At the 2008 Games For Change festival, Chris Satchell, Microsoft’s general manager of XNA, spoke about how the development platform can be used by garage developers to create socially conscious games.

He also told me that the 12 million Xbox Live users are ready for games about social issues. But will XNA be ready for gamers?

Satchell gave me an update on Community Games, the new Xbox Live feature which allows users to easily download XNA-created games. I asked him why it won’t run into the same interface issues that XBLA currently has. He offered this solution:

“One thing we’re going to have is we’re also going to expose all of [the games] on the website as well. So if you want, you’re going to be able to go and do a detailed search from a web browser and say, ‘Oh, I want that game’ and click, and have it downloaded on your console. … you’ll be at the office and go, ‘Here are the games I’m going to play tonight’ and go back home and just have them ready for you.”

Multiplayer: How does the XNA moderation system work?

Satchell: There are 45 games currently in the catalog, available on Xbox Live for download if you’re in the beta. I don’t actually have the number with me, but there’s tens of games that have gone in and failed for one reason or another.

I mean, our community is pretty strict on this. If they find a game that crashes, they just won’t let it through. So if a game doesn’t work, some will be [rejected] for that. Some will be [rejected] for the ratings being inaccurate, like “No, this doesn’t fairly represent the game, go back and change it.”

I don’t know how many have been rejected; I don’t have a breakdown of how it’s actually done. But what we find often is that people submit, and they get rejected for some reason, and the reviews give them comments and they fix the problem and come back again.

So it’s kind of cool to see people go, “Oh okay, well I had a bug here or I didn’t quite represent it correctly so now I’ve pushed it back in again,” and then it gets through the second time. But it’s been great seeing in the beta these past two weeks — just the variety of games that have been submitted.

Multiplayer: How will I be able to get the games I want from Community Games?

Satchell: We’re working on that in the beta. The beta is definitely not how it will look when we launch later in the year because we have to work with the current technologies; we’re releasing more stuff later in the year. And what we’re really looking for is feedback from the beta.

So it’s a little bit cumbersome to get through in the beta, and we’re definitely ironing that out by the end of the year. What I think is cool though is, imagine now that we’ve got that distribution platform, and then you’ve got these people creating socially aware games and now they’ve got an audience.

Multiplayer: Why won’t XNA run into the same interface issues as XBLA?

Satchell: Well, we’re going to be working on that. As I said earlier, we’re working on the interface. But it is a great question. If we get thousands of games, how are we going to sort through them? I mean, you’ll see over time we’re going to take feedback from the community. Content sites in the web space do it all the time. They do it with user recommendations, they do it with rankings, they do it with most downloaded.

Plus, one thing we’re going to have is we’re also going to expose all of [the games] on the website as well. So if you want, you’re going to be able to go and do a detailed search from a web browser and say, “Oh, I want that game” and click, and have it downloaded on your console.

So maybe sitting with a controller isn’t the best way to search, but you might say you’ll be at the office and go, “Here are the games I’m going to play tonight” and go back home and just have them ready for you.

Multiplayer: Are there any plans for an easier, lighter version of XNA, in the vein of EA’s “Sims Carnival”?

Satchell: I’d like to do that in the future. We don’t have a plan we can announce today, but it’s certainly something that I think would be great. Because every time you make it easier, there’s a whole new range of creators that you could sort of get into the eco-system and get excited about it.

I think we’ve made it a lot easier than in the past, but it still takes programming knowledge. You still need to know some coding, and it’d be nice to have some sort of drag-and-drop system or something that could either let younger creators get involved or people who aren’t technical. So definitely a direction for the future, but no plans to announce at the moment.