AJ Papa’s Blog

With the release of the highly anticipated Little Big Planet scheduled to come out this year, the buzzterm that seems to be making its rounds all over industry vernacular is the term user generated content — the idea that end users are given tools and capabilities to generate content for games. With the growing popularity of the term, some have even jokingly stated that developers and producers are itchin’ to put us to work — for free no less.

Despite it’s recent entrenchment into what the cool kids say these days, the idea of user generated content isn’t actually new. In the earliest days of gaming, end user creativity wasn’t under the guise of today’s buzzterm; instead it was in the form of mods and level editors for popular games such as Quake and Lode Runner. Today the idea of user generated content has become a bit more flashy, whether it be making your own custom paint job in Forza Mortorsport 2 or creating your own level in Halo 3’s Forge System. The one thing, however, that spans decades of end user creativity is that most games only allow for a single user to take up the figurative hammer and chisel.

If user generated content is the future, as some have claimed, then the next logical evolution of the concept is to allow multiple users to work on creative content; make the user generated process of content creation a collaborative one. Give users built-in tools such as versioning control, concurrent access, and multiuser editing.

The benefits of a collaborative experience are not that far removed from playing co-operatively in a video game. It has the same effect of working together to reach a goal. In the creation process, multiple users — or perhaps a better term would be team — share the experience of working together to create content that themselves or the community at large would enjoy.

Aside from the obvious benefits of working in a team, the most important benefit to developers and end user creators would be to foster ambition. With a group of people, ideas and projects could go beyond the scope of an idea from a single person. Let’s consider for a moment that I, along with my fictional friends Alice and Bob, want to create a very ambitious level in our favorite game. I could be placed in charge of design; Alice could be in charge of balancing, and Bob could be in charge of aesthetics. In the end we release our level with careful and considerable time given to each aspect of the level. The amount of time and energy for a single person to exert on an ambitious level would be considerably larger than a team of individuals. Ambition serves not only the community who enjoys the content but the publishers who try to sell the games.

Of course there is certain personally created content that I don’t want my friends involved in such as my personal avatar. But for things such as levels, cars, model skins, clan armor and insignias etc., it makes perfect sense to give a team of users the ability to show their creative side. As much as I’m excited now to see the amazing things that users in games like Halo 3 can create, I’d be much more excited to see what a collective group of creative individuals can do.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under The Social Gamer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.