This is why user-created content works.
During the Q&A, a french canadian developer got up there. Not a wimpy looking guy, your typical tatoo’d programmeur-du-jour, and said the following (written in phonetic-quebecois-english for full effect)
“You talk about de need for critical acclaim. And you talk about de need for de big boodget. Der is a painting in France called de monah-leesah. It is famous. It might be very expensif too, if you can buy it, but you can’t buy it.”
Then he pulls out a peice of loose leaf paper from his pocket and unfolds it, holding it up in front of 600+ people, to show a cartoon drawing. Noticably choked up, he says, “Dis is a picture dat my son drawed for me. This drawing makes me cry, and de monah leesah doesn’t effect me one damn bit”.
To quote something I said a very long time ago now,
The thing is that people want to express themselves, and they don’t really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn’t. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?
In these days of mass media, of broadly targeted disposable entertainment, we tend to forget that the core of entertainment was a person telling a story around a campfire, it was dancers in a circle, it was singing for spirituality, it was ballads that carried the news from province to province, it was writing as a holy act–the notion that one’s words might live beyond one’s life simply astonishing, potent and fraught with eternity.
Today’s mass media is a historical aberration, and it’s a recent one. As little as 100 years ago, music was something experienced in the parlor, with your friends. Every household had a musician, and music-making was democratic.
One of the things that Chris Anderson likes to talk about regarding the Long Tail is that the hit-driven market makes products that are moderately to marginally satisfying to large groups of people. But niches target people who really want the product in that niche. Their satisfaction with the product is much, much higher. That’s why I listen to Grassy Hill Radio on the web — because it satisfies me more than the local radio stations do.
As recently as a month ago, a bunch of teenagers writing deeply personal thoughts for a tiny audience of their friends was sold to a major media conglomerate for a few hundred million dollars. Small is the new mass media.
20 Responses to “Why user content works”
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I’ve been thinking about the same thing. I agree, of course: my designs almost all use user content. But it should probably be made clear that user content isn’t something you can just throw in. The basic nature of a game changes the more user content you allow: goals become optional, balance becomes impossible, content will occasionally be offensive, and you will have no control over your players.
It has to be approached in a very different mindset from “old fashioned” game design, and there’s a lot of complexity that the old games didn’t have to worry about. What if you only have fifty players? What if you have fifty million? What if a player “mafia” hijacks your game?
It’s a whole different ballgame. 🙂
Gang sign is meaningful and important too, and I’ve seen some that was inspired, but that doesn’t make it nice stuff to see in your neighborhood. I think that for MMO players, player content is like PvP; they want control over when they will encounter it.
Having said that, I do think that player content is going to be vital going forward, but it is a very thorny rose.
Clearly, the segmenting of the niches is critical. I wouldn’t like reggaeton infecting my radio station, either. 🙂
I’ve never quite understood your desire to put yourself out of a job, Raph. 😉
Yes, user-created content is compelling for the user. We’ve all seen this with video or slides of someone’s vacation or kids. That endearing thing your kid did on the home movie is cute to you, but rather boring or even disturbing to your friends; they’re just too polite to tell you. But, even with nearly every parent having a video camera and hours of home videos, somehow the TV and movie industries seem to stay in business.
Even in geekier space, not all user-created content is compelling. Every D&D nerd, including me, has a few favorite stories about the characters they’ve played. Of course, more often than not these stories bore other people, even RPGers, to tears! Precious few people can take these types of stories and make them truly compelling (even in the professional world of fantasy writing, to be brutally honest).
In my opinion, the big the problem is that someone getting onto a game with user-created content is going to run into that 90-99% that is crap, according to probability. So, while his son’s crayon “cartoon” (a polite way of saying “scribbles”) moves that developer, it does nothing for me; if that cartoon and the Mona Lisa were hanging on opposite sides of an art gallery, I’d probably spend more time with the Mona Lisa. If a whole museum were filled with 99 kid’s crayon cartoons and 1 Mona Lisa, I’d feel ripped off if I had wanted to view fine art. Likewise, if I’m looking for a quality game experience and I run into 99 boring scenarios for every 1 gem, I’m likely going to be disappointed.
This isn’t to say that people will never be interested in user-created content. I’m sure there’s people out there that would love to go to a museum full of crayon cartoons by someone else’s kid(s), and perhaps even let their own little ones contribute more art to hang on the walls. But, I don’t think that museum would overshadow The Louvre in popularity or sheer interest anytime soon.
My thoughts as an arrogant designer. 😉
And yet here you are reading a blog. 🙂 Amateur publishing, filtered by an audience to bubble up the stuff worth reading.
Yes, I’m reading the blog of someone who has shipped two significant games and is probably the most-recognized online RPG developer out of all of us. I’m reading this because I know you are not the 99%, Raph. That’s the same reason I read Damion’s blog, Scott’s blog, etc. If any of these people were just some random Joe instead of a professional virtual world developer, I probably wouldn’t even care about your blog, just as most people wouldn’t care about my blog if I weren’t reasonably well-known in online RPG developer circles. I see the blogs as a way for us developers to chat about important topics without having to fly somewhere for a conference. It’s like we’re having a public conversation about topics we feel are important.
Sure, an amateur might be able to come up with interesting discussions, but I can only think of one such blog off the top of my head. If I had to go through a giant list of blogs to find individual blogs of people I found interesting, I likely wouldn’t waste my time. The most popular blogs would probably cover stuff I don’t care about.
My further thoughts,
And yet, there is a long tail effect, and in fact, if you consider the history of MUDs, there is considerable precedent for users developing some parts of the history of this industry. Granted that many more attempts collasped than thrived, still they are out there.
I think the trick with user content is that it be easy to access, but never required, and that it be an adjunct to a good game; something players can sample when bored or curious, but never in the way of camping the foozle. Perhaps a sort of market or arcade of instances, for example.
The most important decision regarding user created content is the level of constraint in the user’s tools.
If the tools are too flexible then creating with them is too intimidating for most people. Creating is hard work. There’s so many decisions to be made. So many details to consider. Such large potential for failure.
Pencils are a very flexible tool. Most people who try to draw with them make scary, iconic garbage. As a result, most people don’t try to draw with them and aren’t interested in drawing user content for a game world. You may be proud of your child’s drawing, but you won’t be proud of your own.
The problem with something like Second Life is that the user tools are too flexible. Most people aren’t interested in creating with such versatile tools and most of the content that does get created is unappealing.
If you give the users a much more constrained tool then creating content becomes risk-free and fun. Look at Lego and Magic: the Gathering. Building castles and spell decks is entertainment. Look at The Sims 2 and WoW. You create your own characters. Creating within the bounds of the tool is stimulating. It’s even fun to seek the edges of the system and make something hideous!
If you make something hideous with a pencil nobody cares – not even you.
Completely agreed on the Legos. That’s the next paragraph in that old quote, actually.
Brian, you mean you don’t read blogs or sites like f13, Kill Ten Rats, Old Bald Angus, Aggro Me, Darniaq, GamerGod, AFK Gamer, Anyuzer, CorpNews, The Cesspit, N3rfed?
Not really, anymore. I could spend all my time reading various blogs, but I have to run my business and get development work done on games. (Hey, not all of us have cushy CCO jobs! 😉 Therefore, I’ve restricted what I read. What got cut first? Blogs by people who weren’t developers, like the ones you mention. The blogs by professional developers have more dense content in the areas I’m interested in, such as topics on economics or business instead of reading about how pick-up groups suck in WoW. Maybe I might hit the blogs on occasion if I have some time to burn, but that doesn’t happen all that often.
If I had time to read only one article, and it was a choice between you posting about economics and a posting on The Cesspit on economics, you’re telling me that you’d be surprised if I gave your article priority? Similarly, if I only have a few hours per week, I’d rather go somewhere where I knew professionals had created the content rather than someplace where I had to sift through a lot of crap which is meaningless to me (but likely meaningful to at least one other person) in order to find the one potential gem.
It seems interesting that we’re starting to accept that people shouldn’t be required to spend obsessive amounts of time in our games, but now many people are arguing for a system where people will be required to spend time to find the entertaining bits that have meaning to them.
“Small is the new mass media.”
This was the promise of the Internet, many of us thought, long ago. On many fronts, it took a hell of a long time for us to get here, and the road was lined with companies trying to hamstring everyone on it, along the way. The big companies might yet defeat the little guy, but I’m not sure it’s actually possible, anymore. They’re better off getting their thumbs in the pies, I think. Embrace and extend. 😉
Needless to say, coming from a TinyMUSH background, I’m a user-created content junkie from way back. I’d say that we were probably beating the classic Sturgeon ratio for user-created content on my ancient haunt, but roleplaying MUSHes naturally attract writers, and will tend to bestow greater rewards on better writers, so there’s already a great deal of selection pressure already in place towards establishing a population which will be predisposed to doing good text building.
This convergence really depended on the text medium, however. If another sort of game rewarded the same skills that made people good content creators, I could see a similar likelihood of beating the ratio, but that really doesn’t make sense for most games.
So, in short, we should expect to see a lot more crap. 🙂
Heh, looks like this meme is contagious.
As Raph alluded to and the Web 2.0 movement is going nuts about, user created content becomes insanely powerful when allied to free, instantaneous, limitless distribution and powerful wisdom of crowds style filtering to find the good stuff.
Yes, step 1 is that people like building stuff and find their loved ones creations very personal and emotional, but step 2 is that some of those people will do really cool stuff and it will be copied, remixed, modded and evolved in all sorts of cool ways. Even though 90% of everything is crap, 90% of what you’ll see in Second Life won’t be crap because it will be copies and remixes of the good 10% and yes, for some people Second Life’s tools are too free and daunting compared to lego or Magic cards, but those people will be content to remix and combine other people’s creations.
Very few people will design skirts or shirts, but nearly everyone will design their own avatar, utilising the filtering and unlimited copying available in digital spaces to create a look out of the lego building blocks provided by someone else.
You can provide the lego blocks or you can go to the next level and let the users create the lego blocks too.
Vegas Or Burning Man?
Were two possible futures for online games outlined by Daniel James of Three Rings Design when he moderated the User Created Content; Boom Or Bane? panel that I participated in at the Austin Game Conference. In one future, giant entertainment
[…] Raph has more to say on the issue if you hit up his blog. […]
I’m forever fascinated by just how few people actually want to create their own game content. Nothing is stopping them except motivation, time and quite honestly, courage. Yet each year they demand simpler tools and more hand-holding for them while MMORPGs continually get even more contrived. We’re a long way from UO to Guild Wars to DDO, effectively *regressing* away from user content while the rest of the web is dragging them in with blogs, podcasts and so on.
What does that say for the future?
I think it says that the MMO world is going to get a rude awakening when a disruptive technology comes along and brings it more into line with the rest of the Net and the computing world.
We’ve already seen similar democratizing effects on things like music and writing; the rise of the indie game world suggests that there’s a lot of frustrated creators out there who find the current big-budget model unwelcoming.
[…] https://www.raphkoster.com/?p=135 […]
I always thought it would be nice to have a MIDI player built into a game client. Throwing even highly compressed samples around might be a bit heavyweight for a *massively* multiplayer game, but GM+GS MIDI and patches is not. SW:G, with its musicians seemed like such a good fit for this, and I was a little disappointed in the actual execution.
As far as I know Delta Tao’s Clan Lord remains the only online game I’ve played where bards were able to perform their own compositions in game. While they weren’t up to GM standards, and the notation was awkward, it was great to be able to turn up at a concert online and be entertained by talented players.
http://www.donaldsonworkshop.com/baraboo/cltf.html
Legal issues prevented us from doing it, but that was indeed the original design. 🙁