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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