I had a friend in middle school, one of those friends that fell into the “someone you see on the bus” and “sometimes go to their house” categories.  The kind of friend that you would happily play bloody knuckles with in the back of the bus, but if you passed each other in the halls, you’d probably just nod and be on your way.  Pre-teen friendships were strange like that.

On those many bus rides home, my friend would, every so often, pull a collection of floppy disks out of his backpack and declare “you’ve got to check this out.”  And whenever he did, I’d be sure to take those floppies home straight away and see what wonderful surprise they held.  My friend had earned that trust; it was through him that I first discovered Wasteland and Sim City, so his track record was golden in my eyes.

And so it was, one day in 1992, that I stepped off the bus with a 3.5″ disk in my hand simply labeled “Virtual Reality Studio.”  I installed the program on my system with no idea what to expect, and what I got was something that I never saw coming.

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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.

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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.

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