Bridging the Gap Between User-Generated Content and Interesting Content

Edge Magazine is running a story about user-generated content — or rather, its failure to live up to the hype of the past few years. The author says it "turned out to be a niche. Not everyone has the chops to learn the tools, and even fewer gamers have an idea they want to see through. Instead of revolutionizing games, it merely adds another rung on the ladder from 'player' to 'game-maker.'" Instead, the games that have incorporated the concept in a fun way use what he calls "user-generated, machine-mediated content," and he points out the flexibility of Scribblenauts; the user supplies the imagination and the developer translates that to gameplay. "It shows us our reflection — however tiny, however distorted — inside our games, an experience that is guaranteed to mesmerize us. Ambitious players will still go pick up the tools and learn the languages that let them mod or make their own games; but while they're busy with that, [this system] can invigorate our content — and give us a little more of what we love: ourselves."

Comments

MUDs

[ShakaUVM]

MUDs showed just how prolific users can be in creating high-quality content. Ok, sure, not all of it was high quality, but they did amazing things back in these online games in the mid-90s that still haven't been replicated in MMORPGs. And since the content was generated by the same people that consume the most content (the hardcore users tended to become the admins), it both satisfied the problem of having an end-game, and made sure that the people tended to have a better understanding of the issues in the game than you see from, say, Blizzard (whose community chats have revealed a rather appalling lack of knowledge about how their game actually works).

The only problem is vetting user-created content, but having a hierarchical admin system similar to what the MUDs used to use could be a reasonably sane solution.

I personally spent many weeks coding stuff for ElendorMUSH - one of the largest Tolkein MUSHes out there (and was where I got this name from). The level of interactivity players had with their environment in my region of the world puts WoW to shame.

Re:MUDs

[Jurily]

There is one big difference, though: MUDs had a player base of computing professionals (by default, since they were the ones with access to computers).

They had the tools, the knowledge, and the source code to make a difference. Also, the gameplay encouraged thinking, not just endless grinding for quest items and prof materials.

Today's gamers are, well, not like that. Do you think a 3D Nethack would sell enough subscriptions to keep them in business?

Re:MUDs

[plover]

I also added content to a couple of MUDs way back when. I think the difference between those and WoW is that to write for a MUD meant your only technical requirement was to have an good command of the language. Adding content to WoW, Eve, or whatever, would require you to have 3D modeling skills.

You'd also have to be cognizant of game balance -- adding a vending machine to spit out Swords of UberPwnage +10000 for a gold piece, or adding the "Quiet Fieldmouse 1HP" and having him drop 500 gold is going to ruin gameplay.

Back when we were writing MUDs, balance was in our minds because we wanted our creation to be both challenging and fun. Today, with MMORPGs serving as real paycheck-delivering jobs for armies of offshore gold farmers, you'd have to suspect everyone of ulterior motives no matter what they were creating. "You added a tree in the middle of that open field? Hmm, is that really so you can play a game of capture-the-clan-flag, or is it to let you climb up and shoot the snakes easier for your gold-farming operation?"

buzzword incompatibility...

[gandhi_2]

User-generated Content must be crowdsourced. Then you can proactively leverage the synergistic paradigm of the folksomony. We recommend a mashup.

As always...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Sturgeon's law applies.

Just look at Oblivion.

[Cheney]

If you look at Oblivion, and all the mods it has accrued through the years.. it's simply amazing. I've literally added hours upon hours to a game that already spans a very long time with its off the shelf content. The Lost Spires is just an example of what you can get when you give your players the ability to create their own content.

Even on MUDs it wasn't that simple

[Moraelin]

Even on MUDs it wasn't that simple. Yes, maybe you cared about balance, lots of users didn't. But even that only scratches the tip of the iceberg.

Also most MUDs didn't have any real theme. You could have a smurf village next to a Red Dwarf area, next to a medieval D&D-type area, next to a modern day area, next to only the elder gods know what. The MUDs which did try to have a consistent theme, had a bitch of a time enforcing it, and it involved getting approval to add anything.

And even then you occasionally ended up with some bored/disgruntled higher-ranking wizard/builder/whatever-you-call-it adding a smurf area to a strictly-D&D-themed role-playing MUD as just a way of going out with a bang.

So if anyone just let users add stuff to WoW with no further checks, expect to see Halo troopers, next to SW stormtroopers, next to a Star Trek team, next to the penis-tentacled blob from heck and his army of japanese schoolgirl sex slaves.

And then occasionally there was stuff that was just offensive. E.g., I remember having a brief look on a mostly empty MUD and fairly quickly ran into one of the builders walking around showing up as "Wearing Xenia on his dick" if you looked at him. (Exact name changed, otherwise an exact quote though.) Turns out Xenia used to be one of the most popular players. Key words: used to. Apparently she didn't find it funny either.

And so on.

The revolution happened. It was called "Doom".

[The Archon V2.0]

... and it opened the floodgates. Thousands of maps, many of them lousy but some of them brilliant.

Without Doom showing that a good game can spawn a community of people interested in expanding the game, developers wouldn't take the time to release SDKs.

Without that thriving and long-lived community of Doom developers, id would've had little reason to release source code for its engines. Why bother if no one's going to use it?

Without id commercializing TeamTNT's first release as Final Doom, the idea of a group of fans having their work go professional would still be seen as either an insane dream or "selling out".

And would any of this happened if Doom was a lousy game? Hell no! You don't attract talented and skilled people with a poor game. That's half of the problem with this new generation of user-generated games. They seem to think that if you make the tools, someone will use them. The tools are the bonus, not the core; the gift to your fans, not the main selling point for the ad copy.

In a sense, it's like fanfic. People design new stuff for games for the same reason they write fanfic - they want to continue the story, or see how it would play out if changed.
- It's five years later, and the bad guy is back - time to get your gun. It's five years later, and the antagonist has returned - how will the protagonist defeat his old enemy?
- How much harder are things if the Heavy Weapons Dude dual-wields two chainguns? Would the main characters act differently if their brother hadn't died?
- What if we changed all the monsters and the weapons and made a whole new game? What if the characters were taken out of their dark conspiracy-ridden world and dropped into a bedroom farce?

The result is also the same. Some is damn good, some is lousy. The highest amount (and thus the highest amount of quality product) tends to collect around the better series. No TV series would fly if they did half a season and expected fanfic writers to finish it for them, so I don't see how a game company can expect to excel by expecting the community to build the levels.

On the other hand, if there's a good game that just happens to be moddable....

Actually IMHO it makes the LEAST sense in MMOs

[Moraelin]

Actually, I notice that most of his examples of where user-generated content was great, were _single_ player games or limited multiplayer games, not MMOs.

In single player games, for a start, nobody pushes their content on you. If you don't want to play someone's goatse map, just don't download it. In MMOs you inherently play on the same map as 10,000+ other players. (Quite literally in WoW's case for the most populated servers.) If I make my own tower shield with the goatse or two-girls-one-cup pic as custom texture, there's not much you can do to avoid seeing it.

And, well, just look at how much that link was popular on Slashdot. The goatse links are probably the main reason why in the meantime there's the name of the site in square brackets next to any link. At one point, if you didn't run into half a dozen goatse links and a rickrolling in one thread, it was a slow day.

And on Second Life there were quite a few attacks of the pink flying penises on someone else's event.

Let's face it, any game will have a population of trolls, and if you offer them even half a chance to push offensive stuff on unwilling victims, they _will_ do it.

Second, in single player games you don't ruin anyone else's day if you break balance. If you want to give your marines in Starcraft 2 a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch or let the Zerg spawn Vorpal Bunnies, who cares? Even in limited multiplayer games, it's between you and the server's owner, and doesn't ruin anyone else's enjoyment.

In a MMO, you'd very soon see hunters with 100,000 HP damage photon cannons and rogues with dual insta-kill lightsabers in level 19 battlegrounds. 'Nuff said.

Third, the limited single-player games try hard to detect and prevent any differences that one side doesn't know about. If I want to give my marines insta-kill miniguns, either you install that mod too, or the game will refuse to connect. In effect there's a very strong element of opt-in. You have to aggree to my list of mods and actually actively install them too. You effectively have to opt-in for my changes. I can't spring unbalanced or unfair suprises on you.

In a MMO, everyone _has_ to play in the same world. The only way to not play in the same world where my hunter is running around with a tactical nuke launcher, is to stop connecting to that server.

Etc.

Basically it's not that simple at all.