In the Sumba Islands, there is a particular tribe of Indonesians, who weave a particular type of traditional cloth, called ikat. These are intricate, elaborately patterned tapestries, the most complex of which are handed down as heirlooms for generations. The process to create them is a convoluted one, in that it involves more than one person. Over the course of several months, workers dye the warp and weft of the cloth and actually program the pattern as it is woven.

I am somewhat obsessed with ikats. They have an intrinsic capacity for symbolism on so many levels, and I find they are apt metaphors for just about anything. The unrefined thread becomes a piece of cohesive art, and an arguably divine sort of order is rent from chaos; these are all pleasing thoughts for someone as enraptured with symbol as I. But the actual method of creation is what fascinates me most of all.

Every ikat begins life as a hank of thread, some dye, and a vision. This vision is the only thing that each worker shares in common. As they work through the stages of the weaving, some of them dyeing the threads, some wrapping the threads with dye-resistant material (which will form the basis of the pattern), and others doing the actual weaving at the looms, a mysterious thing happens: their separate actions begin to coalesce into a collective vision. I find this remarkable. Between the hank of thread and the finished ikat there is a powerful sort of magic occurring, in which each person is taking part. Though they are working towards a uniform vision, each of their identities must be informing that vision in some way. The finished product is a composite of not one, but many visions.

I only recently noticed that this is a lot like how a game is made. Games are composite art. They are not the product of one mind, but of many. They are the sum of a long chain of separate actions from separate individuals, from artists and programmers up to designers. The game's creators work towards a common vision, but each person involved in the process has a hand in actively shaping that vision. The result is that for the most part, games lack a sense of authorship found in other media. I find this is what I most often miss when playing games, this feeling that there is a single guiding personality behind the experience. But I've begun to wonder whether this feeling is as important as I imagined.

This thought came to me, like most of my noteworthy thoughts these days, while playing Oblivion. Actually, truth be told, I was not really playing Oblivion; I was downloading mods for it. Although I've been out of class for nearly a month now, and I've been meaning to start a new character for quite a while, I've yet to actually do so. Instead I've spent nearly all that time altering the game itself. These aren't just simple dungeons I'm downloading. Some of the first mods players released altered Oblivion's leveling system, or the way the AI guards functioned, in essence the very mechanics of the game. Some are complete visual overhauls that add new textures, increase their resolution, or completely change the game's aesthetics. Some add new content on par with the designer's original work. And, of course, some let you see boobs. With little effort, Oblivion can become not just aesthetically improved, but an experience fundamentally different from what the designers released.

It struck me that I was engaging in something innately different from the traditional consumption of media. What these players were doing, and what I was participating in, was active engagement in the creative process, courtesy of Oblivion's modular structure. We were changing the vision as we saw fit; adding our own threads to the weaving, so to speak. For a moment it seemed like the creative chain had suddenly telescoped all the way back to me, and that instead of passively consuming media or interacting with what I was given, I was actually designing my own game. What's more, I was having fun doing it. The sort of fun I might be having if I were actually playing the game.

Of course, like most of my good thoughts, somebody much smarter than me has already noticed this. Will Wright has made it the basis of his next game. People who play Spore will be designing the game as they play it. They will actually be an essential link on the creative chain. Wright is counting on his players to populate his universe. The game will require their input, not just their interaction, to become a finished product. Players will be a more crucial element than they have ever been before, because without them, the chain is broken, the game cannot be completed. I believe Spore represents the genesis of a new style of game design, a sort of design by aggregation.

Imagining a design philosophy along these lines makes my head hurt. In my most secret soul, I believe that design can't come from the masses. I have an inescapable conviction that powerful experiences need a powerful intellect behind them. But maybe that's the old way. Perhaps this is the democratization of media that games are supposed to bring about. While we've long submitted to the worlds developers create for us, now we want a say in them. But as anyone who's played or even heard of Second Life can tell you, Spore is not the first game to rely on it's playerbase to supply the majority of it's content. But here's the big question: is Second Life a game? For that matter, is Spore?

Despite the fact that we've got almost three and a half decades worth of history by now, I still feel like this is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm willing to bet that even by this point, most of us haven't got a working definition of "game" that we're entirely comfortable with. Second Life seems to be the equivalent of a designer plopping the tools down into your lap and saying "Have fun!" Is that a game? I felt a distinct sense of fun during my quest to mod Oblivion into a different experience, but I don't think it counted as gameplay. It's likely we'll all have fun designing our creatures and cities in Spore and collecting other players' content, but whether or not that constitutes a game isn't clear. Perhaps design by aggregation is a way for all of us to get a chance at the loom; or perhaps it's a way to design games that leave out the "game".