A thirst for imaginative textures has led a group of Quake players who develop their own scenarios, or "levels," to initiate a communal project aiming to collect and archive their texture maps - files that allow visual detailing of the shapes which make up the 3-D games. Creating this collection of textures will not only allow players to build worlds that go beyond the imagination of the game's original designers, but, some developers hope, players will be able to license their scenarios to third party CD-ROM publishers and make some money.
This dream, however, highlights the intellectual property problems surrounding the creation of levels in online gaming. There is an uneasy, confusing symbiosis that exists between id Software (the makers of Quake), Quake players who design their own worlds, and publishers of CD-ROMs that collect the player-designed worlds. The players want to make worlds and put a lot of work into the creation of their common mythos. CD-ROM publishers (which come in all shades, from greedy to grudgingly fair) want to get a piece of the Quake action, but all too often see the work of fans as free to rip off. Id Software just wants Quake to be popular, while protecting its rights.
Last fall this unease was brought to a head by the actions of Actura, a CD-ROM maker who, according to gamers, scooped up many player-designed levels that had been posted on player sites, and distributed them without asking permission, giving credit, or paying the designers.
Aaron Logue, aka Gyro Gearloose, believes that texture maps are at the center of the problem. He points out that in Quake, unlike most other games that allow the user creation of custom levels, the texture maps reside within the levels, and not the game engine. Whenever a user creates a level, they must include the textures owned by id Software, and when they distribute them, they're distributing other's property.
Id has used its ownership of the texture art, Logue asserts, to block CD-ROM publishers by pricing the licensing of its textures well beyond the means of publishers. "Id has basically told these net-scrapers to go blow," he says. The problem is that this has left the relationship between players and id more unclear than ever, and it has left out the possibility of players licensing their time-consuming creations, because they contain the id textures.
A user-developed collection of textures would free the players to negotiate with the makers of CD-ROMs, a process Logue has been promoting through months of acidicly critiquing the business practices of CD-ROM makers on his Web site.
Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id, says that because creating texture maps is such a painstaking process requiring artistic skill, the licensing fees id has set are appropriate. He expresses concern over "companies of ill repute" making money by releasing products associated with Quake without the consent of the company. These products can be second-rate, and possibly damage id's reputation, he warns.
Steve Fukuda, from Vancouver, Canada, founded the Communal Texture Wad project (wad is the name of the texture files), out of a desire for new visual components for the architectural fantasy worlds his Web site encourages. Intrigued by each other's ideas, Fukuda and Logue have been talking this past week about combining their respective endeavors. Fukuda's Web site, QuakeLab, is at the moment the focus of the texture project.
