Back as recently as the early nineties, most games wouldn't let you
make your own things. It just wasn't done because the technology just wasn't there. Very few games contained the ability to save, and most of those did it in such a basic format, using some form of number coding to make all the necessary data, in a space that was too small for anything more due to technological limitations. Oh sure, it was possible to play within games. After all, people were coding there own games for the Commodore 64, and skilled programmers could make whatever they wanted, or at least what they wanted within the capabilities of the technology available. This, however, was purely the realm of the coder geeks, and most people got very lost when asked to code things. They didn't necessarily want to make a game, just make something that looked pretty.
And as the people who tried and failed to make a good game on the consoles of the early eighties will tell you, that's easier said than done. Changing the look, or ability is one thing, changing the very physics engine which holds a game together is another thing entirely. You can't make a custom option for a FPS and suddenly have a Tetris clone.
It's kind of like Lego. You give a a child a box of Lego and he'll probably be able to make something from it. Give him several lumps of plastic, and ask him to make the blocks of Lego from that, and there's a good chance that he'll either give you a funny look, or, should he try it, he'll most likely give up because it's too hard.
Because this is what customisation still is to an extent. It's just a toy box. You've got lots of things you can make, and ways to make it, but you're still stuck within guidelines. However these guidelines are forever expanding, with each new generation of consoles helping to push customisation further and further. And with the advancement of the internet, sharing all these newly made versions of familiar toys is becoming easier and easier.
Once console games stopped being made in bedrooms, and actually began to have serious investment, customisation soon started to come into it. This of course didn't stop the PC gamers hacking away at games, and making mods, but as far as legal game customisation went, creating characters was usually the first step. At first it was just custom characters, and in a threadbare version, that was basically a giant dress up doll. Soon enough though, you began to get the same with custom levels, I recall the level editor from Tony Hawk's 2, and it was a lot like putting specific lego pieces on a piece of flat land.
Sturgeon's revelation dictates that 90% of everything is crap. This is especially true of custom made things with regards to games. lord knows that over the years of making Skatepark's in
Tony Hawk's games that I've made some aweful ones. And so has everyone, because it takes a while to learn the difference between good looking and good playing. The game doesn't make it clear what will and won't work, merely lets you try it yourself to see.
Yet, for all the good levels you could make, you'd find more than your fair share of awful ones. Some of these are clearly joke levels, or designed for a specific multiplayer mode, but most are just plain bad. Not for lack of trying, but just because people haven't learnt the full load of tricks to make a decent level.
But the level editor in a Tony Hawk's game evolved with time. With the advancement of the consoles came more specialised pieces to use, and more unique pieces that varied the place up. THUG however introduced us to the rail tool, perhaps the single most important feature in the editor, as it allowed you to put a grind rail anywhere, at any height, with any depth of angle or twistiness, within the three dimensions of your park. This wasn't sticking Lego blocks together any more, this was sculpting together your own Lego pieces to put in your park.
Characters too have come a long way. WWF Attitude featured a rather in-depth character editor for it's time, allowing you to pick from a wealth of options, and make quite a variety of fighters. When the licence was sold to THQ, the create a wrestler feature was listed as a severe fault in an otherwise good game. This was because really all you did was pick a head, a torso, and a pair of legs, which reall reduced creativity, especially when most of these were already existant in game characters.
THQ decided to fix this for the sequal
WWF Smackdown 2: Know Your Role. Here the character creator was given a massive overhaul, and for the first time I'd seen you could not only change the look, but also physically alter the shape of the polygons. This wasn't a dress up doll anymore, it had become a fully fledged 3D character designer. Subsequent Smackdown games have upped the character creation to ridiculous levels, and now, provided you can use it well enough, make it possible to create absolutely anyone you feel like making.
Other games have added even more options in customisation. Creating a character is commonplace, but other games have gone further to allow the entire thing to be personalised. Smackdown's create a wrestler went as far as making your own entrances, taunts, move lists, to the point where the patient man could update his copy of the game, rather than buy the yearly release. some of the PES' series does the same, allowing you to update kits, and rosters of even the in game teams. THUG even went as far as allowing you to create your own special trick, as well as goals to play in the levels.
On top of that, there are games like Fable which have organic(ish) customisation. You don't necessarily get to control how fat, for instance, your character is, but if you eat a lot of pies in the game, your character gains weight. This isn't too far removed from stat enhancing in RPG's, in that you need to perform actions to grant the customisation and improvements, however organic growth isn't so instantaneous.
But is there a limit to just how much you can customise? For a game to be beaten, you need it to be winnable, yet there also has to be a challenge. You can't let the player control every aspect of it, as then he will more than likely just keep tweaking it until he
wins, rather than actively trying to improve his skills to beat the challenge you made for him. But yet, people like there customisation. People want to play as themselves, or as their author inserted fantasy persona's.
Drawn To life has the players actively customising the level's they're playing in. Okay, so all changes are purely cosmetic (draw a shorter than suggest ledge, and the rest is simply invisible), but you can fully draw the platforms within the level that you'll be standing on. For instance, when told to create a stormy cloud as a moving platform, I made a metal ledge with rocket boosters. There was no reason to design that, but I have a bit more control over the environment I'm playing in, and get to make the world the way I want it.
I think this is part of why customisation appeals. It allows you to make what you want, and design what you want, and be a player in your own little world, living out your fantasies, not just interacting with someone else's. In essence, you can take your life, and make it into a game, and do the things you normally couldn't, allowing you to blur the line between fiction and real life just a little bit more.
If games are an interactive form of storytelling then customisation is a way to make the player even more a part of the story, by not only allowing him to put himself in the story, but also give him his own skills that are required, and by allowing him to adjust the setting as he pleases.
Even then this encroaches on the narrative of the story. You can't be a medieval knight and have a jet pack, so you're still stuck to only some customisation, you can never fully create your own reality and play things as you want if you want the true interactive story, some sacrifices need to be made. Sure, you can wear whatever sort of armour you want, but you can't cheat the rules of the game by having a gun in a sword fight.
But where can you go from here? Games
like
Little Big Planet continue to push the boundaries of what you can make in game, with many of the custom levels being like for like replica's of old school games. If you can already customise the skills and looks of your character, the looks of the world he inhabits, and even the goals he has to do to win the game, all that's left is to change the physics of the world he inhabits.
Yet that's a long time off, we simply don't yet have consoles with that power. You can't turn GTA into Call of Duty. Even if in real life you might be able to amass so much money and power you could hypothetically start a war, in the game the in game engine of GTA just won't let you, because it can only create what is programed into it, and you can't adjust that programing as there's not enough power, memory, or ability.
Until someone comes along with a games editing software for a console that's as intuitive as all the other "create-a-whatever" modes that come along, we're stuck with limitless choices for only a limited set of options to change about a game. You can change what your character looks like, how he fights, what sort of skateboard he uses, whether he can cast fire or water spells, the engine specifications of his car, and even what he sounds like, but no matter what, he still has to beat the enemies, save the princess, stop the end of the world and become the best racing driver to enter a skateboarding tournament. The game can't be won if you can't do those things after all.
Perhaps then it's a good thing that we're still only dealing with the optionals, and not the essentials. After all, would you really want to get two thirds of a way through a game with a character without knowing that you actually needed a snowboard medal? It would make the game un-winnable, and that's no fun.
Changing core mechanics is perhaps a step too far in terms of game customisation. After all, you buy a game for it's core engine structure. Sure, sometimes there's a moment where you think "I'm carrying a rocket launcher, why do I need to hunt for the key to this wooden shack?" but for the most part, you wanted to play as a midget running around a dinosaur infested town, so why change everything just so you can go go-karting?
You're simply not ever going to be able to adjust a game to that degree. Sure, little Big Planet is rather damn customisable, as are several other games, but they're still games with pre-set challenges, and you still have to beat them to beat the game. Otherwise what was the point? If half the fun of gaming is in the challenge, you simply can't give the player the option to make the game so easy he removes all the challenge in an instant, so at best, all customisation is always going to be either cosmetic, or progressive.
Or with flat out cheating. As my high score in Sonic 1 with debug proves. putting loads of enemies in a level, it was easy... what do you mean it doesn't count? I got the highest score possible with game engine customisation...
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