Hobbyists rejoice!

Microsoft, as part of their fantastic Express program, is releasing a very interesting sounding toolbox for the aspiring developer to create his or her own games called XNA Game Studio Express. Initially, you'll be able to play 'em and trade 'em on Windows. Next you'll be able to run them on your Xbox 360. And somewhere, just over the horizon, you may get to fully distribute the bits on Xbox Live.

Are you rejoicing? Good. Now, stop it.

Be you a C# developer, a graphic artist, or a game designer there is still a vast and lonely chasm between your aspiration and delivering a reasonably high quality product. Very few people will individually posses enough skill and talent to make a polished game. In these modern times, even garage games need teams.

True, packages like the Torque tools from Garage Games will help, but I think the community will need to got even farther to fully enable the diverse talent nodes (i.e. people) to get together and rock some indie game goodness.

Proposal #1

Create a "personals" site for gaming talent. Artists looking to attach themselves to a project could announce their availability and demo what they can do. Designers looking for development resources could browse the listings looking for some talent. If this all sounds a bit like Match.com for game talent, then we are on the same wavelength.

Add to this the ability for past project team members to comment on your performance, similar to LinkedIn.com and viola - you have a community.

Proposal #2

For smaller ad-hoc requests, create a marketplace for game-related work requests. I'm thinking something along the lines of Google Answers where you can describe something you need help with, or some creative work that you need, then assign a monetary value to the result. Prospects can find and reserve work items, then post the results when they are done. A mutual rating system would be in place to rate both sides of the transaction eBay style.

The payment system? Regular money might work, though the amounts may not be large enough to make economic sense. If only there were some micropayment system that gamers could love... hmmm... and double hmmm...

In short, if anyone wants to make a truly profound impact on the gaming industry, before you go off and write that "Gradius meets Grand Theft Auto" masterpiece you've been kicking around in your head, try starting up one of these communities instead. Remember that in the California gold rush of 1849 that is wasn't the hordes of gold miners who were successful - it was the shopkeepers and tavern owners who created the community infrastructure.