Hi Sean,
In the Mail Order Monsters post you talk about creating a “Mii monster”. I think that’s treading dangerously close to user generated content. Making a Mii is something everybody can do, it doesn’t require creativity since you already know what you’re making: What you see in the mirror. Of course there are many people who take it further, recreate celebrities or even the most unlikely constructs (as can be seen on the Check Mii Out channel) but those are still the vast minority. When you task a random person who just made a Mii to make a monster as well they’ll just be stumped and have no idea what to make. Creating a fantasy construct is not an easy task, even if you have an idea of what to make you’d still have to implement it. What might work is a Mii Pet that lets people add their real life pets because it gives them an original to work from (if they have a pet) but pets don’t lend themselves to these bit-by-bit creation systems.
Nintendo already has tons of investment in these editors. Might as well put them to use somehow.
Let us look at something like Spore. The idea of specifying which appendage to add on and what stat bar to ‘buff’ isn’t user-generated content. This happens all the time in RPGs. Designing your own monster in Spore wasn’t user-generated content. You design your ‘character’ in many games.
But when playing Spore, the game felt very empty, very hollow. It didn’t really feel as if you were on a planet.
In Dragon Quest terms, the ‘user generated content’ would not be in how you choose to upgrade your character or designing your character in general. The ‘user generated content’ would be the dungeons, the NPCs, and cities all being designed by someone else. The experience would be a mess and feel very shallow, as Spore felt.
I’m not against editors in general. I love editors as found in Lode Runner or RTS games. But editors and other people’s work were supplement to the professional content. They were not meant to replace the professional content.
For example, if a 2d Mario came out that had a level editor, I’d think that cool. If a 2d Mario came out that had a level editor and no content from Nintendo, I’d be angrier than Hell.
My Monster Mii idea was that if you can customize the protagonist, why not the antagonist? I’d love to fight a T-Rex with tentacles that breathed fire. Granted, that may not be what most Wii Sports players would want. But I think it is an interesting idea.
What if you could take all the bits and parts of the Mario villains and mix and match, not unlike a Mr. Potato Head? You could have koopa troopers be flying out of cannons like the Bullet Bills. You could decide to put the para-wings on a Goomba (oh wait, Nintendo has done that already), how about a Flying Hammer Brother?
I find that I enjoy the Mii making process. However, once I have my Mii, I do not need another one. I have no reason to re-visit the Mii Plaza. However, if I were making little monsters or something, I’d have a reason to visit continuously.