Now, few would ever bother accusing Microsoft of modesty. And there was certainly little of it from the Software Satan's gaming impresario J. Allard's recent keynote on the next generation XBOX. Leaving aside the standard ambit claims to being the future home entertainment hub, one interesting tidbit was the plans to provide an e-commerce platform for consumer generated game modifications. Entering your initials in the top score list is one thing, but selling your personalised armour to other players? Actually, its not so crazy an idea.
Fan made modifications to games is nothing new. Popular mods such as Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, not only radically change the setting and look of their original games, but they can often dramatically increase sales and propel their amateur developers into gaming celebrity. No wonder that consumer mods are becoming big business. New software distribution plaforms such as Valve Software's 'Steam' allows customers to download new game titles via the internet. Steam was very much designed with consumer generated content distribution in mind, and will bundle mods with commercial releases to provide fans a channel to profit from their development work.
Still, it is one thing to be a closet genius games programmer, and another to expect your average XBOX console owner to take advantage of a marketplace for gaming items. The real forerunner for the future of in-game commerce comes not from 3D shooters, but MMPORGS or massive(ly) multiplayer online games in which players jointly create and play in entire virtual worlds.
One such system, Second Life, which has the backing of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Benchmark Capital, has an active economy in which players reguarly trade virtual items of clothing, furniture, vehicles and houses which are created in-game. There is a floating exchange rate of the in game currency - Lindens - and the US dollar, which allows successful players to cash out into reality. And there is perhaps no more spectacular example than an Australian resident called Kermitt Quirk, who recently managed to sell the real world rights to his intensely popular virtual board game Tringo to another player Sean Ryan, who also happened to be the former CEO of Real Networks. And so, a game originally created in virtual reality had been sold for commercial distribution outside it.
The game industry has come a long way since Pong, but the immense consumer appetite for inventive interactive entertainment has certainly not changed. It is entirely possible that as gaming systems and platforms become more immersive and sophisticated they will become the everyday overlay for many people to the world of information and personal interaction, rather than the web browsers and chat programs used today. In that scenario, it is not Windows you have to worry about anymore, but Pandora's Xbox sitting under your TV.
