Design Goals IV: Inclusivity and Exclusivity

This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com

One of Sim City 4's greatest strengths as been its capacity for being modded. The chance to create our own content, to see it in game, and to contribute to the wider community has doubtless extended the title's life by many years. Indeed, the huge universe of custom content available for Sim City 4 has become a substantial asset of the game, which any competitor has to take into account. But what is an asset in some ways is a liability in others.

As the amount of custom content for Sim City 4 has grown, there has been a corresponding increase in opacity and confusion for the end user. While the community does it's best to guide and assist people in getting the most necessary and best of the custom content out there, the sheer mass of what's available presents the would-be user with a lot of noise to tune out. This is especially true when you consider that, as is inevitable with fan-created content, the high-quality assets are mixed with those of middling or even poor quality. For someone getting started with a fresh Sim City 4 installation, adding the custom content that constitutes so much of the game's improvement over the years has become a significant investment of time and effort; and I suspect there are people who have not bothered as a result, on the assumption that all the extra work is simply not worth it.

For the next game, we will have to balance two opposing ideas: Inclusivity and Exclusivity. The game has to be inclusive in the sense that anyone should be able to create content and add it to the game, as well as make it available to others. But there should also be an element of exclusivity: a way to filter the noise from the mass of community content and select the best of the community offerings. Furthermore, this process shouldn't require a large investment of player time, or specialized knowledge (e.g., knowing individual modder's reputations).

There are a couple different tools at our disposal to address this balance:

Community Design Standards: This is something I intend to expand on more, but in general I think there will need to be a set of agreed-upon standards for community content. Potentially this would be one job for the art director and lead designer of the initial development team. In the area of custom buildings, for example, there could be a standard with regard to things like poly count limits for building types, the inclusion of all necessary texture maps (normal, specular, etc.), or inclusion of alternate states (night, dilapidated, abandoned, etc.). Of course modders would be free to do whatever they want, but there could be a sort of official "seal of approval" for those assets that meet the standard.

Tools For Organizing Custom Content: The release of the game could also feature a sort of "asset browser," a framework for both viewing the user's current assets and accessing a repository of community content (or links to community content if that proves too unwieldy). Individual contributions could be tagged to help users isolate the specific kind of content they want to include in their game. The STEX and LEX use a similar system, but this model would go further in that it would allow users to trivially select, download, and install content, which would then appear in the appropriate UI location; confusing details like dependencies would be handled automatically by the software. A good modelto look towould be iTunes, or Ubuntu's Synaptic package manager. Such a system could be applied to all custom assets if the modular design principle is adhered to: not only buildings, but mods and other customizations could be handled the same way.

Community Ratings: This goes without saying, but a sound system of community feedback is one of the best tools for letting the cream float to the top. Users would be able to sort custom offerings by quality rating, or perhaps by several different categories of rating, and see what other players recommend.

Community content is central to the concept of a community game, so it will be important to allow it to proliferate without negatively impacting the game experience or creating a burden for the player.