Wii gets serious with user created content

The best games are our own. Remember spending hours editing that level in Counter Strike? Maybe you couldn't get enough of creating new maps in Strarcraft? If you love making your own content for a game and sharing it with others, the Wii is going to be able to accomodate your creative juices.

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The potential for this concept could be too vast to comprehend. There have been questions though if Nintendo, known for its wonderful software quality control, is willing to embrace this paradigm shift that allows the cult followings of games to spice it up with its on versions of character skins and level design, than just relying on a few hundred software developers. The Nintendo DS title "Mario vs. Donkey Kong2: March of the Minis" indicates that Nintendo knows when to welcome change. This game will feature a level editor. Since the DS will integrate into the Wii, players will be able to easily swap their various designs for this game all through the wonderful technology of WiFi.

This concept is nothing new. Plenty of existing titles such as Second Life and Animal Crossing already allow players to go wild with content creation for the games. EA's upcoming project "Spore" has an interesting premise. This will be the first major title that really depends upon user created content. In Spore, the player will create a being of some sort. The player will nurture and facilitate the rise of the being as it evolves and eventually gains tecnology to leave its home world. As the user created race explores the universe it will discover a variety of other worlds and cities, but these worlds and cities will be created by other users. That's right, users will upload their created content to servers and download the content to thier console, and the console will integrate and control these user created entities inside each game. This is really innovative stuff, and Wii is going to be equipped to be able to hit the ground running with these concepts.

As you see more games and console support user created content, you will begin to see more tools and software sprout up just like they did for people to edit blogs and wikis. Saying that games are soon to become Open Source might be a stretch, but again, the direction of development says it might not be that far off in the near future.