A Hierarchy of Authoring Tools

I keep thinking about a single interesting sentence from a profile of Wikipedia in the NY Times magazine in early July, a prediction that the written word would continue to be Wikipedia's main focus even if pictures, sound or moving images could be appealing supplements to its information. I know that doesn't sound too profound: it's like predicting that human beings will continue to communicate with one another using language. But the point raised in the article is that writing works for Wikipedia  not just because it's what we're historically accustomed to as a medium for communicating information and knowledge, but because it remains a superior technology for the kind of collaboration that Wikipedia is built upon. It's the best authoring tool that we know of: supple, flexible, easily adapted to new purposes, relatively easy to teach to a very wide variety of author-users and widely distributed through the population as a result.

In virtual worlds, we've seen  some of the pitfalls with user-generated content (problems that have a parallel in Wikipedia). When users are given access to that layer of a virtual world, a few will attack the world as a whole, while others will look to ruin or damage the experience of other users. User-generated content as a whole is also often not quite as appealing or attractive as what authors with the full resources of a developer can create: open-source creativity sometimes generates broad but  subtly unsatisfying experiences.

But the biggest problem, it seems to me, is that the tools for authorship in virtual worlds  that we have available are the opposite of writing. Even the best are somewhat difficult to use and put enormous time barriers in between a creative vision and its satisfaction. This is one of the reasons that old fogeys like me who played pen-and-paper role-playing games before we ever typed "North" in a MUD sometimes feel a sense of lack in even the most sophisticated virtual-world environments. With notebooks, maps and a few manuals, a wide range of  pen-and-paper creators were able to author shared experiences that were richly imagined and highly adaptive. Mostly all they had to be able to do was imagine a world and the things within it, and then perform that world for others once they'd written down some notes about it.

Doing something similar  in the most "open" virtual world environments is a lot harder, or at least I find it to be so. Second Life gives me a lot of tools, but I feel like the learning curve and time demands involved in using them is very steep. Author-oriented non-persistent games like Neverwinter Nights have seemed  more demanding to me.

Maybe this is because writing is what I know how to do, all I know how to do, and for coders or artists, creating in Second Life or NWN  is child's play. But that's the point of writing again: the largest number of sub-creators can walk in that door, and so the combinatorial possibilities of creation through writing are vaster.

Creating author tools in game environments (whether massively multiplayer or otherwise) seems to me to be the hardest kind of programming there is, and possibly the least rewarding in a financial sense. So I have a question for developers, programmers, people who create objects and environments in Second Life or elsewhere. How would you rank the intrinsic difficulty of creating easy-to-use but powerful authoring tools or authoring platforms  in the following areas of virtual world design:

1) Quests (e.g., user-created tasks that include relevant text, scripted encounters or sequences, NPCs, and rewards, but that do not deform or change a persistent environment permanently)
2) Objects that are purely aesthetic or decorative
3) Objects that can alter or effect a persistent environment if used, that have scripts attached to them
4) Skins or clothing for avatars
5) New emotes or animations on established character models
6) Entirely new character models with unique animations
7) Unique and persistent embeddings of sound, pictures or moving images obtained from pre-existing external sources
8) Unique AI configurations  for particular  creatures or NPCs
9)  Sub-environments within a virtual world (e.g., the interior of a building, with all its objects, non-player inhabitants and so on)
10)  User-generated parameters for physical action within the virtual world (e.g., authoring tools that let users specify the local force of gravity)
11) Entire regions, areas or zones of a persistent virtual world

What I'm especially interested in here is how difficult it might be to create authoring tools that would require little specialized knowledge but that might allow players to go from a concept or idea to a finished feature without sharply limiting their choices to a small menu of objects or textures that the tool makes available. E.g., I understand that you could easily  allow almost anyone to reskin an avatar if you made a tool that had a pull-down menu that consisted of "blue, green or yellow"--but how difficult might it be to have a customization tool that had 500 color choices, or allowed people to easily upload textures from a wide variety of visual samples in a common file format.

Where there are existing author tools for these purposes in an existing virtual world (Second Life, again), are there plausible ways to make them either simpler or more powerful? Again, leaving aside the question of whether you actually want to do so, whether it's a good idea to do that? Also leaving aside intellectual property problems that follow on a number of these (e.g., whether an authoring tool that allows embedding of sound in a persistent world is going to lead to lots of copyright violations.)

Comments

1.

Development is always a balancing act between cost, time, and quality.

Also given any tool, it locks you into a paradigm or development style, i.e. a text editor/compiler you can create anything, but takes time, a gui rad tool is fast but then is inflexible in what it can do.

I view tools as an evoluationary progression, where it takes time to understand and develop. Given objects, once upon a time you sketched designs with paper and pencil using compasses and stencils. That has become automated in 2D and then into 3D. Now I can use a web page, design a 3D object, and submit it and have it manufactuered and sent to me.

[epredator]

2.

It will be interesting to see how the sort of user created content tools that we get to see a glimpse of with Little Big Planet will knock on to the wider metaverse environments.
Simple, yet creative controls not requiring great technical skill to operate, yet needing creative vision and talent to be effective sound very promising.
I think this sort of tooling fits in with many of you list of ten.

[Gene Endrody]

3.

I was actually going to say something along the same lines (although Little Big Planet is new to me).

When I read "authoring tools" I immediately assumed these were offline tools as opposed to features integrated into the VW. Creation needs to be an integral part of the VW or game mechanic to encourage more people to be creators. It should not be something you do offline and definitely not something you do in generic tools like Maya or Photoshop. When users have control of the parameters of procedurally generated content, they may not have the flexibility of offline tools, however it's easier and more fun. Character creation in City of Heroes is a current example of some steps in the right direction. Spore is also a great example of what can happen when you mix ideas of user generated content with procedurally generated content.

[Mike Rozak]

4.

Random comments:

- http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/PersonalVirtualWorlds.htm

- Having nearly built a tookit (or rather, being in the process of building one - toolkits take forever), I'll point out that you're greatly simplifying the work that an author needs to do and/or that the toolkit needs to handle. I can go into excruciating detail if you wish.

[Timothy Burke]

5.

If you're able to, that might be very useful.

I think I know what you're getting at, though. This seems to me to be a conceptual problem with the entire idea of an "author tool", actually.

On one hand, you could say that html or xml is an "author tool". On the other hand, you could say that a menu in Photoshop that allows you to put a variety of effects over a photograph is an author tool.

Those two things are not the same, but either is potentially the kind of thing a developer could try to implement in a virtual world environment. On one hand, if you wanted to allow players to set tasks or quests for other players, you could do it through an interface with set choices: how many players? kill quest or drop quest? probability of drop or number of targets that must be killed? reward (fixed by relation to level of creatures killed). On the other hand, you could try to create some kind of authoring language that mediated access to the underlying code of the VW that allowed players to create quests in a much more open-ended way.

That's the kind of thing that I think must require immensely complicated work for the toolkit and the author--that there isn't any way beyond a certain level to simplify what has to be done. That's what struck me about the original Neverwinter Nights: it had two levels of authoring. The first was just "you can place tiles and monsters in a module you're designing". But for the second level of authoring, "you can script elaborate sequences of action to follow on particular events", they pretty much said, "You're going to have to do that in simplified C++ syntax, guys".

[epredator]

6.

The extensibility of any platform of any sort becomes key here. As you point out with neverwinter nights, high level user clip art, moving down to code.
To have an open platform with ability to exert creative control allows for the creation of other toolkits and inventive tool suppliers and 3rd parties.
Games designers (and business application designers) will use lots of techniques to describe the product, be it plot, level design or fundamental concepts. Storyboards, sketches and scripts all get written as part of the design process.
It would seem that that level of description and tooling seldom arrives to a user and customizer of a game system. We have development kits, bells and whistles, layout tools etc. but less in the way of expressive design.
I suspect that is because modding and content creation up to now has been the preserve of us techies and we like SDK's
So I agree that it would be interesting for languages to develop to describe this sort of quest content. It may be a teicky task just as business languages are still attempting to allow non technical business people to express their wishes.
We are in a mashup culture though, so it could happen with the right seeds being placed.

[John Rice]

7.

From an educator’s standpoint, this is an interesting post because I’ve always maintained that videogames must be highly customizable in order to become widespread in the classroom. We all seem to hate what PowerPoint has done to lectures, but many teachers and professors use PowerPoint in part because it is completely customizable in content.

I agree NWN seems very popular with classroom teachers these days … C.S. Loh over at Southern Illinois got a nice article in his local paper recently about his graduate class training teachers how to use NWN in the classroom. But, it is still like Timothy Burke said, “I think [it] must require immensely complicated work for the toolkit and the author.” And, the NWN editor can get complicated, especially for novices to programming.

So, when the PowerPoint equivalent of game editors gets here, I think we’re likely to see more custom games in the classroom. OTOH, the quality of the games might be on par with the quality of all those PowerPoint slides.

[Dave Levinson]

8.

This is a great topic and one that I will be speaking on next week. Being a game developer for many years, I became familiar with off-the-shelf and proprietary tools. Integrating and organizing these content assets using said tools was a constant challenge. The market responded with solutions, but many firms still write their own.

Virtual world development is more difficult than games, IMHO. While I expect the market to offer content creation and management tools for this space, proprietary needs are higher than ever before. I actually have a project earmarked to address this need for my company now. While I expect valuable tools to come to market in the coming years, this space will remain a challenge.

Lastly, there are existing solutions that can be leveraged in these worlds today. For example, one of our clients converts digital photographs to avatar face maps. Their eight year old technology has been leveraged in such a way to bring automated solutions to users. I expect this to be a growing trend.

[Gene Endrody]

9.

"I'll point out that you're greatly simplifying the work that an author needs to do."

Just a quick response. I'm not naive to the complexity of tool design and I'm not saying it is simple, however some of the complexity come from some of the assumptions you work with from day one. The first mistake is to try to take something typical of the tools division of a game company, intended for internal artist or designers, and tighten that up for an end user. If you have an existing engine or art pipeline, it's likely you're already too late in the process. What I'm talking about is using procedural content generation and exposing those parameters to the user - making the procedural content generation the basis for creating the content and discarding much of the traditional pipeline. This is what Spore seems to be doing. I will acknowledge that Spore is a monumental effort, however less ambitious efforts, like Little Big Planet, are possible. Trying to make user tools for a game like World of Warcraft - now that's hard. Building something unique where creation is part of the game experience and the focus is not on next-gen visuals - although still difficult, it's a more realistic challenge.

[Gene Endrody]

10.

Just so you don't think I'm speaking out of my ass, Sherwood Dungeon uses procedural content generation extensively. Not for UGC, but as a tool to limit download size (another benefit that PCG offers). Although Sherwood's not a big game, it certainly feels bigger than the 2 MB download would imply.

[Mike Rozak]

11.

Procedural content is in itself an art. A lot of times it doesn't do what the author wants to do what the author wants/expects it to do. Just read all the AI anecodotes out there, such as those for Oblivon

[Harvey Fox]

12.

For the written word, it's nice to have modern word processing (I'm old enough to remember mechanical typewriters), and speech recognition & OCR so that you can dictate info and have the computer mark it up for you. Even this level of comfort isn't error-free at the moment. The technology is still immature, but we're getting there.

Designing games is easily a few orders of magnitude harder than writing a (wiki) article, and our written (and coding) languages are hard pressed to accomplish the task in an efficient and timely manner.

Still, I dream of a day when expert-systems & speech parsers will allow us to communicate with AI-enabled applications, allowing us to build, review, fine-tune, and simulate our designs. All in real time, in an "on the fly" manner.

I don't think this is the realm of science fiction, but I doubt that we're "there yet", either. I remember when all "good" (i.e. fast enough to be usable) programs were hand coded in assembler. As computing power increased, we could afford to be less efficient in final code output, and focus more on "readable" design interface. You saw a movement to C (and its variants), and more recently to higher level languages and scripting languages for serious development (python comes to mind), as ever increasing computer power allows us to get away with even less efficient code as a trade-off for a more intuitive design process.

This process will hopefully continue, until the process where designing a game (or a car, circuitboard, hydro dam, etc.) will become a completely intuitive process, where we "chat" with an expert system about what parameters we would like, and fine tune it by more chatting and visual pointing tools. A bit like Gene Roddenberry's vision of chatting with a powerful computer to set up the parameters for a holodeck program.

I know of very few languages that are a relatively simple, intuitive, high-level, end-to-end solution for the creation of virtual worlds, but you might want to check out the DM language for the Byond engine (www.byond.com). Byond has its limits (2D tiles, slow, poor up-scaling) but I think the DM language is an important good direction in the process. Studying that langauge, independant of the underlying engine's limits, might yield some insight. I would hope that someday, either DM (or something DM-like) would envolve into a more general purpose language, to be plugged into any game design management engine, much as we have SQL today for dbms.

If the DM language had better tools available to it(3D rendered environments, better multiplayer scaling, SQL clustered-dbms plug-ins, etc.) and had a nice expert system pasted on top of it, then that would begin to approach what I am attempting to describe.

In the "real world" of today, we have examples like Byond, Realmcrafter, Torque, Kaneva, Multiverse ... all that are doing important first steps towards realizing that eventual goal, where "telling" a game story will be similar to the stories our ancestors told around the cook-fires, thousands of years ago. At least, that's my dream. Is it yours, too?

[Timothy Burke]

13.

Yes, absolutely, Harvey, that is also what I hope for. And it may be that will take AI that can bridge between "I want some green-skinned humanoids, very muscular, hybrid of Nordic and Mongul weapons and clothing" and actual character models. As well as a very different kind of global arrangement of intellectual property where a huge variety of images, sound and so on are available for such an AI to draw upon in response to such a request.

[CherryBomb]

14.

Hoping that easier-to-use tools will produce better art is optimistic. To go back to your analogy with writing, consider that the latest advance has been text messaging.

[Timothy Burke]

15.

Cherry, I think that up to a point, you're right. What the Internet has done in part is reveal that everyone has something they can and will write, but that most of it is not worth reading.

But on the other hand, lowering the barriers to publication did allow a significant number of writers to appear to general view who never would have been able to access old-style publishing or the mainstream media. It also revealed how stale certain kinds of writing really were, and how much they were controlled by a kind of inbred consensus.

So that's what I'd hope for with virtual worlds and games: an opening to creators who are presently unable or unwilling to master the current technically daunting toolkit and an exposure of some of the inbred creative patterns that presently exist within the industry.

[Alex]

16.

There is no reason why scripting needed to create or modify procedural 3D world can not be plain English language - or Excel tables batch-converted into 3D worlds (X3D) - done this on a smaller scale - non-tech users were pretty happy.