Last week, Gamasutra posted a great preview chapter from Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton’s upcoming book, Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. Focusing on Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set, they presented a great overview of a number of games which incorporated user-generated content, as well as software (such as Game Maker) for creating new games.

Here’s an excerpt:

As Budge recalls, “I was exposed to GUIs at Apple, and I had the pinball simulation from Raster Blaster. I saw that it would be a small step to do a construction set. This was the kind of program I liked, since there was no game to write. But it was a lot of work, since I had to implement file saving, a mini sound editor and a mini paint program.”

The player simply guided a disembodied hand, complete with pointing finger for selection, to draw, color, and drag and drop the various table elements onto the board.

As Armchair Arcade member “Rowdy Rob” recalls, “PCS was, back then, a groundbreaking program. It had an easy, intuitive, and Mac-like interface, and even without a mouse, it was a snap to place various targets, bumpers, and flippers on the table. The flexibility of the program allowed you to create very odd-looking pinball games, and was a great experimental tool. This ‘game’ was definitely a high point in the history of Apple II games. You could ’snap together’ a cool pinball game in under an hour, and your friends could play your games for longer than it took you to create the game! How rare is that?”

I played with this quite a bit as a kid, on our family’s Apple ][ plus (48K of RAM, woo!), and it’s interesting to me how obviously influential games like this were in forming my personal interests in gaming, while also how rarely anyone ever talks about these games. These games, as Loguidice and Barton argue, were the precursors to many other games which involved “making” something within the context of a game — EA’s early Music Construction Set, through Game Maker, various text-based adventure design environments, and now with masterpieces such as Little Big Planet. One of my colleagues, Alex Games, is particularly interested in using games to teach game design language, focusing his work on Gamestar Mechanic, a game designed by Gamelab and developed from support by a recent Macarthur Foundation grant. (The game’s still a private beta, hopefully rolled out soon.)

I, obviously, am interested in how people use tools to learn how to make games as well — the focus in my work on understanding what’s going on in spaces such as the Flash game portal Kongregate speaks to this. What happens when you’ve got a community of people designing something together — and, especially, designing something with skills that are not limited to games, such as Actionscript — and what gets learned, exactly?

It’s interesting to me that the games and learning field in the past several years has been largely defined as trying to correct the problems with the emphasis on “edutainment” from a decade ago — bringing game players and professional game designers in to the conversation. However, some of the more elaborate and interesting games (such as Gamestar Mechanic and Little Big Planet) seem to be moving in the direction of user-generated content, design, and learning… y’know, the former purview of the better, very early edutainment such as the Music Construction Set and its ilk.

As with many academic fields, polarizing debates eventually resolve somewhere in the middle or at some third position which sidesteps the original controversy. It seems obvious that good games are not just instructional devices to deliver educational content — games have their own language, their own symbol systems, their own internal goals. But, as games become more pervasive and these tools become integral parts of play, players ain’t just simple consumers of games any longer as well — they want valuable experiences that allow them to tinker, to develop, and to make things (which, surprise, often involves learning).