The Future Of MMOGs - You As Designer?

Thanks to GameSpy for their feature discussing user-created content as the future of massively multiplayer games. In one section, Will Harvey of There Inc. discusses potential problems with more exotic player-created features: "If third-party developers [A.K.A., gamers playing the game] write games for an MMPG, will the code for those games also run on the servers? What if it crashes?" Elsewhere, Will Wright talks about quality issues after players create content: "Once we have the ability to leverage the creative process, how do we move that content between players in the most efficient way? There's always some content that a small number of players create that will have the most appeal."

Comments

Some thoughts

[Asmodeus]

I'm currently writing a game which has an emphasis on user content. We are using C#/.NET (no flames please) and using a lot of bytecode analysis/verification/manipulation. This allows us to verify that we can constrain the cycles used by uploaded code by inserting new bytecode into the loop structures etc. We can also use DFA and a defined set of permissable interfaces to limit the capabilities of the uploaded code.
For an example of one of our bytecode manipulators which manages object persistence, look at the www.gotdotnet.com site and search for bytecode in the user samples.
Some other thoughts are that copyright, ownership, censorship are the main showstoppers, not technology.

Asmo

What it takes

[Doctor Cat]

Ultimately I think any solution to helping people find the best content has to involve the players rating it in some way. Otherwise it won't scale well. But there's already been a lot of work on the web on user-rating systems that can be leveraged. Recommendation systems that say "if you liked thos things you might like this too", based on what groups of things other players liked, could have application here as well.

Another thing I've seen in a lot of the early wave of games that focus on user-created content is that the tools seem to be aimed at some specific skill level and type of creator. I think we need to see tools that support a broader range, where people with less skill, less experience, or simply less motivation can still create something a little bit interesting, and the people who really master the tools have a lot of power and flexibility to do really amazing things.

Anyway I do think this area will grow a lot, as better tools & games are developed. My comparison has always been to the free web-hosting services like Geocities, Angelfire, etc. that got really big based entirely on user created content. RPGs or virtual worlds built this way are, I think, particularly suited to encouraging socializing, as they often lack any combat or obsession-feeding goal structures, while they provide a never-ending source of new things to see and explore that provide potential conversation subjects.

Second Life

[Hard_Code]

Second Life is already there. All of the content is user-created. There is a scripting language that can be used to create complex behavoir. Houses, trams, amusement park rides, airplanes, sentry guns, alien ships, ghosts, even a recreation of the destruction of the world trade center towers.

Check out the archives of the "embedded journalist".

Sandboxing

[cyranose]

I've coded for Second Life in the past, so I don't want to dis There, but that Will Harvey quote honestly baffles me. Even the extended quote in the article seems out of touch. If you use SL, you'll see a scripting language that doesn't seem to have any of those problems (and no, I didn't work on that part).

The real problem with user scripting is that once you have the equivalent of magic in the world, you can really piss people off. And that's hard to sandbox or detect algorithmically. For example, it's difficult to tell the difference between user code that helps a friend levitate and one that keeps a victim pinned in place.

The real problem with user content in general is similar: you want to somehow reward and retain beneficial content and discourage the retention of crap. Let people build all the crap they want, but please take it down at the end of the day, okay?

Second Life has some interesting approches, including taxation and community rating. But, frankly, the crappy content problem is not solved in the real world either.

I'm just glad for anything that turns non-designers into even modest designers--in any world. For me, it was legos and computer graphics that got me thinking about aesthetics. The more ways, the better.