| it lets some people creative side come out |
I totally agree... but it goes deeper than that
when you play a game, you want to feel as if it really were you that was in it, that's part of the immersive feeling that's so important to games. So as Wright comments in a presentation: when I play GTA San Andreas, I prefer to have my "hero" wear a pink shirt and flower shorts even if he's damn ugly cause I'M THE ONE WHO CREATED IT, whereas the art designer could never choose such a getup
But Spore goes way beyond that. It's planned to automatically share the user-created content via online directly to solo games.
With GalCiv2, that would mean that you would play against AI that uses customized ships or races designed by some australian player. And every game would bring unexpected twists to the art content.
The logic being that, over time, SOME users might significantly contribute to the development of the art content in a game, which would let the game designers put more effort (and money) in the other aspects of the game.
Personnaly, I'd be interested to know for galciv2 the percentage of the game creation budget that went in art.
Here's a quote from J. Allard from the game division of Microsoft:
"If only 1 percent of our audience that plays Halo helped construct the world around Halo, it would be more human beings than work at Microsoft corporation," Allard said. "That's how much human energy we could harness in this medium."
