimCity where the end of the world is near and new means of living in communities must be developed) but the content, shape of the game, and ultimately the development of the living communities will be created by the thousands and millions of users. Ultimately, the game designers are hoping “the wisdom of crowds” will create, innovate, and develop new methods of living in communities that face threats similar to the ones we face in the real world.

As a student at Georgia Tech, one my professors brought down some people from Booz Allen Hamilton and their client, Andy Marshall, to observe a wargame we were doing in class involving countries with interests in Asia. The folks at Booz Allen were developing a computer game similar to the wargame we were running in class, but they were attempting to create a game exactly like the MMFP developed for the commercial world. Andy Marshall, a lion in the defense community who has been in the Pentagon for almost 40 years, wanted a way to observe the strategies of the Chinese. The idea was to create a computer game that pitted player strategies against each other for world domination, and allow user from all over the world, including Chinese players, to play the game. The project never got off the ground because the technology wasn’t as highly developed as it is now, and the player participation from around the world didn’t exist in the numbers it does now.

But the idea is sound. Use the “wisdom of crowds” to determine strategies and create new an interesting ways to solve problems that cost very little (time, money, energy), and then to be able to sift through the developments for the gems that people can try in the real world. Exploring the terrain space of ideas is what the wisdom of crowds really does effectively. The terrain space is the entire range of possibilities to a given situation. Think of hills, valley, and plateaus. These terrain features indicate the strength of “solution” to the given situation with hills being a stronger solution than valleys. The problem is that experts and intellectuals can only survey the terrain of a limited area for a variety of reasons including belief that it will work, shame in their profession, and the limits of knowledge. By opening up the terrain to thousands and millions of participants you can explore the terrain space much more efficiently and completely so find new and interesting features.

Playstation 3’s LittleBigPlanet is the other game the has many of the same features. It offers a basic game design that allows user to create their own video game, obstacles, timing sequences, and objectives. It is much more like Super Mario Bros, whereas Superstruct is much more like SimCity (conclusions generated just from reading the articles). The fascinating thing about LittleBigPlanet is that one user created a functioning calculator inside the game using parts provided to him by the game designers. I am sure that the game designers had no idea that was possible, nor that anyone would even want to. That is the great thing about creatable content, you never know what you are going to get. (Click here to see the video.)

The reason I believe we are at an inflection point of a behavior change amongst gamers and within the video game industry is that the technology exists to have thousands or millions of gamers playing together, the interest is there among gamers to try these new developments, and the urge to create your own content has been urged on many different fronts from Youtube to Myspace. My bet is that over the next several years we will see an increase of both entertaining creatable content online games as well as MMFPs like Superstruct that will try to use the same framework to answer seemingly intractable problems.