I'm a great fan of persistent world games. Some would call them "MMORPGs" or "MMOs", but I'd like to avoid some of the unnecessary connotations of that term (what exactly makes a game "massively multiplayer"?) and call them persistent world games (PWGs; I have a sneaking suspicion that Raph Koster may have been advocating this very same term independently), sticking to the element that unites them: They take place in a dynamic world that stays even when no players are playing.

Today, we're going to talk about something that both excites and dismays me: User-created content. What does it mean, how do you do it, and why do I think it's partly a failure?

The idea of user-created content in persistent world games is not new. There is, for instance, the occasionally-mentioned and oft-exaggerated [http://www.secondlife.com|Second Life] which strives to create a virtual world devoid of any actual gameplay. Others have attempted to involve user-created content to various degrees and with various degrees of success as well, from the trivial and nearly meaningless guild tabard customization in [http://www.worldofwarcraft.com|World of Warcraft] to the ability to construct and decorate your own house in [http://www.uoherald.com/news/|Ultima Online] and an entire game devoted entirely to construction called [http://www.atitd.com/|A Tale in the Desert].

I think this is a great idea, myself. Persistent world games have a facet that singleplayer games lack, which could be summed up as personal expression. In other words, when you are playing with other people, we in general have a desire to impress upon them something about ourselves. For some, this takes on the deplorable form of wishing to impose oneself on others, giving rise to the classic [http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm|Killer player archetype]. For others, the desire is much more moderate, but nevertheless, a large part of the attraction of persistent world games is that there are other people playing with you, and that you are allowed to interact with them in a fictional world in the manner of your choosing.

So, user-created content. There are many ideas for what this means exactly, some of which were hinted at above. At its simplest, the ability to craft items is a form of user-created content, even though the user generally doesn't do a lot of creating. Ultima Online's house-building is a much more free idea, letting players design and build their own houses from parts on purchasable plots of land. Second Life has rather taken the idea to its extreme, where almost everything you see was created by someone else using traditional modelling and graphics editing tools: Player avatars, clothes, environments, sound and music, video, etc. This last form is especially promising.

In the end, though, I submit that there is a fatal problem with user-created content, which I'll rather cynically state like this: Most people are talentless hacks.

When dreaming of the endless possibilities of user-created worlds, it's easy to fall into the trap of imagining only the craftiest and most talented of players, who with their newfound power create works of beauty in your persistent world, enriching it and its inhabitants. However, in reality, this crafty and talented player is rare at best and a creature of myth at worst.

The sad truth is that most people don't know how to model, or create textures, or make reasonable game environments in the first place, let alone how to make it beautiful. But they try anyway. Without wishing to infringe on anyone's tastes too much, the upshot of this is that while your world will have the occasional rare diamond, it will also be swamped and clogged up by subpar content created by people who have no business creating anything.

What's worse is that these people are in the clear majority. It stands to reason that the very best is created by a small number of elite persons who do have the talent and training necessary. As a result you will have a great deal more of the subpar content, lowering the "signal/noise ratio" of our content to infinitesimality.

Another issue worth considering is consistency. When a game's content is created by a visual designer somewhere, as is done with most games, you can ensure (or at least attempt to ensure) that your game is visually and audibly consistent, sticking to one style throughout. No such luck with user-created content; generally what you'll get is a motley pile of haphazardly designed content, each person pulling in his own direction.

Second Life, I'm sad to say, is plagued by these issues to the point of being useless (and, as a side note, it rather boggles me how people find it so charming and revolutionary; I find it having almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever). My brief stint in that game a while ago left me with the impression that it was nothing but a poor engine with horrible controls filled with user-created content that was incongruous, inconsistent and usually downright bad.

Maybe this is acceptable. Maybe we're being elitist when we dream of a game of breathtaking beauty that only a skilled elite can create. Maybe quality is what you have to sacrifice in order to have user-created content, or maybe you have to come up with some other solution, such as suppressing poor content—though that just lands us straight in the elitist trap again, with the uncomfortable addition of needing to have someone to judge the worth of the content according to his whims. Then again, perhaps that's what I'm doing now as it is.

In the end, I don't want to call user-created persistent worlds a pipe dream. I love the idea and I think it could turn out to be quite beautiful. However, if we want to achieve this goal, we need to remember that uncomfortable fact: The average person will not be able to produce any content worth looking at. At best you end up with a small clique of quality content-makers supplying a large base of non-contributing players, but even then you have the issues of consistency to deal with. At worst, you get a soup of mediocre content dragged further down by a complete lack of consistency, such as Second Life.

Next time, I'm going to talk about some imaginable solutions to this problem.