Email: About user-generated content

Yes, it’s me again.  I thought I should have another word with you.  While I do find your articles on Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption interesting, I also feel that you have missed an important fact in some of your recent posts: user-generated content can in fact sell a game, as long as the game is properly designed for it.  I am not, of course, referring to how LittleBigPlanet or Spore do things; those are about as far from the mark as can be imagined, if for slightly different reasons.  However, when a game does it intuitively, user-generated content works perfectly.

 Take, for example, one of the few best-selling games of all time not from Nintendo: The Sims.  There are no absolute goals in The Sims.  There are no requirements beyond filling basic needs for keeping Sims alive, which would hardly be something you’d pay $40 for the privilege of doing.  There is nothing at all in the game which is an absolute goal or definite lure.  By your surface-level analysis of content, it shouldn’t sell because it fails to provide a cohesive experience with alluring goals.  So how did it sell over 16 million copies?  By having the very thing you’ve derided: user-generated content.

The most important word in ‘user-generated content’ is CONTENT. It is not about user-generated goals or else it would be labeled as such instead of user-generated content.

I’m all for user-generated goals and prefer them over the stupid ‘achievements’ and various digital pats on the head or unlockables games undergo. People play the same game in different ways. Some just explore. Others just want to beat it. Some do co-op. Others do a speed-run. Defining ‘goals’ in stone in a game I think is a bad idea. One of the appeals of World of Warcraft is how the ‘goals’ of people are user-generated. Most people play World of Warcraft because their friends do. Their goal might be to make a guild, to raid in a smooth way, to explore, to make money, anything!

A game like Civilization allows the player to win via peace, via war, via religion, via space ship, and so on. My favorite Ultima is Ultima VII where one can make the goal to ‘bake bread’ and make money off the bread you make. User-generated goals are not new. They were, in fact, a bedrock of PC gaming.

User-generated content is not user-generated goals.

Most of the fun in Sims games comes from building up a home, filling it with stuff, living the lives of the Sims within, and creating your own story for them.  It can be described as a sort of virtual dollhouse.  The thing is, all of the content produced is user-generated.  While the set pieces are provided by the game engine (naturally enough; it’d be horribly tedious otherwise), it’s the player who sets the stage and plays things out.  It works because it’s intuitive; it doesn’t punish you with illogical extra steps for trying to do the things that you’re most inclined to do when given free reign like that, and because it isn’t hard to figure out what to do in the game’s basic scenario either.  As I said, it’s a virtual dollhouse, and everybody knows how to play with dolls (even little boys).

The dollhouse comparison is apt and is how Will Wright describes it. Video games often re-enact childhood games. People playing FPS games such as Call of Duty 4 are, in spirit, playing the boyhood game of capture the flag or ‘you are the bad guys, I am the good guys’.

The content of games is the mythos and the stage itself (along with the monsters). The content of Super Mario Brothers is the idea of Alice in Wonderland in a video-game complete with fantastical monsters and devious stages.

A game like Civilization is the same way. It has the mythos of the Western historical context of stone-age civilization evolving and going to the stars. The civilization types, scenarios, and units also make up the content.

Starcraft’s content is the mythos, the universe, the game is set in complete with units, maps, and single player campaigns.

User-generated content is not bad as an addition. However, content is to entertainment as beef is to a hamburger. Games that rely on ‘user-generated content’ think they are Fuddruckers (a fast food joint where people assembled their own burgers). Rather, customers perceive them as selling hamburgers without any beef except with some notes telling you how to cook your own meat.

There is a reason why user-generated books, user-generated music albums, user-generated paintings, do not and cannot exist. The entire purpose of the medium is to express content. No one is going to buy an empty picture frame with instructions on how to paint for the same price as a painting. The salesman could say, “This empty picture frame allows a difference experience than most paintings. In this, you get the feel the creation of painting.” That might actually sell in New York as I am constantly amazed at how the red wine sipping art patrons readily hand over their money at such tripe, but it will not sell outside those red wine sippers.

Games like Starcraft, Civilization, and even Lode Runner have user-generated content. However, these games do not SELL based on user-generated content. When people buy Starcraft, they are not buying it to play custom player maps. Even Quake, which had great mods, is bought primarily due to the professional content the game was originally designed.

When a customer buys a game, they expect professional content. Not amateur content. The problem with user generated content replacing the regular content of the game is that quality goes from professional to amateur.

In this light, user generated content is an illustration of a core industry in implosion when they think amateur content is at the same level as their professional content. It would be like a television channel deciding to air YouTube videos.

Back to Sims, the game’s content is not the goals of the Sims or even the furniture but the doll house itself. The game is sold with professional content, not amateur content (though that can be added not unlike Lode Runner or Wrecking Crew).

I think Will Wright got ahead of himself thinking the success of Sims was due to the success of user-generated content. And he’s paying for it with Spore.

It’s a cohesive single-player experience with user-generated content, in a nutshell.  And evidence enough that such an experience can carry a software toy a long ways, as long as that content makes sense to the user.  I believe you’ve missed the mark on Wii Music for that reason: it’s tons of fun to see how you can toy with a song and make it sound different.  Trying to argue that it’s unintuitive to modify music falls a bit flat; the first thing anybody does when they pick up an instrument is play it randomly to see what sounds it makes.  Wii Music just takes that impulse and runs with it.

Content is THE reason why people buy video-games. The number one complaint about Wii-Music is the lack of content (expressed in the number of songs). Nintendo knew they screwed up when they began stuffing as much content into the game at the last minute (that being the mini-games).

I’ve tested the game out with young children to elderly adults. The elderly adults enjoyed the mini-game section. The young children grew bored with most of it but absolutely loved making the album covers. They loved making their Mii really big and putting it in different poses. In other words, these kids liked messing around with their Miis more than anything else to do with music. There was no desire to ‘generate content’ from anyone.

We buy products to perform a job. Generating content is not the job of the customer. Customers want to absorb content, not make it. While user-generated content like map editors are popular and should very much keep being made, what sells the game is the professional content, not the amateur content that may or may not be made.

Imagine Starcraft being sold without any maps. A little note from Blizzard would come in the box that read: “Use the map editor to make your own maps! Or download maps from the Internet!” The game would bomb royally. It is professional content that sells games.

Unlike a game like Spore (which involves something literally alien to the player and that doesn’t make sense in how it’s played) or LittleBigPlanet (a game which is punishingly confined to set pieces that have near-infinite uses as long as you can figure them out, but that make no sense in any intuitive context), Wii Music hits pretty close to the mark that The Sims hit.  Pretty much everybody knows how to fool around with instruments.  And it doesn’t really punish you for trying, either.

You are lasering in on a very good point, but it has nothing to do with user-generated content.

When asked why future technologies were not in Civilization, Sid Mier replied that the player couldn’t associate with them. Alpha Centauri is a very well made game, but Civilization ends up being ‘more fun’ to people because it is easier to associate technologies like the wheel and gunpowder instead of bio-molecular cloning and mind worm upgrades.

Everyone understands the dollhouse so the Sims can be understood. Everyone understands music so Wii Music can be understood. Fat plumber Mario was a character people can associate. Sackboy is someone people cannot. Everyone understands the evolution in Spore, but the creatures make no sense whatsoever.

When Blizzard made Starcraft, the game, as almost every science fiction video game ever made, is stuffed with pop-culture associations of science fiction. The Protoss look like the Predator, the Zerg look like the movie Aliens. The terran battleship looks and sounds like Admiral Gloval from one of my favorite shows: Robotech. Starship Trooper references are throughout the game. In World of Warcraft, Blizzard used much of Lord of the Rings.

Space Invaders and Defender were understood because Star Wars was understood. Super Mario Brothers is understood because Alice in Wonderland is understood. Grand Theft Auto is understood because urban gangs are understood. Donkey Kong made sense because people understood King Kong.

One of my favorite RTS games, Dark Reign, is little known today. While the single player was pretty poor, the biggest problem of Dark Reign is that no one could associate with the units of that game. The Plasma tank, for example, looked like a purple beetle. Contrast that to Command and Conquer which was designed as a futuristic Gulf War experience. Everyone can understand such tanks in those games, even if they cloak. But Dark Reign went too far and cut the cords to the familiar world of what people can associate.

This is probably one of the reasons why good games fail: no one can associate with the content. Hello Psychonauts. Hello Metroid. It is this reason alone that I suspect The Conduit to fail because the monsters and environments will be impossible to associate with. Meanwhile, World War 2 FPS games are so popular because everyone can associate with World War 2. No one can associate with black-green aliens shooting bizarre weapons unless it is something we have seen in pop-culture.

To sum myself up: the reason why user-generated content games do not succeed is because customers expect to buy professional content. Games are in the content business. Amateur content is seen by the customer as ‘inferior product’.

And I blame Will Wright’s preaching attitude on user generated content for Nintendo going that route. Nintendo will quickly do an about-face on this subject. Just watch. I also suspect Iwata’s fascination with future Web technologies caused him to go that route. Iwata should remember his own saying that Nintendo is in the entertainment business, not the technology business.

Wii Music could have been a much stronger title if the basis for user-generated content was not the meat of the game. Despite that, not all the game is user-generated content. And it being a ‘Wii’ specific title, advertised very hard by Nintendo, and on the fastest selling game console ever made, it will sell but not nearly as much as it could have.