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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