J Allard joins Sims creator in praising player-created content

J Allard and Will Wright may be well known names in the world of gaming, but they believe the future of games lies not in their hands - but in the hands of players themselves.

At the Entertainment Gathering last week, as reported by News.com, Xbox team leader Allard described gaming as "the only medium where we yield control of the protagonist."

He said that developers should also "Yield control of the director - and the producer", in order to "take on the Wikipedia model. We're going to take on... The open-source model, if you will, for gaming."

Allard described how he met a young inner city child last year and showed him a new Xbox 360 basketball game. Instead of heading straight out onto court, the boy spent two hours designing his ideal pair of trainers, telling Allard that was what he wanted to do for a living.

Allard admitted that this might not be a typical reaction - but that it doesn't matter if creative gamers are in the minority.

"If only 1 percent of our audience that plays Halo helped construct the world around Halo, it would be more human beings than work at Microsoft corporation," he observed.

"That's how much human energy we could harness in this medium."

Allard's comments were backed up by Will Wright, creator of The Sims. Wright said he is very aware of the vast amounts of time many Sims fans spend developing their own unique characters, and designing in-game items to use and trade.

As a result, Wright's next project, Spore (currently in development for the PC and - rumour has it - Xbox 360), is built entirely around this concept. Spore will let players develop their own unique life form, controlling its evolution from a single cell organism to a giant, all-powerful entity. According to Wright, a specially designed physics engine and behaviour models will let players create a creature that's just as complex and detailed as a character in a Pixar film.

Players will be able to share their creature with others, and visit new worlds inhabited by beings created by fellow Spore fans. "Instead of putting players in the role of Luke Skywalker, or Frodo Baggins, I'd rather put them in the role of George Lucas," Wright said.