Any careful development or thoughtful planning on the part of anyone making games can be undone in one fell swoop from every game’s worst possible enemy.  Their nemesis.  Their one stumbling block on the way to greatness.

The player.

Any player has a unique ability to completely and utterly destroy any game.  There are several ways they can do this with some of the most popular methods being to play another game along the lines of making sure everyone else isn’t having fun, but the one that can scupper just about anything, online or offline, is where the player is given free reign to exercise their creativity.

Playing Space Marine at the preview event I went along to the other day (and look, here is my write up over at Bit-Tech), I started thinking about how the developers must dread players when we started playing the multiplayer part of the game.  Space Marine comes with the option to customize your power armoured super soldier down to the colours of individual parts of armour.  The intention here is that you can create unique designs or anything you might have painted if you happen to have been a fan of the miniatures.  The reality in most cases is however wildly different.

The reality struck me about the same time that three other space marines stuck me with their various melee weapons and all I could see what a rainbow coloured blur of garish armour ranging from lime green to neon pink via all the colours, some of which might have been new to me.

As hilarious as being brutally murdered by the Emperor’s Pride was and the image of a grim frightening soldier wielding a chainsaw garbed in what can only be described as Soho colours inspiring more than a couple bemused smiles, it does damage a core part of the multiplayer game.  As it is a team game, you need to be able to identify in a split second whether or not what you’re looking at is an enemy or not.

The difference between the two sides in Space Marine’s multiplayer is obvious close up with superb work going into the art assets, but at a distance, if the loyalists and the followers of Chaos are both rocking up looking like a unicorn has thrown up on them, then you’re often going to mistake friend for foe and vice versa.

It’s a problem that lots of games are starting to stumble on.  Anything with user generated content is going to be a bit of a minefield and has to come with a very prominent warning that whilst something like Little Big Planet or Spore might be rated as such to let everyone play, letting other people’s creations into your world significantly increases the chances of something phallic appearing in your game world.

It pains me to admit it, but your average player is not creative.  Even the ones who think they’re creative are not creative.  There certainly isn’t a huge amount of design sense shared among the gaming community, so when you are presented with such a mind blowing list of customisation options for your game, the first thing that most people will try to do is to use all of it at once.

If you let players have any control over their game world, then you’re letting yourself in for a mess if you’re not careful.

Here’s the interesting thing though:  That mess can make the game so much more memorable than it would have been without it and for the few times that you do unearth an amazing design talent lurking in your player base, it’s probably worth the chapter-worth of garish Space Marines.  Anyone who has played around with Minecraft for long enough will tell you they have seen things that make their heads spin.

I like user generated content and I think it’s a wonderful direction for games to take.  I’m also all for the idea that gamers can make games themselves, as evidenced by my mediocre experiments in creating the most bug ridden and unplayable pieces of software imaginable.  At the same time, I have the utmost sympathy for any designer who’s painstakingly planned project is undone single handily by a few simple player choices.