There has been a lot of talk lately from developers about User Generated Content. They speak of it in the way all buzzwords are spoken: in excited tones flush with possibility. This worries me in some ways, for reasons you might expect: The danger I see with this sudden new focus on UGC is that some developers may be looking at it as a nice easy way to cut their development costs – put out a bare-bones experience and include with it the tools to let users build their own levels/maps/etc, and just let them handle the rest.  The problem here is that making users do all the work is not the point of user-generated content.  Though developers now may talk about it as if it is something entirely new, UGC has been around for a long time, and in many forms.

The first real introduction I had to UGC came way back in 1990 on my family’s Apple IIe. Sure, our Apple had long since been supplanted by the PC and relocated to a dusty corner of the basement, but that didn’t stop me from turning it on and taking a spin on Marble Madness or Maniac Mansion every once in a while.  One day, a friend of mine brought over a new program: The Adventure Construction Set.  Well, it was new to me, anyway; at this point it was already 5 years old.

ACS was not a game in the traditional sense of the word. While it did contain a full adventure you could play out of the box, its true purpose was to allow users to build games of their own.  Much like its predecessor, The Pinball Construction Set, ACS was a toolset that a motivated gamer could use to turn their own game design ambitions into a functional product.

I had never played the Pinball Construction Set, and while I probably would have enjoyed it, pinball games were not a passion of mine.  ACS was about stories and adventures, however, and that most certainly was my cup of tea.  Before ACS, I had fiddled around with BASIC in a very limited fashion to make my own text adventures, but ACS offered a whole new world of opportunity. With ACS, I didn’t have to be a programmer – I could simply sit down and start generating characters or items or what-have-you, and as long as I stuck within the kit’s basic framework, I’d soon have a game as detailed or simple as I liked. The possibilities presented by ACS seemed endless.

Looking back, of course, it is easy to see that the system was pretty limited, but it gave me hours upon hours of enjoyment, as well as entertainment to my friends who got to play my finished products. (This part is probably debatable.) I won’t say that Edgar’s Quest Parts I – IV were not shining examples of the early 90′s RPG genre, but my over-reliance on talking ducks may have been a hindrance in retrospect.

ACS partially satisfied my itch to create games; almost as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve wanted to be a game designer. As the years went on, I was always looking for more options to create my own gaming content. While I really wanted to build my own games from the ground up, I suffered from the unfortunate condition of having absolutely no aptitude for programming; once I moved past QuickBASIC, things got a little hairy. Fortunately, there were many opportunities out there for an eager but unskilled gamer to try his hand at building his own content.

A little after my ACS experiences, the PC world was rocked by the dawn of the FPS. Most first-person shooter games of that era conveniently had map editors that either came in the box, or were quickly developed by the community. Wolfenstein 3D, the first FPS I ever played, had a very simple map editor that I found on a local BBS a few months after I started playing it. Wolf3d maps were basic grids on which you placed blocks of whatever type of wall you wanted to use.  After that, just plunk in a few enemies and some bowls of food and you had yourself a map.

Now, the part where the real magic came in was when you combined the map editor with a handy graphics editor someone else had made.  With a few strokes of the pencil tool, suddenly those nasty German guard dogs all had lush, full mustaches.  With a little imagination and time, you could turn Wolfenstein into whatever setting you wanted.  Some friends and I worked diligently over a several week period to build a recreation of our middle school — something that would undoubtedly get us arrested these days.  The lunchladies carried miniguns, and the library was a most unpleasant place to be a Blascowickz.

Map editors and FPSes continued on hand-in-hand with most new titles, though as technology grew more complicated, so too did the map editors.  DoomWADed.exe took a lot more effort to understand than the old Wolf3d editor, but also offered you a lot more options. Editors were not limited to just FPSes, of course, and plenty of other genres offered custom map options or the ability to build your own scenarios.

The real problem with UGC at this time was a question of sharing: was it really worth the time and energy of making it if you could only ever show it to a handful of people?

In the next part of the series, we’ll take a look at what really allowed user-generated content to come into its own.