[LibrePlanet-US-MA] Steal This Film II + Little Big Planet = Paradigm Shift?

[Wesley Hirsch]

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So I've been playing Little Big Planet recently, which got me thinking.

Who here has seen Steal this Film II?  I'm talking about the second
version which was an awesome documentary about free information, not the
first which was a recap of the raid on ThePirateBay servers.  Anyways,
in the film, the make the rather interesting of statement that we, as a
culture, are moving away from the idea of hierarchies, and towards the
the idea of communal sharing.  The film discusses this to great length,
but the important point is that as we change our idea of community, the
barrier for entry changes.  With the advent of the Internet, and more
recently, with the advent of social media sites, we're starting to
create a world where in order to be a part of the community, not only do
you have to consume media/culture, you also have to create it.  Granted,
this idea has been around for a long time, but it hasn't been very
mainstream.  The introduction of sties like YouTube, and Wikipedia
changed how the general public thinks about media, and who has the
rights to use it.  Children are now growing up in a world that's based
upon sharing with each other, to a much greater degree than ever before.
 We, as a libre-planet group are doing our best to further that, but
I've noticed these small changes happening everywhere.

Little Big Planet is the one that got me thinking, with the announcement
of LBP2, and as I'm playing LBP1, I've noticed just how much innovation
there is in the user created levels, and almost to the extreme, how much
sharing there is.  The game's engine allows you to build practically
anything, while there are some limitations, the game itself is basically
a physics simulator.  What makes the game great though is the "Capture
Object" tool.  Once you've created an object, out of whatever material
you wish, you can capture it, almost like a copy-paste mechanism, but
for objects.  The best part is that once you've captured an item like
this, not only can you reuse it, but you can place the object into your
levels in the form of an object-bubble, which allows other users to use
that object.  This concept astounded me when I first found it, my
thoughts were somewhere along the lines of "This is exactly like
open-source.  This is how free software works."

In truth, the system is not truly free, as it requires both owning a
Playstation 3, and the game itself, which goes for about $30 right now,
as well as using the proprietary Playstation Network, but it got me
thinking.  Can we, as a community, push for more games along these
lines?  LBP has exposed the gamers market to the core ideas behind free
software.  Can we push it one step further, and make this the norm,
rather than the exception?  Right now, all console based network games
run on their respective parent companies' networks, but this is not a
limitation, just a choice.  The platforms themselves have the ability to
connect to the internet, generically.  What if there was a game that ran
it's content servers off of whatever server you chose?  If the software
to run the server were open-source, and release for free usage, we could
build a multitude of nodes.  Assume for the moment that this game is
LBP, as I'm already stretching my analogy enough.  If users were able to
run their own servers, not only would the content be theirs, and not
Sony's, but the network would be extremely resistant to outages, and
people could change how the game interacts with the players, by changing
how the server interacts with the game.  Connect my (soon to be, as soon
as they release it) diaspora node to my levels.  Whenever I'm in game,
people could see that in diaspora, and click a link which would give
them a way to hop right in to my game.  Hell, with enough tinkering, I
could probably turn an actual real time IRC chat into a level.  Dodge
the incoming text, and such.  Now imagine playing such a level on a
channel like #ubuntu on freenode or something.

Obviously, such an undertaking is not to be taken lightly, and will
probably be met with massive resistance from all of the big game
companies.  Such is, unfortunately, the nature of humanity and control.
 Once you have control over something, you don't want to lose it.  But
if games designed around changing the paradigm of this fundamental split
between creator and consumer start to become common, it will be much
easier to loosen other areas of control.

One of my favorite things is to point out to someone that that
"open-source stuff [I] keep talking about", is in fact the same thing
they're doing, only in terms of levels for a game or something.  Getting
to do so more would be the best :D.

- --Wesley Hirsch

PS.  I'm posting this here as the primary, but I'm also gonna reproduce
this on my blog for posterity/visibility, so feel free to comment at
either location.
http://blog.shishire.com

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