Players Will Surprise You

That’s why EA Maxis has endeavored to begin community outreach initiatives prior to a game’s launch, such as when the Creature Creator was released for free well ahead of Spore‘s launch. “What happens is this incredible transformative process,” Bradshaw says. “The ingenuity of our players will take things well beyond what we’ve even considered.”

For example, Spore players had a means of commenting back and forth to each other about creations in Spore. “One day, one player created a mailbox… that was a creature, and said, ‘this will be your means of communicating with me.’ The next thing we saw was more and more mailbox creatures… until nearly every player had a mailbox creature.”

In that way, says Bradshaw, players are liable to design play in ways the designers could not have even foreseen. Similarly, player advocates naturally emerge from within the Spore community, says Bradshaw, to police forums, advocate for desired features, demand patches and point out bugs.

“I hope that people here starting to make games for change start to look at these kinds of practices within gaming,” Bradshaw says. “We intuitively understand that games are a vehicle for learning and behavior change –” but game design is still needed.

According to Bradshaw, Spore‘s players were able to become designers, community leaders and advocates without being instructed or shepherded by the developers because they’re given both tools and freedom. “For me, ‘sandbox’ is… a description of the types of games I’ve worked on that I think has a basis in creating imaginative play,” she explains.

Lucy has a lot more to share with you if you visit the article at Gamasutra!