19 replies to this topic

[Ninevolt]

Hi All,
I realize I'm pretty new here, but I thought I'd get a discussion going anyway, hopefully I'm not being too brash :P.

This is a rhetorical discussion, I'm not starting this to pick your thoughts for my own benefit. Rather, I'm curious as to your views regarding the usage of user generated content in games. I'm just going to throw down some basic questions and see where this heads.

First and foremost, can user generated/provided content be considered a valid game design element? Certain games, such as Audiosurf certainly are structured around content provided by the player, while the vast majority of games do not.

Secondly, Is the inclusion of user generated content into a game a worthwhile undertaking, or does it pose too many technical/logistical problems to be beneficial?

Third, and the last for now, assuming that some degree of user generated content is beneficial to the overall gameplay experience, what is the right balance of developer provided content as compared to user generated content, and should a ratio of the two be enforced, or allowed to evolve as the players (or player community in the case of online games) see fit?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[onyxthedog]

I do like the idea, but there are too many troubles that can come of it.

The validness of this as a game design element can greatly vary due to the specific game and genre of game.


There would be varied amounts of technical difficulties depending on the game, and really that would be what causes you logical errors.For example just about everything would be able to be comprimized without the programmer's/designer's desire. Imagine making your character tiny and your enemies huge in a FPS. That would make the game far too easy, causing you to lose interest long before beating the game. Also if it was 2D it would have to be a vector image so that CD may be done more easily.

For me this could be something to do later, but at my current state I not ready, too many unecessary troubles.

[Ninevolt]

onyxthedog said:

Imagine making your character tiny and your enemies huge in a FPS.

Actually, that could be a pretty cool game dynamic, allowing players to determine the size of their character, but in turn scale mobility, damage and vulnerability to the character sizes, so that instead of unbalancing th game, it simply creates a free-flowing balance system based on playing style. It would be a major headache to balance, but could be interesting if pulled of correctly.

Ok, sorry for the segway, the idea just hit me and I felt like sharing :)

[onyxthedog]

Ninevolt said:

Actually, that could be a pretty cool game dynamic, allowing players to determine the size of their character, but in turn scale mobility, damage and vulnerability to the character sizes, so that instead of unbalancing th game, it simply creates a free-flowing balance system based on playing style. It would be a major headache to balance, but could be interesting if pulled of correctly.

Ok, sorry for the segway, the idea just hit me and I felt like sharing :)

But that would not really be providing their own content if they could only scale their character. I was talking about like if they use say like Maya to generate both characters.

But your mobility idea would not be a bad idea.

[Ninevolt]

onyxthedog said:

But that would not really be providing their own content if they could only scale their character.

Hence why I said it was a segway. :)

[onyxthedog]

Don't use big words that don't have to do with programming or math (sometimes not even those) and expect me to understand them.;) I only have a every day vocabulary of a 7th-8th grader, thus I am in 7th grade

[Reedbeta]

You also have access to the Internet, and in particular to dictionary.com. Ignorance is no excuse when a world of information is at your fingertips! :yes:

[Nae'blis]

For me, user-generated content is not strictly a game design "element" anyway. There is a technical choice whether or not to allow it, and a stack of programming required to implement the system, but the simple act of letting an unsupervised User create their own content means it's not as designed by the game designer/producer, hence not a design element. That would be taking credit where it's not due - saying you somehow predicted certain innovative content coming back, or The Next Big Thing being created by some person who played your game. Semantics, I know.

As far as actually doing it, I guess Spore and Little Big Planet are the two big name releases coming up that focus heavily on user-generated content. I don't know many details about LBP, but I know Spore is implementing it as a seemless (in theory) background download service where, other than a creature's content card telling you who made it, there's little to notice that it's not part of the game. I think it's a cool system, and I'd suggest that it's already been more than worth it in Spore's case (thanks to the massive hype and buzz that's already been built up around the game), although it did impact on their production process fundamentally - and right from the concept stage. So it's clearly a very big choice to make, but if you market it well then it can be a beneficial choice to make, sure.

With regards to your point about ratios - how would a developer actually enforce this? That would entail the building and upkeep of a central hub/community as well as the technical backbone for transferring files (assuming they actually did this method rather than just allowing downloads as and when the User fancied a new asset), plus monitoring traffic levels and hosting all the assets people created on their own servers. The community would then also have the self-defeating task of all working to create assets in order to eventually get to a point where they were no longer allowed to do any more. Oh, and the developer would probably be creaking under the massive weight of maintaining all these support systems on top of an already technically demanding game.

For me, though, the fundamental issue with this so-called Games 2.0 theory is that keeping the content within the designed system of the single game (as opposed to just bundling the world editor with the retail game and user-generated content then being called a traditional "mod") is that the content can't wildly change the game visual style and can't change the game mechanics very much at all - even in a single-player game, the internet connectivity required in order to transfer content would mean that allowing Users to change the mechanics would create an unbalanced game between Users and could even in some cases bar content being able to be shared. I'm all for modding and being able to customise your game, but I'm just a touch sceptical about the claimed great revolution in how we will in the future create and play games that will be brought about by Games 2.0. I think that the marketing departments love to try and convince us that the one retail package of their game will allow us to go create our own superb games and build on theirs in a dramatic fashion (and many people fall for it), when in fact games require a program for coding, at least one for art, another for production and management tasks, one for storing files and keeping inventory... and so on.

[onyxthedog]

Reedbeta said:

You also have access to the Internet, and in particular to dictionary.com. ;) Ignorance is no excuse when a world of information is at your fingertips! :yes:

True, my bad. Thanks


Anyway, Nae'blis brought up, well kind of, a new point about this that is a good one: at what point does the game become theirs and not yours. The content is essentially theirs, so how could you call the game yours?

[Ninevolt]

onyxthedog said:

Anyway, Nae'blis brought up, well kind of, a new point about this that is a good one: at what point does the game become theirs and not yours. The content is essentially theirs, so how could you call the game yours?

I guess my next question would be, is a game truly only the sum of its content? If you replace all the pieces on a chessboard with your own pieces, as long as the rules remain the same, is it not still chess?

*Edit* I'm not trying to pick a fight, just trying to drill down on our definitions. :)

[onyxthedog]

I didn't think by your post that it was starting a fight at all, but this is alot of that more grey area stuff in game development. It really comes down to how it is implemented IMHO. If you were to do a turnbased fighting game (Like Runescape or some of the Final Fantasy games), then in essence it would be the same gameplay just with different sprites. But if you were to change the sprites on, say, Halo, then it would be totally different because the collision detection would not be the same. Like my earilier example, if you made you character small and the enemy large it would make all sorts of weird things happen.

Just to name a few, the Elites could then jump what would seem like a million and three feet, you could no longer jump high enough for the game to work, you would be so slow that you would be hit by vehicles 24/7, There is a small possibility that the larger enemies could step on you.

So basically, I think that it depends on the way that you implement it.

[TheSpaniard]

There's another option not yet thought of by the game industry, and consequently is at the heart of my game idea. I will explain.

On one end of the spectrum you have a game whose content is completely 'developed' game such as WoW, and on the other end, nearly entirely user-created content such as we see in Spore.

So lets say, using these 2 mentalities, we want to create a city. In the 1st option, the programmer would either procedurally or manually create a city of his own, to serves as a setting for his game. Some benefits of this include the ability to mandate 'balances' via code. You also get a sense of uniformity which adds to realism, but lack a sense of individual customization (barring lots of art/time investment).

Option 2, allow the users to create their own buildings in the city. Each user will create their own building/area in a city. (possible)Pros of this would be a very diverse city, full of rich customized landscapes. The cons would be enormous imo. Youd have a hodgepodge of a city, in which every area could be asynchronous to the next, with no overridding theme. This immediately snaps a user out of the immersion he has been developing in the world. similarly, lazy people will make generic and bland buildings, solely for functionalities sake. There would additionally be little to no way to ensure balance in this type of system.


Now we move on to my idea. The solution to how to create a world that reflect the gamer, while not destroying their immersion. Create a procedural city, where the variables and details are determined from the statistics of the players. If youve not heard of introversion, heres their website: introversion.co.uk. Check out these 2 blogs from their lead developer:

http://forums.introv...opic.php?t=1132
http://forums.introv...topic.php?t=586

they show examples of a procedural city building engine. now imagine the slight variable changes that Chris (the programmer) was making to create different city-maps were instead produced by an algorithm processing player (for slight personalizations of style) and players (for emergent neighborhood styles) statistics. With clever programming, you can create architectural style procedurally as well.

[anubis]

To chip in on this discussion. There have been games that practically live off of user generated content. Unreal comes to mind. True, the content is not distributed through the game directly but still the amount of content generated by the modding community is gigantic.

How they achieved this is by offering the right tools to the end user, to basically let them do what they want with the game mechanics. So the question is not, if this can be done but rather how tight you wish to integrate it with the game itself, and the gameplay.

Little Big Planet would fall more in the Unreal category, although the editors seems to be more tightly integrated with the game, it's still basically creating maps. Spore on the other hand seems to be taking an approach that is more focused on integrating the editing with the gameplay, while the distribution of the user generated content is completely hidden from the user, as I understand it.

So from a game design and marketing perspective the interesting question is if you only care about binding users to your product or if you want to explore new avenues of gameplay. In the first case it's been done before (Unreal, Tony Hawks, Quake ) and the feasibility question is solved.

For the latter I have yet to be convinced that a lot of people are going to buy into this. Take for example the game The Movies. It basically had user generated content and was popular for a while, but I think it failed to build up a user base in the long run. I suspect that you have to make people care about the content they generate and allow them to build communities around it.

[TheSpaniard]

hear hear!
I worked on the movies as QA at activision, and while there was a ton of stuff you could do, there was no reason to do it! I expect your going to see a similar outcome with spore. There appears to be tons of stuff to buy and get and do, but in the end, why are you doing it? Sure other people will be playing with some of the stuff you make, and making wacky creatures will offer some appeal, but it doesnt seem like enough to me.

IMO, the perfect balance is one that :
1. rewards people spending time personally handcrafting something
2. does this while still creating alternate ways for people who do not want to to stay competitive (ie, doesnt force you to make content or risk being outclassed) {im actually considering making a game that specifically ignores this to encourage people to make wizard enclaves where they work on making new spells as a group, which is something you read about in tons of fantasy books but never see and would be an emergent property of someone breaking this rule - lesson learned, nothings set in stone}
3. doesnt allow handcrafting to 'break' the game.
4. doesnt make handcrafting the main feature of the game
5. doesnt allow handcrafting to interfere with gamer immersion into the world (like people with pink mohawks in a medieval setting)
6. still can be used to increase sense of individuality.
7. help enhance gamer immersion by when they think "i should be able to do this," they are able to (when it applies to customization or conscious action, this being the same reason for destructible environments)


any i missed?

[Daddy Warbox]

Edit: Warning: Incoming rant-y post. Sorry, sometimes my mind just needs to take a dump :P.



The missing ingredient for UGC games is purpose. Most UGC games let users create stuff, but it often amounts to little more than petty expression. Developers are too afraid to give the users that much power over their games. I mean, think about it. When even simple games that strongly constraint the users' ways of interacting with the game world, like Counter Strike, can become so horribly effected by things like simple cheating, how could a game that allows players to change parts of its own design possibly not fall into ruin?

I like to think of it like this: A game like CS, with its fairly rigid way of being played, represents a structure built out of solid materials. The players who play the game, however, are not solid at all; they're globs of viscous fluid that occasionally seep through cracks, but for the most part follow the general direction of gravity, and thus flow down a structure as intended.


To solve the problem of designing a game that allows the fluidity of the players to affect parts of its design, you can do either two things: Spend a lot of time and budget on tightening up your structure so there can be no leaks whatsoever, or build your game itself to match the fluidity of its players. If the players were water, and your game was oil, then their very natures would separate out automatically. Silly analogy, but you get the point.


Of course, then there's a new problem: A solid, structured game gives the players a direction to 'flow' in (I love these analogies!), but a non-structured, 'fluid' game just kinda flows down with gravity like the players do. Sandbox Sim games, the prime example of a UGC game, start to turn to mush over time because of the lack of a point or purpose for the player to play them. They're fun for a while, but they usually don't go anywhere, ultimately. This may be fine for many players, but it's definitely missing out on the audience of gamers who prefer more structure.

Adding other players to the mix can add some amusement for people who can get into it enough to make use of expression as part of a social dynamic, but even then the best kind of 'structure' you can get out of that game is a mixed up, inconsistent, clumsily built heap of UGC constructs that STILL serve no intrinsic purpose. A user who enjoys a structured game like Counter Strike may quickly get bewildered and bored trying to make fun out of a more social sandbox experience like with games like Second Life and such. At least, I would (though I don't necessarily play CS, even :P).


So where does the right balance in this formula lie? I think it lies with giving the users control over the solid elements of a game in a fluid way, but in such a way that encourages structure in itself. That is, giving them both the sandbox ability to add their content and express themselves, giving it also a point and purpose within the immediate instance of their game, and finally a point and purpose in the overall scheme of the game for everyone. Literally, game creation within a game. Not a new concept, I know, but I think this is where the real challenge lies.

See, users are notoriously bad when it comes to having to make things that, well, 'work'. Take a game like Pontifex or Armadillo, for example. The puzzles in that are mostly straightforward: The game is constrained to two dimensions, and the user is given only a limited selection of tools to work with. Even then, I could watch someone's little sister try to play the game, give up on level 2, and then go back to The Sims. It's just too much to ask for most players. Not everyone is born to be an engineer, evidently.

So then: Where's the trick to this?



So that's just my 2 cents. There's more I could say, but what do you guys think so far?

[Mephs]

Leave user generated content to Spore and the Web 2.0 craze. It sounds good at first but really, given the nature of online gamers I'd rather not put them in control anyway.

[starstutter]

Mephs said:

given the nature of online gamers I'd rather not put them in control anyway.

but we'd be way better at makin gamez then ****ed up develperz.
*puts headset up to techno-hampster music and holds the talk button down*

[starstutter]

even better summary:

[Daddy Warbox]

starstutter said:

even better summary:

But the Dickwads are half the fun of being online, though. :P

[anubis]

Please don't play with necromancy... It's not polite. At least on this board :)