Comments on: User generated content and centralised control don’t mix

By: SunSailor

SunSailor — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:48:17 +0000

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.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:56:03 +0000

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.

By: n0wak

n0wak — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:53:08 +0000

“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.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:51:05 +0000

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.

By: Paul Evans

Paul Evans — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:21:57 +0000

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

By: Jesús Alonso

Jesús Alonso — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:31:59 +0000

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