A Million Little Game Developers

News.com has an interesting article up on Will Wright and J Allard talking at a conference about "the growing role that game players will have in creating content for the biggest games." (Hat tip: Kotaku.)

This is potentially a very important shift in thinking. But I think the story mistakenly conflates consumers' "virtually infinite appetite for customized entertainment" -- ring tones, on-demand TV and iTunes are the examples -- for the to-be-determined appetite for consumer-created entertainment. It's clear that appetite is strong among some consumers; aside from Wikipedia and fan fiction, see for example these Wired stories on fans continuing the original Star Trek series and Lego enthusiasts helping develop the next line of robotics Legos. What's much less certain is how much of an appetite entertainment and tech companies have for consumer-created entertainment.

Allard says, "We're going to take on the Wikipedia model. We're going to take on...the open-source model, if you will, for gaming," but come on -- this is Microsoft. It's much easier to believe this sort of thing coming from Wright, who can pretty much do whatever he wants and seems do be doing just that with Spore. In any case, it's interesting to see two industry heavyweights talking about this.