'YouTubing' Training Games

Anne Laurent is the author of The Agile Mind blog.

David Kushner at the IEEE Spectrum blog "The Sandbox" recently coined a gaming term, "the YouTubing of games" that set me to thinking about how the evolution of immersive online experiences is running on many, often parallel, tracks.

Kushner has been writing for a year off and on about the expansion of user authorability -- players' ability to create content -- in video games. As he noted last year, Unreal Tournament III from Sony and Electronics Arts Halo 3 both now give users more power, enabling them to create modifications of the former and to film gameplay in the latter. Now, he writes that a couple of "YouGames," as he calls them, have won Game Critics Awards, potentially opening the floodgates to user modifiable games.