Communities & level editing, probable history

[Simon]

Hi,

You have a computer game, and suddenly level editors become available. Kieran observed a common pattern for how communities grow around level editing. There are three ages.

Editor becomes available: Early adopters jump on the new tech. It's very exciting to see what you can do in the editor, and it's satisfying to build anything at all. Every level has a brand new idea and is published immediately. Quality varies widely: Most of the levels turn out garbage later. Some levels are already excellent. Some levels highlight quirks in the engine.

Extreme levels, bug examples: After the editor has been available for a while, everybody has a rough grasp on the design space. The editor enables researching the finer details, you can build levels to see what the game engine can do. The community builds trimmed levels that showcase bugs in the engine. Some members release insanely hard levels to push both the engine and the design space to its limits. This is still bad level design by later standards, but there are no standards yet.

Quality: The novelty wears off, level releases become less frequent. New publications consolidate the findings of the earlier stages. Designers ignore a part of the design space to focus on select interesting ideas. Fun levels need not be hard, but it has taken until now to find the alternatives. Even new members observe what the established community likes, and builds higher-quality levels from the get-go.

Keywords to find this article: culture, Kieran's 3-step-theory, 3-step-culture, musings on level design, musings on level editors

-- Simon

[nin10doadict]

Sounds about right except for the 'build high quality levels from the get-go' part because pretty much everyone is going to make a few levels that are hot steamy garbage when they're just starting out. Until they pick up on the quality that the community has established and gain some experience with level design themselves, most people are going to make a few stinkers. I feel like I am a good example of this; while Lemmings Squared does have some good levels, it has its share of terrible ones too. Having gained more experience and feedback, I feel like Casualemmings has a lot fewer levels that are objectively bad.

[mobius]

the chips challenge community has gone through the exactly identical pattern. That game also has it's share of incredible glitches.

I suspect the Mario world has too. Kaizo mario is pretty old now, not sure when it was released though. Level editors have been around there for a long time too. I've seen some really good packs recently.