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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."
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?
User-generated Content must be crowdsourced. Then you can proactively leverage the synergistic paradigm of the folksomony. We recommend a mashup.
THL phish sticks
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.