Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05150.21522.pdf

Sue Morris, a PhD student from Australia argues in this paper that popular multiplayer FPS games for the PC are and always have been “co-creative media.” This means that the developers are never solely responsible for production of the final product regarded as “the game,” without input from unaffiliated, unpaid players (the “community). Morris goes over the evolution of FPS gaming, starting with its early roots in Wolfenstein 3-D, and ending with games such as Half-Life, Quake III Arena, and Tribes 2. She argues that id Software (the creators of the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake series), who pioneered the genre, always released their source code to the public and relied on user modifications (“mods”) to make their products better and more accessible. She also gives examples of FPS game communities and the ways they enhance the games in question through extremely thorough testing and feedback, as well as ardent, if mostly selfish, modification. The best example is the game Counter-Strike, a mod of Valve’s Half-Life game created independently by two avid players that became the most popular FPS game of all time.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author. The most successful games, FPS games in particular, are those which have the best community-developer interaction and the best mod tools. Half-Life and Quake in particular had excellent level design and other mod tools and became vastly popular as a result. Having good community-developer interaction and good mod tools also prolongs the replay value of a game due to more regular bug fixes and updates as well as new things to do in-game as compared to a game that does not have these things. For example, Turok 2, published by Acclaim, had virtually no developer support and no open source. The game’s bugs were never fixed, and no new content whatsoever was released, even though members of the community pleaded with Acclaim to at least allow them to work on the game themselves. As a result, the game’s popularity declined fairly rapidly, and virtually no one was left playing after about two years. Conversely, Half-Life and its many mods are still popular today, despite the game being 9 years old (a very long time by video game standards) and having a critically acclaimed sequel out.