From Comsumer to Creator: Platypus Nostalgia
I love Starcraft. Not Diablo. Not Warcraft. Starcraft.
One of the things I liked most about the original Starcraft was the map editor. Not only could you enjoy the imagined world of the Korprulu sector, you could actually take a hand in expanding it yourself! Fifteen years (or so) later, the first installment of Starcraft II is finally here with a vastly expanded editor.
The vastly expanded Starcraft II editor can be a bear for an old dinosaur like me with little to no experience in the strange world of modding (did I even spell it right?). The maze of buttons and menus is enough to make you give up after 14 or 15 hours of wrangling with the thing. Sure, there are walk-throughs online, but they all presuppose some basic knowledge and facility with this sort of thing. Creaking joints and cramped mental worlds aside, however, there is a compelling reason for an old fossil to be excited.
Like so much of our modern world, the video games of yesteryear were products created by experts and consumed by the masses. This lent even the most active of them a high amount of passivity; a sad ending to a century that began with artist-theologians like G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers asserting that the imago deo was to be found in human creativity. However, the rise of modding is reversing that trend. Video games, those most stereo-typically passive of late modern entertainments are now centers of creativity. Players no longer merely receive the game as envisioned by its creators, but are actually empowered to take part in the creation and expansion of game worlds. Quite simply, gamers are moving from consumers to creators.
Why am I still struggling with the Starcraft II editor? As Remy learns in Pixar's "Ratatouille," animals can consume but it takes a human being to create.
One of the things I liked most about the original Starcraft was the map editor. Not only could you enjoy the imagined world of the Korprulu sector, you could actually take a hand in expanding it yourself! Fifteen years (or so) later, the first installment of Starcraft II is finally here with a vastly expanded editor.
The vastly expanded Starcraft II editor can be a bear for an old dinosaur like me with little to no experience in the strange world of modding (did I even spell it right?). The maze of buttons and menus is enough to make you give up after 14 or 15 hours of wrangling with the thing. Sure, there are walk-throughs online, but they all presuppose some basic knowledge and facility with this sort of thing. Creaking joints and cramped mental worlds aside, however, there is a compelling reason for an old fossil to be excited.
Like so much of our modern world, the video games of yesteryear were products created by experts and consumed by the masses. This lent even the most active of them a high amount of passivity; a sad ending to a century that began with artist-theologians like G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers asserting that the imago deo was to be found in human creativity. However, the rise of modding is reversing that trend. Video games, those most stereo-typically passive of late modern entertainments are now centers of creativity. Players no longer merely receive the game as envisioned by its creators, but are actually empowered to take part in the creation and expansion of game worlds. Quite simply, gamers are moving from consumers to creators.
Why am I still struggling with the Starcraft II editor? As Remy learns in Pixar's "Ratatouille," animals can consume but it takes a human being to create.
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-Jacob Mobley