[From PopTech] I’ve spent many, many hours playing the games Warren Spector has created. Deus Ex, for example, broke ground in providing an open, interactive playground. Also, things blew up real good.

Spector says gaming isn’t what we think. It’s not usually a solitary activity. And violent games aren’t just about violence but also about thinking, planning, acting and reacting. Finally, games are not apart from the real world but are part of the real world,

Spector says we’ll see more user-generated content. “Will Wright [The Sims] is the best game designer in the business.” And we’ll see more “virtual affiliation.”

Games, Spector says, can be art. His are commercial and reality-based, he says, but they can be art.

The exciting new trend is “shared authorship,” as opposed to games in which you decipher the single author’s intention. Spector finds Grand Theft Auto 3 “reprehensivle” in its content but the game play is revolutionary. “The negotiated narrative” is unique to games as a mass medium. Spector gets chills thinking about the way in which games will allow us to assume personae, interact and grow.

Plus, the screen shots from Deus Ex 2 look great.

Soundbyte: “Our tools are pathetic. Try having a character smile in a game. It’s insanely hard. We have four control points. Try getting a tear to role down a character’s cheek.”

Amy Jo Kim is now at a stealth startup called “there.” “What’s going on in gaming today is what you’re going to see in the rest of technology in 3-5 years.”

She laid out the basics of online gaming and pointed out how complex and rich the social networks around online games typically become, including “self-organizing fan ecosystems.” She told us about the development of The Sims. Very interesting. For example, Maxi (the Sims’ creator) noticed that people started telling one another stories about their characters. So Maxi facilitated this by allowing users to upload their stories for sharing with others.

During the Q&A, moderated by Dan Gillmor, Kim and Spector disagreed over the future of fan sites. Maxi (The Sims) has encouraged fan sites and the degelopment of new content for their games. Spector thinks that as gaming brands grow, fan sites will increasingly be attacked by game makers.

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