As the internet grew to prominence, user-generated content suddenly found a brave new world.  Instead of simply creating content and passing it around to friends on 3.5″ floppies or uploading it to your local BBS and hoping someone found it and passed it along, now there was a global network for distributing custom content – this was the big time.  This finally answered the ultimate promise of user-generated content: entire communities of people creating and sharing content for the games they loved.

The goal of UGC is to let players extend and share their experience with a game with others. Having players enjoy a game so much that they are willing to invest their own time and energy into building more of it is an incredible thing, but it’s a pretty unfufilling thing if they can’t get it to those who would appreciate it. I can sit and make as many new modules in Neverwinter Nights as I want, but until I share my creation with someone else, it’s probably not going to be particularly fufilling.  The internet solved this problem, and the volume of UGC available has blossomed ever since.

This all sounds well and good, and it is, but the volumes of UGC out there speak to another point: UGC is about extension of the game experience, not replacement. Again, my fear is that developers may be looking at the concept, now that it is possible on consoles, as a shortcut in development.

Sure, tools like Adventure Construction Set and RPGMaker don’t really feature any content of their own, but I wouldn’t really consider them games to begin with. They are toolsets. Things like Doom and Half-Life, on the other hand, are meant to be played as games with a full serving of content already in place.  After that, the user can supplement that content to their heart’s content, but even if they choose to never do anything at all with the tools, they still had an enjoyable game experience, at least in theory.

Of the small percentage of players that do take advantage of the tools provided to them, almost every one of them is doing so as a matter of fun, or personal expression – they are not seeking to supplant the original game.  The truth is 95% of most user-generated content isn’t really that good.  The actual percentages are arguable, but the point remains the same.

Developers, unless they are strictly making a toolset, still need to provide a rich professional-developed experience with their games, or the UGC will ultimately suffer.  This is for two reasons: first, professional content helps provide a framework for players to let them see what a game is capable of; it can be inspirational.  Secondly, if players don’t have a good enough experience with the core game, they won’t care enough to spend their own time creating new experiences for it (And the time required for creating content continues to increase; editing Wolfenstein was a pretty simple affair, even to edit graphics; creating a module for Fallout 3 or Oblivion, even at the simplest level, is a far more complicated matter. This isn’t even getting into creating custom 3d models…).

Team Fortress 2, for example, has countless user-made maps.  The group I play with tries to sample at least three or four user-created maps a week, which we’ve been doing for months, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s available.  Some of them are okay, some of them are great, and some of them are awful.  I’d say there are so many to choose from because Valve seeded the core game with a nice selection of maps, provided users with a relatively easy set of tools to use, and even after all that, still continues to support the game with new, professionally-made content.  This provides players with a huge range of choices, and that’s what helps keep servers full today almost two years since the game came out.

I may never get to be a professional game designer (though I hope otherwise!), but as long as developers provide me with tools, I will be able to find outlets to try my hand at improving the games I love, regardless of how the final product turns out.  User-generated content can be a wonderful thing that greatly extends the life of a game and builds up a solid community around it, but it is not a replacement for a solid professionally-developed game experience.  No developer (that I know of) has tried to do this yet, but perhaps it is the nervous cynic in me that sees trouble down the road.  UGC is not a new thing, and all I ask is that developers, in their rush to latch on to the latest buzzwords, remember that we the gamers are still the ones paying them, and that they can’t try to shift the onus of content development to us entirely, and that the better they do on their end, the more likely we are to want to add to that.