Player-Created Content

Most content in virtual worlds is created by the development team (to the specifications of the designers). Some is created by the live team ¹. Some is created as a community statement because the players will it ². Some is created by the players themselves.

Players “add content” whenever they play by their in-context actions. Anything they do that affects the virtual world or its inhabitants is adding content. There’s always a positive effect to this, even if the action as a whole is detrimental to the virtual world: In the same way that any publicity is good publicity, it can be said that any content is good content (because it’s better than no content).

Content that arises from the natural actions of players within the design framework is said to be emergent or self-generating. Although designers recognize its importance, normally when they talk about player-created content they mean content explicitly created by players; players as designers and developers, in other words.

Player-created content is extremely sticky, at least for those who do the creating ³. This makes it prime elder game material. Some virtual worlds have player-created content from the very beginning, of course; these can’t really use content creation as an elder game, unless it’s a different kind of creation.

From a designer’s perspective (especially one working on a commercial virtual world), allowing only experienced players to create content lessens the chances of its consisting of the low-quality, inconsistent, illiterate, out-of-context, gratuitously profane, sporadic, incomplete, atmosphere-snapping, unimaginative nonsense that experience has shown is inevitable if people can (effectively) self-publish their creations. In practice, using only experienced players does indeed raise the overall quality of what’s created; at least they’re not going to try to subvert, mock, or otherwise deliberately undermine the source material. Nevertheless, their creations are still very hit and miss; some are bad, some are good, but without training ⁴ even the excellent ones are prone to making the same errors that professional designers spend all their time trying to avoid (particularly selective depth).

In one sense, it doesn’t matter. If people like doing this, why stop them? A single virtual world could act as a content aggregator for thousands of individual demi-worlds in various states of permanency. Then again, experience with TinyMUDs has shown that virtual worlds that couple unrestricted building with unrestricted access have tended to have short (albeit occasionally glorious) lives. Restricting building to only the most experienced players will remove a lot of the in-fighting that dogs content addition, but it won’t guarantee quality.

It’s the quality issue that bites hardest. Players are harsh judges. It doesn’t matter to them that a fellow player spent eight weeks creating a castle in the air: If they think it sucks they’ll either say so or keep away ⁵. In virtual worlds where players have been cosseted up until this point, such a reaction can be something of a shock. There’s no point in complaining, either: “I’m not playing if a character I spent two months building up can die!” may galvanize a live team, but “I’m not playing if an area I spent two months building isn’t played” won’t.

The answer might be to have all content vetted for quality before it is accepted into a virtual world. Most books have one author, but some have two, three, or more. When there are several authors, there will usually be an editor involved to ensure that the writing is consistent, complete, and correct. Even books with just one author will have a publisher-appointed editor to make sure everything fits the house style. Even this book has such an editor (hi, Stephanie!). If content for virtual worlds were subjected to the rigors of an editorial process, the result would be much higher-quality material.

Unfortunately, the central reason why developers like player-created content is not because it’s sticky, or because it works as an elder game; they like it because it’s free. If it stops being free (for example, because an editor is spending time looking at it), it becomes less attractive. Why employ someone to look for diamonds in the rough when you could employ someone else to make those diamonds for you ⁶?