This year's great example is Portal. Portal was built by a bunch of students who graduated from DigiPen. And it was called Narbacular Drop, and Valve saw it and said that it was good and hired them, and today we have Portal. Valve in particular has been very good about this, as they did the same thing with Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, so there's plenty of examples out there of cases where things that amateurs did are incredibly innovative and really incredibly good and what they needed was support and tools and infrastructure to be able to do it even better. So I tend to think that treating amateur stuff as bad is baloney.
TE: So are you going to then have your own world kick start content, and do you think it's absolutely necessary?
RK: Absolutely. I think it gives people a huge leg up, because many, many content creators are modders.
We have this motto here that we make content so that it can be stolen. We're going to make games, and we're going to make them nice, and they're going to be fun games in their own right, and hopefully people play them, but we're also going to open source them so they can be used as starting points, so people can build on them.
For all we know, you may be the next Tim Shaffer or Richard Garriott and not be able to express it. We think it's really important to have lots of starting points at different levels so people can pick up the ball and run with it.
TE: One has to wonder if your emphasis on user creation and, one infers, user ownership is in any way in response to the SWG debacle you've been both so vocal and so circumspect about. Are you trying to allow users to create a world no one will be able to take away from them?
RK: It isn't any sort of reaction to Galaxies, I don't think. It doesn't have anything much to do with that. If there is a way in which it relates to Galaxies it would be this: The market is very much narrowing into a particular gameplay style, right? Even though I'm very gratified when I see something people made fun of getting adopted into other MMOGs, like I'm really glad to see the musicianship system in Lord of the Rings Online. It is the step beyond the Galaxies, one that we couldn't take because of lawyers. Or the amount of dancing emotes that are in World of Warcraft, when before SWG everyone was making fun of us for dancing. Some of these things are sneaking in, but at the same time the overall gameplay really has narrowed into kind of a lack of variety, honestly.
