Somehow I think that the #gamedesign Twitter thread is generating quite a few blog posts.  I started tonight’s topic on User Generated Content (UGC).  Twitter has its limitations when trying to get a point across and as such I feel the urge to blog.

Here’s how it started.

“Is a player's autobiography of his character's leveling experience, in-game fiction or non-fiction?”

I argued that it is non-fiction immediately after someone quickly responded that it was fiction because the character doesn’t exist in the real world.  The sticking point in that last sentence is the words “real world”.  Change that to “virtual world” and the sentence doesn’t make much sense so it seems that we need to expand our notions of fiction and non-fiction to contain a point of reference.  In this instance our autobiography is non-fiction within the history and lore of the virtual world (VW) and fiction from the standpoint of the real world. I could debate even the latter classification but I would diverge from my point in this post so I won’t debate it.  The importance here is that a piece of player-narrative, a form of User Generated Content (UGC), is classified as a first class citizen of the world’s lore and history simply by being non-fiction.  Non-fiction really happened so there’s an implied level of relevance to the virtual world that it belongs to.

Later a comment was made about UGC that we hear all the time when discussing the topic. 

“Problem with UGC quality perception is you get to see the 99 stupid ideas the devs would have cut during early playtest.” 

That brings up my second point.  Most VW developers have a bias built in from many years in the game industry.  That bias states that UGC is 99% crap and 1% brilliance.  Contrast that with developer content as viewed by the players and I think you find the same ratio in the opposite direction.  How many times do we complain about the writing in games as a player?  More than we praise it, yet the vast majority of developers will swear their content is almost universally better than anything the player community can create.  I adamantly disagree that developer content is better than UGC because quality is relative to the audience.  The 99 stupid ideas have a distribution problem and not a quality problem.  Those 99 ideas cannot find an audience because either the population of the virtual world is too small (audience doesn’t exist) or the tools to find and discuss content are not there. (audience can’t find content they find interesting)  In some occasions, the content can be of great quality but outside the context of a world’s lore.  That’s mostly a side effect of a specific intellectual property being used to reduce the cost of generating content for the world which leads me to…

The surprising thing is that we see developers complain to no end about the cost of producing content for their games.  That is content that is largely regarded as crap by the players and consumed at a rate that far exceeds the developers capacity to generate.  I believe that in order to solve the content generation problem in today’s virtual worlds the developer is going to have to overcome this developer quality bias, develop tools for users to create or capture their own content and then develop distribution models within their virtual world to publish/trade that content. 

I’m sure that you’ll find examples here and there of games doing exactly this type of thing.  EQ II has books that can be traded.  UO did as well.  Both of those games use character persistence but player-narrative, a form of UGC, properly integrated with the virtual world becomes a cultural persistence that doesn’t die when a character quits logging in.  EQ II falls short because the book with the story evaporates from the world once the last person with the last copy logs off the game for the last time.  Future players only know about an instance of player-narrative for as long as it can be handed down from person to person, something we abandoned in the real world shortly after written language was developed.  Until that’s solved, player-narrative will always remain on the outside of the game lore looking in instead of being treated as a first class citizen along side developer content.  Developers will be no closer to solving the content generation problem then they are today and that’s sad because as a medium, MMOs have so much more to offer that what they’ve offered to date.

Now for my wild claims section. 

* Developer authors shouldn’t have to write back-story for the history of the world once the game goes live.  Solve the sharding/scalability problem (i.e. Eve Online) and build tools to record the history that actually happened in your world instead of making stuff up for your latest expansion that players will ignore anyway.

* Don’t use a restrictive IP if you want to involve your players in any real way.  IPs are for theme park worlds and easing investor fears; they’re not for living, breathing, evolving worlds where player-narrative or other forms of UGC matter.

* Player created content is often times better and always created faster than any amount of developer content.  Developer content should be treated like the default content when no player content exists or content used to spur the creation of player content and not in place of player content.

* The MMO to challenge WoW in any real way will have solved the UGC problem discussed here.  WoW has mostly perfected the theme park MMO.  Beating them at their own game is an exercise in futility.  It’s no wonder there’s a number of theme park MMOs closing their doors this year.

Comments as always are welcome.