User generated content and centralised control don’t mix
November 10th, 2008Games, Internet, Political 6 Comments
User generated content is currently something of a media darling in the game industry. Of course, it’s actually nothing new – gamers on open platforms like PC and the home computers before it have been creating mods and new content for their games for a couple of decades now. What’s different now with the advent of yet another acronym to remember (UGC) is that the concept has finally come to the home consoles, those friendly ‘turn on and play’ devices.
On paper, it sounds great – finally, people using consumer-friendly boxes can be creative without having to hunt down FAQs on the internet and learn how to tame often esoteric toolsets (although many people, me included, find this part of the fun of course). All the tools you need are presented in the box, together with a way to distribute them to your friends and the wider internet. But, as ever, the downside is related to the fiefdoms of control the consoles always operate within.
Guitar Hero : World Tour and Little Big Planet are the two most recognised sources of console UGC right now, and both are subject to many media reports of users’ carefully crafted content being deleted by moderators, due to copyright concerns. Any cover of a commercial song, or even a game tune, is summarily removed from GH:WT (as was widely predicted), and now levels which are in homage of titles like Mario are getting removed from Little Big Planet too. It’s perfectly understandable of course; the companies running the servers on which the content sits cannot afford to be sued over it, so are taking the cautious route and pre-empting any problems. But it also shows that centrally controlling content is capable of stunting the otherwise grand promise of user generated content.
The Internet is as successful as it is because control is distributed. For better or worse, you can find publish pretty much anything, and that makes it what it is – a sea of dubious quality data from which search indexes, linking and recommendations turn into a usable, ever mutating wonderland. UGC has this potential in the gaming space, but it can never fully realise it while content is regulated at a central source. It’s similar to the way fanfic and fanart are always popular, but organised publishers of it get sued these days, so the place to really find it is on smaller, distributed fan sites, not central corporate ones. Console UGC is certainly good fun, and better than no UGC at all, but the fact that it may only be published in one place means Big Brother is always controlling what can and cannot be published, and that is the antithesis of the principle of personal creativity. Creativity wants to be free, not penned in by what a central source says it can and cannot express; if I want to create a LBP level where Link and Mario belch a cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, I damn well should be able to. 
But, that won’t happen in the control-obsessed world of the console any time soon I’m sure.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I think this helps fighting the piracy in one way or another, at the expense of forbidding players both copy their game and create whatever they want.
Fortunately we still have some jewels for the DS or the good olde Mario Paint for the SNES
November 10th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
It will be interesting to see how the XNA Community Games go. MS employees and contractors are explicitly forbidden to review games. http://creators.xna.com/en-US/community_spotlight_peer_review
November 10th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Yeah, although XNACG is a little different – that’s an entire game that you may be selling, so removing copyrighted content would be appropriate. I imagine MS will still have to do that even if they’re not allowed to review games (for quality).
UGC though is just a bit of fun, and it should be ok to put up tribute levels for giggles. Obviously a company can’t risk it but if that content was distributed on other marginal sites no-one would really care. Forcing all content through a corporate portal means that stricter policing is unavoidable. I think it would be much better to have official and unofficial distribution points; people could subscribe to moderated ones if they were concerned about profanity etc (child filters etc) but could still access more ‘viral’ material if they wanted from unofficial sites. Ie just like the rest of the Internet works, rather than the AOL model the consoles have right now.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:53 am
“But it also shows that centrally controlling content is capable of stunting the otherwise grand promise of user generated content.”
If you seek rehashes and retreads of old ideas and games, sure, it’d be disappointing. But, frankly, I’m glad a lot of these levels are removed. Not solely for the copyright concerns but for their sheer lack of creativity. There’s some great completely original stuff in LBP and I’d hate to see it lost in a sea of Super Mario Bros. Stage 1-1 clones.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:56 am
People learn by imitation, not to mention parody being a great creative force. It’s quite easy to avoid endless unimaginative clones through rating systems, this isn’t about quality filters. It’s about restricting what people can do, and censorship is never a good thing for a creative environment.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Here in germany, you are always with one foot in prision if you allow others to publish content on your platform, regardless, if it is a post in a blog or forum (Not only you are forced to remove critical or abusive comments, you are committed to prevent repeating incidences in advance then – with very high penalties), the clan logo in your game (It may contain a swastika or other third reich references) or uploaded content on public file servers (You are reliable here for what your customers are uploading, it’s called nuisance liability) – you are always in charge to control your users content. I can understand, that big companies keep a hand on their platform, beside the fact, that it means power, they are enforced to – at least in germany.