作者：Jedrzej Czarnota

近来，数字游戏的共同创造，或者数字游戏开发中以及发行后整合用户创造性过程都成为商业文学中越来越重要的元素。这主要归功于它在完善数字游戏的市场绩效以及创造新业务模式的逐渐觉醒。它的潜在原理是：用户拥有数字游戏公司所不具有的技能和知识，或者这是这些公司很难获取的（从公司的努力程度来看）。因此，数字游戏公司将开始了解用户社区创造剩余价值的能力。而这些用户将不再只是充当着消费者，同时还将扮演着制作人的角色。

毕竟比起公司，数字游戏消费者（与所有消费者一样）更清楚自己的需求和喜好。而因为一些“棘手”的原因—-即从公司到消费者质之间的转换非常昂贵，并且在途中很容易造成消息流失的情况，数字游戏公司总是很难去获取有关消费者需求的信息（理论上来看，消费者总是知道自己想要什么，而与此同时公司则需要花费大量资金进行市场研究，焦点测试，以及民意调查等等）。同时，数字游戏公司还必须清楚消费者的喜好，因为他们需要管理（并减少）需求不确定性而有效地平衡游戏制作的风险（否则将会提升开发成本；数字游戏公司必须确保自己的投资能够获得补偿）。如此便说明，消费者可以通过创造自己的作品解决所有的这些问题—-他们将创造出满足自己需求，同时也确保公司无需为产品未来需求担忧的内容。不幸的是，作为创造性产业，数字游戏产业并不是受需求所推动，相反地，这是受到“需求前供应”的推动，即一款数字游戏会在未考虑未来消费者是否会“喜欢”（需要）的前提下诞生并进行销售。这也是为何共同创造对于数字游戏公司来说如此重要—-这能帮助他们在游戏发行后即时对消费者的需求即时做出反应，所以在消费者知晓了自己在这个受“需求前供应”驱动的市场的需求时，游戏公司便可以通过避免那些“棘手”的原因而获取利益。

co-creation(from ekaterinawalter)

共同创造的对象不只是关于内容

像Steam Workshop等平台和《无冬之夜》等游戏便是这种做法的领头军，并且我们也越来越清楚滴看到消费者在电子游戏中创造内容的重要作用。如果数字游戏公司可以做出正确的决策并密切注意这样的内容开发，他们便可以从与玩家的共同创造中获取巨大的利益，同时玩家也能够玩到自己所喜欢的游戏。基于共同创造，消费者可以享受更多的游戏内容，并且这些内容大多都是由消费者社区所创造的。另一方面，公司将提供更受市场欢迎的内容，即不仅能够让更多消费者前来购买游戏，同时也能吸引更多新玩家并长期挽留住用户。

这不单是消费者可以帮助数字游戏公司创造的内容。举个例子来说，这已经成为了一个广泛的产业实践，即在新游戏发行前邀请用户进行测试。这同时也是共同创造的一种形式，消费者可以利用业余时间去完善他们在之后可能会购买的游戏（没有补偿）。这同样也适用于将自己组织的MMOG玩家群组带到公会，公司或其它没有玩家合作和竞争，或者没有任何多人游戏的社会结构中。这些情况都是取决于不同的数字游戏规模，即有些游戏本身偏向技术性，有些更注重内容，还有些需要涉及游戏设计。

随着共同创造在数字游戏产业中扮演着越来越重要的角色，有些人便开始好奇消费者在这一过程中的作用。数字游戏公司是否能在缺少时间（或没有兴趣，没有资本，甚至是因为这些工作被推到较后边）的情况下使用消费者和共同创造过程去完成一些卑微的工作和平凡的职责？或者消费者的共同创造潜力是否超越了这些简单的工作？如果最终证明消费者能够带来富有创造性的内容，“游戏的显著完善”，能够让开发者眼前一亮的内容，甚至能将游戏带向一个全新方向，那结果又是怎样？

我们将在本篇文章中着眼于共同创造的创造性结果以及消费者是否能够带来渐进性创新和根本性创新。

渐进性创新和根本性创新

我们应该避免利用共同创造让用户去制作一些平凡的内容，或承担一些卑微的任务。当然了，理解共同创造能够更好地适应数字游戏公司当前的作用，就像它代表的是一种简单的外包劳动力。不幸的是，这种思维模式将导致我们认为消费者不能够创造任何创新内容—-不管是渐进性（即完善公司当前的设计而不是具有突破性的游戏设计或制作）或根本性创新（我们未曾在游戏中看过的真正的创新内容）。的确，如果我们是一家数字游戏公司，我们便很有可能遗漏掉计算机和电子游戏的联合创造过程所带来的潜在利益。

创造性是共同创造的本质。通过执行测试新作品等非创造性工作而邀请消费者共同创造游戏将有可能带来创新内容（例如测试者可以识别出一行出错的代码并进行修改，提出一个更好的解决方法—-但这都需要测试者能够访问这一代码）。基于公司所采取的方法以及这是否能够激发消费者的创造性，共同创造过程的创新程度也会有所不同。换句话说，如果数字游戏公司在这一过程中并未足够开放，共同创造便不可能具有创新性。这种开发包括与消费者社区简单的社交互动，如在特定的平台上交换创造性，或者提供给消费者其自身的开发工具，并分享一些游戏代码等。

当前关于使用共同创造较为流行的方法便是引导消费者对游戏元素做出贡献（例如通过创造性开发工具），即得到游戏公司的认可（如公司允许消费者面向特定市场为自己的角色创造并销售新装备）。这一方法不仅能够避免消费者胡乱摆弄游戏（游戏邦注：如破坏产品的图像从而降低了它的市场性能，或引起公司的运行问题）所造成的破坏，同时还能够有效地管理并控制共同创造过程。在这种情况下，我们注意到一种权衡：消费者的创造性是有限的（他们只能在公司所设定的范围内进行创造），不过这也将减少对于公司或市场供应内容的破坏。在这种情况下很难做到根本性创新。不过渐进性创新就容易多了，例如专心的消费者会贡献大量时间去创造任务，这甚至超越了那些由游戏开发者自己所创造的内容（就像《无冬之夜》中倍受欢迎的任务便是使用Forge工具所开发的）。

尽管如此，工具集的使用并不是共同创造的唯一模式，就像内容不是共同创造的数字游戏的唯一目标一样。就像我们便看过来自用户社区的成员通过构建游戏模组而实现了新游戏设计的根本性创新（如IceFrog的《DOTA》便是完全转变自《魔兽争霸3》，这就是一种根本性创新）。玩家可以找到意外的方法去玩游戏，因此他们也能够创造出新的游戏模式，改变过去的游戏的使用方式以及吸引玩家的原因（就像《魔兽世界》中暴雪制裁和暴雪禁止经济）。此外，根据相关文献，玩家开发不仅是外部辅助，同时也是游戏开发中核心艺术资产，测试用户能够有效完善游戏代码，而消费者社区将给数字游戏公司带来巨大的压力，从游戏开发和改变方向来看（如著名的《EVE Online》的Monoclegate事件）。

公司开放或封闭将决定难度级别

我们发现一些数字游戏公司才开始射击这个全新的领域，即与消费者共同创造游戏。这里主要有2大结论：首先，共同创造所得出的渐进性创新或根本性创新是取决于数字游戏公司是否能够足够开放地将专利资产呈现在消费者面前。公司还能够为与游戏制作相关的社区创造渠道，或为消费者对游戏开发和制作的贡献创造模式。我们可以从Arakji和Lang（2007年）的作品中看到这点，他们鼓励共同创造，并由数字游戏公司进行推广，从而直接影响着最终结果（质量和声誉）。

其次，将共同创造作为一种有价值的工具用于游戏开发和制作中时，数字游戏公司将开始迎来一些较轻松且风险较低的任务，这将能够有效地完善开发者的最初设计。将创新（特别是根本性创新）作为共同创造过程的输出内容其实很困难。提高创新的根本性可能会导致共同创造对游戏背离了开发者最初的观点，因此给公司带来更多挑战。让我们着眼于这些挑战。

结尾：公司所面临的新挑战

共同创造并不是个能够轻松整合的过程。我们总是很难将公司的利益与社区的喜好，心愿和想法相匹配。就像在文献中，消费者便不知道自己想要什么类型的市场供应品—-消费者社区是一个水平连接的集体，并不存在自上而下的结构。此外，创造性产业是受到需要前供应所推动（在一款游戏发行前消费者并不会去喜欢它，只有在尝试过后才知道喜不喜欢）。同时消费者也不能在数字游戏产业中进行根本性创新（如果任天堂完全听从粉丝，他们便不会创造出Wii），因为这将把公司限制在当前的市场轨道中。因此公司在数字游戏开发中的控制是必不可少的，在共同创造过程中的一些控制形式更是必不可少。最后，数字游戏公司在将消费者的创造性整合到公司运营前还需要面临许多困难——包括数字游戏制作中的消费者可能创造出许多管理上和组织上的挑战，如果开发者未能有效识别并解决的话，便会造成巨大的灾难。在数字游戏中使用共同创造还存在更广泛的策略性风险，如机密性，竞争性以及与消费者基础之间的关系等等。基于所有的这些原因，我们必须掌握在共同创造中数字游戏公司与消费者社区之间的关系，而数字游戏公司也必须始终牢记自己的目标和利益，从而在面对风险时才不会乱了阵脚。在与消费者社区共同创造游戏的过程中未引起任何主要问题才是最重要的。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Innovation as an outcome of co-creation in digital games firms?

by Jedrzej Czarnota

Embracing customers’ creativity

Co-creation of digital games, or the process of incorporating users’ creativity in digital games’ development and after their release, has been getting a lot of traction in business literature recently. This is due to its dormant (and slowly awakening) potential for improving the market performance of digital games and creating new business models in this industry. Its underlying rationale: customers have skills and expertise that digital games firms do not have, or which are very expensive and difficult (in terms of organizational effort) for those firms to obtain. Hence digital games firms seem to be starting to understand the ability of customers’ communities to generate surplus value. Those customers are beginning to be seen not only as consumers, but also as producers.

After all, digital games customers, like all customers, are better informed about their own needs and preferences compared to the firm (von Hippel, 2005). The knowledge about customers’ needs is difficult to obtain for digital games firms due to its ‘sticky’ nature – meaning that its transfer across firm-customers divide is expensive and much information is lost on the way (theoretically, customers know what they want, while the firm spends a fortune on market research, focus testing, opinion polls and the like – this is an example of such an attempted transfer). At the same time, it is critical for digital games firms to be aware of their customers’ preferences, because of their need to manage (and reduce) demand uncertainty to balance the risks of games’ production (which are getting increasingly expensive to develop; digital games firm must be sure that its investment will be recouped). This state of affairs suggests, that allowing customers to make their own products kills both of those problems with one stone – they will make products that will suit their needs and the firm will not have to worry about the future demand for their products. Unfortunately, digital games industry, as all creative industries, is not demand driven – instead, it is characterized by ‘supply before demand’ phenomenon, with new digital games made and delivered without their future customers even thinking that they ‘like’ (need) them. That is why co-creation is such a valuable and useful tool to digital games firms – it allows them to react to changing customers’ needs in real time after the game has been released, so after the customers have the knowledge of their own needs in this ‘supply before demand’ driven market, allowing the firm to capitalize on not having to transfer the sticky knowledge about customers’ needs.

Co-creation of not only content

With such platforms as Steam Workshop and games like Neverwinter leading the charge, it is becoming apparent that customers can create content for digital games. If a digital games firm plays its cards right and keeps tabs on this content development, it can reap significant rewards from co-creation, with players also getting to keep their cookie. With content co-creation, customers can enjoy a game with significantly more content, large portion of which has been generated by their own community. Firm, on the other hand, gets a more popular market offering, which is being purchased and played by more customers as it is more attractive to new entrants and better at retaining long-time users.

It is not only content that customers can help digital games firms with. For example, it has become a widespread industry’s practice to invite customers to beta test new games before their release. This also is a form of co-creation, one in which customers use their spare cycles to improve the game (without being paid for it) that later they will have to buy. Same goes for self-organizing groups of MMOGs players into guilds, corporations and other social structures, without which there would be no player cooperation and rivalry, and no multiplayer games whatsoever. Those phenomena are attributed to different dimensions of digital games, with some being technical in nature, some touching upon content, and the others dabbling even with the game design. We will discuss possible loci and typology of co-creation in one of the future (coming soon) posts.

With this increasing role of co-creation in digital games industry, a new question pertaining to the function of the customers within this process arises. Should digital games firms simply use their customers, and the process of co-creation, only to fulfil menial jobs and mundane duties that they did not have the time (or interest, or funds, or were of lower project management priority) to complete? Or does the potential of customers’ co-creation go beyond those simple jobs? What if it proves capable of generating innovations, “true improvements”, things that game developer can be impressed (and perhaps surprised) with, and which could potentially take the game into completely new directions?

In this article we will look into the innovation outcome of co-creation, and whether the customers are capable of incremental and radical innovation.

Incremental innovation and radical innovation

We should avoid thinking of co-creation as just production of mundane content, or performing of menial tasks, by the customers on the behalf of the firm. Certainly, so understood co-creation is fitted more easily with current functioning of a digital games firm, as it represents simple outsourcing of labour. Unfortunately, this mode of thinking will lead us to believe that customers are unable to create any innovations – either incremental (meaning improvements to current designs of the firm, but nothing that would be surprising or ground-breaking in terms of game design or production) or radical (true novelties, things that are unforeseen by the firm and open up new avenues for development and functioning of the game). Indeed, if we were a digital games firm, it would also cause us to miss out on the potentially game-changing benefits of the process of co-creation of computer and video games that our organization could embrace to improve its competitive position.

Instead, innovation is the nature of co-creation. Even inviting customers to co-create games by doing such un-creative jobs like beta testing new productions could potentially yield an innovation (for instance, a beta tester could identify a malfunctioning line of code and instead of fixing it, propose a better, more elegant solution – but this requires tester to be granted access to this code). The degree to which the process of co-creation can be innovative depends on the approach of the firm and whether it opens some of its game to customers’ creativity. In other words, co-creation cannot be innovative if the digital games firm does not open itself in any degree to this process. This opening can include simple social interfaces for communication with customers’ community such as establishing platforms for exchange of creativity on a dedicated forum, or more advanced means such as making available some of its development tools, to bold moves of releasing some of the game code.

The currently prevalent approach towards harnessing of the phenomenon of co-creation – deployment of toolkits for creativity – is particularly well adapted to directing the tide of customers’ contributions towards game elements where they are deemed desirable by the firm (for instance, customers are welcome to make and sell new outfits for their avatars via dedicated marketplace). It is an approach which insulates the digital games firms from disruptions caused by customers’ tinkering with the game too deeply (i.e. damaging the product’s image and thus reducing its market performance, or causing problems for the firm’s functioning or operations), and at the same time allows for neat regulation and control of the process of co-creation. In this scenario, we observe a trade-off: customers’ creativity is limited (they can only create within the bounds erected by the firm) but it is also less likely to damage the firm or its market offering, thus causing problems or disruptions. Radical innovation in such conditions is very difficult to achieve. Incremental innovation, on the other hand, is easier – for example, focused customers can devote their time to create quests, which can rival or even surpass those prepared by the game developer himself (for instance popular quests in Neverwinter developed using Forge tool).

Despite that, the use of toolkits is not the only mode of co-creation there is, just as content is not the only dimension of a digital game that is co-created (reminder: technology and design as well). For example, we have seen members of users’ community innovating radically new game designs (i.e. IceFrog’s DOTA total conversion of Warcraft 3; a radical innovation) via modding (a form of co-creation in digital games which was the first to be noticed by academic discourse). Players can find emergent ways to play games, thus innovating modes of gameplay, changing how the game is used and why it is attractive to players (for example the appearance of both Blizzard-sanctioned and Blizzard-banned economy in World of Warcraft). Moreover, literature reports players developing not only peripheral, but also central art assets in game development (Banks, 2009), beta testing customers improving the game code (Burger-Helmchen and Cohendet, 2011) and communities of customers inflicting heavy pressure on digital games firm regarding the direction of game development and changes (famous Monoclegate in EVE Online). We could multiply the examples here – if you have interesting ones, please share them in comments!

Open or closed firm, and increasing the difficulty level

We see therefore that digital games firms only started making forays into this new and uncharted territory of co-creating games together with their customers. Two conclusions come to mind here: first, the possibility of incremental or radical innovation resulting from co-creation depends on the decision of the digital games firm to open its proprietary assets for customers to have access to. Firms can also establishing channels for game production-related communications, or modes for customers’ contribution to the game development and production (to name a few). This is reflected by the work of Arakji and Lang (2007), who in their work observe that the way co-creation is encouraged, promoted and enabled by digital games firms, in a directly proportional function influences its outcomes (their prominence and quality).

Secondly, in embracing co-creation as a valuable tool for games development and production, digital games firms started with the easier and less risky thing to do – co-creation of those elements of the game, which are improvements to the developer’s original design. Embracing innovation (and radical innovation in particular) as the output of co-creative process is difficult though. Increasing radicalism of innovation is associated with more significant departures of co-created game from the developer’s vision, and thus introduction of numerous challenges to the firm. Let us now take a brief look at those challenges, before we wrap up, as a teaser for future posts.

CODA: new challenges to the firm

Co-creation is not an easy process to embrace. There are many difficulties to aligning firm’s interests with the ebbs and flows of community’s preferences, desires and delusions. It has been demonstrated in the literature that customers do not know what kind of market offerings they themselves want – community of customers is a horizontally networked collective without top-down structure. Moreover, creative industries are supply-before-demand driven (customers do not want a particular game before it is released, they like or love it only after they have played it). Customers have also been found to be unable to radically innovate in digital games industry (for instance, if Nintendo listened to its fans, Wii would have never be made – Aoyama and Izushi, 2008) and can lock the firm on the existing market trajectory. Therefore, the firm’s guiding hand in digital games development is indispensable, and some form of control over the process of co-creation will always be necessary. Finally, there are numerous difficulties that digital games firms face before they can incorporate the customers’ creativity in their own operations – involving customers in digital game production can produce many managerial and organizational challenges which, if not identified and resolved, can lead to complete disaster (and I really mean complete disaster, see Banks 2009 paper on Auran). There are also wider, firm strategy-level risks and challenges of using co-creation in digital games, pertaining to concerns about confidentiality, competition and relationship with customer base (Hoyer et al., 2010). For all of those reasons, it is important to understand the co-creative interface between digital games firm and its community of customers, and for the digital games firm to remain aware of their aims and benefits to be obtained from this difficult and at times risky process. Not making a critical mistake while engaging with your community to co-create is of utmost importance.(source:gamasutra)