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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