covert.creations

Sturgeon’s Law says, “90% of user-created content is crap”. And its true. If you’ve ever visited Myspace, you’ll see it in action! But in games, its a disturbing fact. Where some people hail “user created content” as the answer to skyrocketing costs in content dev, the reality is countless maps and mods that play “hide the penis”. Ugh. If you’re creating a commercial enterprise out of user-content, you’re going to spend a lot of time sifting through the detritus to find the jewels.

Unless, of course, the content-creation is the game.

Take Garry’s Mod. The point of the game is, well, there is no point. Its a classic sandbox, conceived as a play area for Source engine physics. You don’t so much as play Garry’s Mod, you play with it. And thats sort of my point. User-created content blossoms when the tools to extend or modify the game experience are baked right into its very activity.

So you can expect the usual fruit of Sturgeon within Garry’s, but again, thats the whole point of it. The goofier or more inane, the better!

Spore promises another example. In this game, you customize the behaviour and appearance of your very own species of creature. You play the game by yourself, but as you go, you will discover other players’ creations in your copy of the game as they are silently propagated through a network of the players. Passing around your creation isn’t the point – its totally invisible to you. Yet this demonstrates an effective solution to Sturgeon. The creature tools are in the game, and not as an outside activity.

The whole mod scene is still thriving, as any visit to ModDB will show. Yet, for every Dystopia and Garry’s, there’s a veritable tidal wave of crap. Is this an answer to skyrocketing dev costs? No.

As I’ve said before, the most significant barrier for smaller developers is content. Period. And so the geniuses in charge of Saga of Ryzom promise “user created content” in the form of the Ryzom Ring. Yeah, good luck with that! Turning to the community in hopes of getting a quality, balanced, and interesting game experience is suicide. This is not the answer for live competitive games (MMORPGs in particular) unless you change the activity to support it. The answer is to embed the tools into the game. Make them part of it.

There are more solutions to Sturgeon which I’ll talk about later, yet I suspect more will emerge as the nature of all these games changes.

In the case of Garry’s, well, he just got a deal with Valve to distribute it for-pay over Steam. What a huge win for modders in general. Proof that innovation can pay sometimes. Its a step. And in my opinion, a step in the right direction.