Rising to the Opportunity: About creation and creativity in video games.

The interviewer asks him how he started his career. Alex Evans takes us way back to the 80's. As a person with a creative streak, he first wanted to make computer music. But as the equipment was too expensive, he instead bought a Commodore 64, and taught him self programming. Those skills he brought on to Bullfrog, and later Lionhead, and at last led him to start his own video game company; Media Molecule.

The Commodore was the entry technology for him, just as flash was for later generations, and further still level- editors, indie game development, and at last - LittleBigPlanet. And that's it. That is what this post is going to be about: The creative platforms for artistic expression in the game community.

There are crucial differences to the days of yore and the now. Without going into the complexity/simplicity - abstraction level quagmire, let's just say that the entry fee to hard coding is hard, and the entry level to easy fun is easy. And as such the chance of you ever picking up the creative side of computer entertainment is vastly more likely with a computer game, than with a line where it says "ready".

Experienced programmers would say that there is a balance between limitations of power and ease of use. The two have an inverse effect on each other. But we aren't talking about experienced programmers, we are talking about n00bs. And in that case those limitations of power rairly come into effect. And as many have said before me, limitation is the mother of inspiration.


Back when Alex Evans started programming, there weren't many alternatives in this last respect. But the Commodore 64 was affordable enough. It sold more than any other computer system has before it, or since. It popularized the demoscene milieu, and laid the creative foundations for thousands of computer game programmers. But one can attribute the commodores popularity to the same mechanisms that make the iPad sell in so vast numbers today. They were filling a market niche that that was very ready to be filled. At some point 400'000 were made every month.

But as times moved on the de- facto platform for start ups shifted. Don't get me wrong, there are still many coders out there today, but the creative start of many is not in java or some other programming language. It is directly in the level editors of the games themselves.

Evans holds a guest lecture about the making of computer games. He says that the creation of a computer game is just as much influenced by it's creative direction as with the tools that are created to make it. He shows examples of this from ancient times, when chisels were produced first, and were a prerequisite for the creation of masterpieces such as "David" by Michelangelo. In just that manner the game- engine and level editor are prerequisites for the game creation. And the success or failure of those tools can mean the difference between scrapping a game, and success.

Perhaps the best example is the now autonomous game Counter Strike. Back in 1997, when valve released their critically acclaimed game "Half Life". They built a robust graphics engine and level editor for the creation of the game, which they eventually decided to ship with it.The then already developed modding community sprang upon it like a hungry lion to produce countless modifications of the original game, popularly called "mods". From this sprang Counter Strike, the brainchild of a Vietnamese- Canadian computer student by the name of Minh Le.  Counter Strike became emensly popular, and year after it's initial release Valve hired Minh Le and bought Counter Strike.

Just like the Commodore and the demoscene had been the launch platform for Alex Evans, the toolset of Half Life and the modding community became the launch platform for Minh Le.

After a few years Alex Evans co- founded Media Molecule. The group entered with a few creeds and tenants. One was empowerment, and the other was simplicity. The result was a highly ambitious game called LittleBigPlanet. LBP integrated the tools into the game it self, and in the self contained package gave players the tools to share the worlds they created. This trinity proved to be highly successful. LBP now has more than 3'000'000 user created levels, and game number 2 is in the works.

So LBP succeeded in becoming a platform for creativity. But did it recruit to the game industry? To a certain degree. Media Molecule hired 4 community members as level creators in their successor, but to my knowledge LBP has made a very small splash in the industry elsewhere.

If anyone out there are like me, and I seldom attribute uniqueness to my self, they get a highly addictive kick out of creating something. I believe there is a huge market out there for empowering creative tools.

So even if every person does not contribute with vast amounts of creative output, the right entry level platforms have the power to give something to each and every one of us, and we are given the opportunity of giving something back.

Some would say that LBP is the beginning of a trend of user created content. But I believe that is an unhistorical statement. Rather LBP is an entry into the already significant number of entry technologies out there. What is different though, is the low entry level. The gradient of the slope of complexity, and that is something that I believe the game world will learn from, and bring on in the future.