The Trainz Experience

John Banks - academic and ACID researcher as well as Auran staff member - is next, talking more about the Trainz experience in particular. He notes that there is a certain amount of accountability of the games publisher towards the game users, stemming from the massive development efforts which the users have made. There is an emergence of new ecologies of production here: of new kinds of distributed organisations and ad-hoc networks. In John Hartley's words, there is a value drift, a blurring of barriers between producers and consumers - a new participatory culture (Henry Jenkins term) is emerging.

Fans have traditionally had a troubled relationship with the mass media and consumer capitalism, being peasants rather than proprietors and begging the IP holders for content; this has now changed as a qualitatively different transaction space has emerged. There are new media tools, DIY media production cultures, and economic trends which favour media convergence that have emerged over the past decade or so.

John now hands over briefly to his colleague Keith Done, who provides a brief history of (offline) games, tracking the gradual evolvement of games and the increasing involvement of players as co-creators. One key development here was the emergence of role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons - yet despite the significant success of the D&D model, the parent company TSR ultimately failed as it didn't manage to harness its gamers' creativity in developing game scenarios. This is an important cautionary tale for games developers today, and shows the drive for co-creation has a long history.

As John continues again, he details the development of the Trainz product, which involved the users in great detail early on. Auran staff were staggered by the amount of detail provided by the fans in their efforts to improve the game's content, and the company now has come to regard its Trainz product as a platform for user creativity, rather than a complete proprietary package in its own right. Some fans have even sold their own creations commercially as independent Trainz add-on packages.

Auran, in other words, has been relatively liberal in its approach to fan content licencing - it does negotiate with fans if it aims to use their content in its products, and in turn allows fans to commercialise their own content independently of Auran. But in addition to such company-fan relations there are also interesting conflicts amongst the fans themselves (where fans build on one another's contributions without proper attribution or against explicitly stated requests): in this new co-creative environment intellectual property disputes are not limited to the traditional copyright holders only! As John puts it, then, these are 'messy, unruly networks'.