| ▲ | DonHopkins 3 days ago | |
Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals. I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison). We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release. https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow https://archive.org/details/sim-show Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time). https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument... Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools. The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with. Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex. SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios: Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides) | ||