My experience with community created content so far

[derula]

The main issue here is discoverability. My experience with developer-supported community content is mostly with the following games:

• Portal 2
• Super Mario Maker

Both have good tools for players to create their own content. The problem, however, in both cases, is this: How do I find the good content?

In both games, the developers tried to have this issue resolve itself by giving the player a way to rate content. The idea: as more content gets played, the rating gets better and better, and good content will be easier to find.

There are, however, problems to this approach:

1. People have different opinions about what constitutes "good content." I.e., some SMM players only like music / autoplaying levels, some like "20 seconds speedrun" levels, some like extremely hard levels, some like puzzle-y levels, some like classic Mario levels...
   • They tried to fix this problem by using tags, but there isn't really a way to look for tag and rating, and even if there was, what if a level is a really good puzzle level that also contains automatic elements - it might be suggested to people who just want automatic levels and don't care about puzzles, etc.
2. In order to get a helpful rating, levels need to be played by a significant amount of people with different preferences first, i.e. to get to a good level you first have to play dozens or more bad ones, just to make the rating system do its job.
3. Eventually, people get tired of wading through tons of bad community content before getting to the good bits, and just follow their favorite creators, or only look at content that already has a high rating. This content now gets promoted even more, just because more people see it, while new creators don't really stand a chance of being seen by anyone.

So this system, in my opinion, isn't a very good way of doing it. It's frustrating for most creators and frustrating for most players, and will cause most on both sides to quit relatively quickly. From a pure logical perspective, however, it does seem to be the most fair approach.

The other extreme, of course, is manual curation. As in, there is a team, instructed by the developers, of people scouring through levels constantly and rating them in different categories using objective criteria (as much as possible). Only "good" levels will make the cut. Of course, this has also huge disadvantages:

1. With a lot of community content coming in, it needs a large team to check all of it.
2. You can't really judge stuff like that objectively; if you could, you could just use an AI for it.
3. There will be accusations of bias and discrimination.
4. Maybe players find a way of playing the game they enjoy that the curators don't get or don't feel like should exist, and they will just make it not exist...

Of course, this problem exists in those games because of the way content creation works with them: each peace of community-created content is created by one single user in its entirety, no other users can iterate on it or improve it. Each creation is "owned" by one specific person, is "theirs." This, of course, is a neat way of doing things and can make people feel proud of their achievements. However...

...what if it weren't like that?

What if the "community content economy" was not so much based on capitalism and democracy, and more on socialism? What if all content belonged to everyone, everyone could change it (subject to everyone else's approval), and everyone's talents were always combined? Kind of akin to Wikipedia, it could create a constantly evolving whole that just keeps fixing itself.

People wouldn't like it at first that they don't retain control over their content, but it may lead to a better overall result...

What does everyone think?

 

[Varik Keldun]

As a content creator myself I do understand the issues with visability. But i am also in favor of the creator controlled content.

Yes scouring game mods to find a gem is a pain... Yes trying to have something to give that 99.9% are not doing to make it unique is hard.
But your other statements hit on the other two issues...

A good creator will listen to his/her fan base and take into consideration suggestions from the community while retaining control over the content. This is exactly what deadhaus is doing themselves.

I have watched quite a few streamers myself play some SMM2 games. They do super hard difficult levels and what not or pick some great maps sometimes based on other peoples suggestions sometimes based off previous level designer.
The reason these levels get more attention and stand out are beacause usually they are good.

 

[Golden Xan]

I don't know too many games that do community-created content such as this. I know Skyrim, Garry's Mod, and more recently, Dreams. Steam's Workshop is also filled with content created by the community for various games. As an example, the Cthulhu Wars we played on streams was a mod created by the community on Tabletop Simulator, with assets made by various creators that did not, for the most part, worked together.

In Dreams, the system is similar to what you suggested: everyone has access to everyone else's content. But access is not the same as authorship. You can take someone's content and improve it, but the original authorship is still credited to the main designer. If you take someone's music and put it on your game, the music will be credited to the music author. The same applies to any other kind of content.

As such, people can use each other's content to make improvements to their own creations and make concise experiences, just like you could gather a bunch of peoples' smaller mods in Skyrim and make a pack with compatibility between them to create a unique experience. You could name that pack in honor to yourself, but the authorship for each mod individually would still belong to their respective creators.

However, none of these options remove the ability of the original creator to continue making his own improvements to his own content. If someone takes his content and alters it, a new version is created which belongs to the editor. The creator still retains his version, and could also use the editor's version if he so wanted to.
If people don't want their creations to be shared, they can opt not to do that.
I think this is what needs to be made clear the most: having access to someone else's content, with permission, can be beneficial to create a network of high-quality content, but permission is not the same as authorship. As such, I cast my vote for "retaining control".

I believe this is as close to perfect a solution as can be. People can benefit from each other's work and even work together, directly or indirectly, to make something great. But they will never get to a point in which their hard work is taken from them, as this is demotivating, unrewarding, and pushes creators into other activities that they can call their own.

As for finding good content amidst a sea of mediocre content, I believe the system must be made so that it supports a natural flotation system. Good content is naturally highlighted over time by people's focus. Less than stellar is left behind over time. This is the way this happen in nature, and nature is a form of equilibrium. There is no artificial system that could surpass a natural equilibrium.

What I mean by this is that there needs to be the means for the community to represent their interest (and recognition of better content) in some way. It could be through the amount of accesses, voting, rating, or maybe a combination of everything. This is something that will likely have to be adjusted over the years.

In order to try and help promoting good content that is emerged under a lot of pre-existing content, there could be separators of category, as you mentioned with the tags in SMM, but there might also be highlights from the developers, highlights from "newly created content", a means to tie related creations, or a way for you to follow your favorite creators.

The best examples of this are the existing social medias and platforms there are out there already. They all have mechanisms that have been built with the purpose of enabling the viewers, readers, and consumers to naturally show their satisfaction towards the content being made.

The only rule should be that the developers and managers make no effort to censure content. They don't try to promote content from the people they know or like, and they don't try to hide the content of people they dislike artificially. Voicing their opinion, making content on top of their own favorite content, is absolutely fine--but manipulating the system to try and prevent others from showing their own level of interest is not. As long as this rule is maintained, all content will eventually be brought to its natural position in the general opinion.

When people create content that resonates with others, it always finds its audience. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be no level of manipulation.

 

[derula]

It seems like my phrasing in OP wasn't amazing. I didn't mean "people should not get any recognition for what they created" or "there should be a panel of judges deciding what's good or not rather than all of the players," my main point was that I was having trouble finding good content before, at least with the in-game tools given in two example games. I only added a potential solution because something urged me to not just point out the bad, but also be constructive. Maybe I should have left that part out; I don't know what a good solution is, that was just a quick idea I had.

The Dreams system seems like a more promising compromise.

I have watched quite a few streamers myself play some SMM2 games. They do super hard difficult levels and what not or pick some great maps sometimes based on other peoples suggestions sometimes based off previous level designer.

I guess my point is that the in-game tools aren't very good for finding those things. Typically there is some curation done by fans outside the game to find the good stuff, similar to the modding community.

The best examples of this are the existing social medias and platforms there are out there already. They all have mechanisms that have been built with the purpose of enabling the viewers, readers, and consumers to naturally show their satisfaction towards the content being made.

Don't forget that these existing social medias have the advantage of the community being their entire purpose, and each of their many developers spends all their time and effort in perfecting that specific function. Three, five, or even ten years of development time where community content is only one of the pillars (and also an entire game needs to be developed) just can't measure up to hundreds of man years spent in optimizing only the community aspects of those platforms.

Leaving aside any remark about how many social networks have tried and failed to achieve notoriety at least in part due to inferior algorithms etc., it should also be noted that even the prevailing ones still suffer from similar problems. As an example I'll just mention problems with YouTube (videos not showing up in subscribers' feeds, the algorithm favoring strange lower-quality content for reasons nobody understands, etc.) Reposts on reddit are a problem that rewards people who are good at promoting things more than actual creators.

When people create content that resonates with others, it always finds its audience.

What are you basing this idea on? Because it's pretty much contrary to my experience. Setting aside that most content I created and thought was pretty good never found an audience (maybe it just didn't resonate with anyone), I also very frequently see underappreciated content that just has no visibility on some of these platforms, while I'm constantly being bombarded by low-effort, boring, annoying, repetitive content. I know all of these are subjective, that's not the point. It just suggests to me the idea that there exists a lot of content that would resonate with me, but it's just nigh-impossible to find.

 

[Golden Xan]

Right. I was mostly looking for and tracing comparisons to nature when I said those things. In the examples you mentioned, YouTube, Reddit posts, forums, or anything, really, where content can get flooded, systems can be manipulated, it is my understanding that these are not natural enough. Meaning that there are artificial manipulations, whether intentional or not, preventing it from flowing naturally.

In an ideal system, a system that mimics nature as much as possible, content that is perceived as valuable to some will be found by those people because there will be other people who are like them whose focus will be directed to that content. The focus received is what determines the overall value. When people who are similar to you find something that they like, they talk about it, they share it, and this process make it easier to be found. That way, over time (sometimes a long time), everything that is good is found by those who would like and seek that content.

But I, of course, understand your preoccupation. I think the system will need to be adjusted over time as the devs perceive flaws on it, and I think the best way to develop it is by attempting to make is as close to nature's mechanics for achieving equilibrium as possible.

Right now, if I were to make a more concrete suggestion than that, would probably be to allow players to form groups in the "community-created content marketplace" where others could join. People would look for groups of people who like the same things they do, and that would narrow down the content being shown there by letting the players themselves share content, instead of it being found by some system. Like this, the system is the people. No mechanical influences, just people's focus and similarities in play.

That way, people will eventually find the players who resonate the most with them, the people who make the content they tend to like more often, and that will ease achieving nature's equilibrium. It requires less developmental effort, and it allows everyone to find their niches, even more than with categorization.

Do you like this idea?

 

[Brolnir]

I find my self always falling into the camp of people retaining control over their own content, even if it means being detrimental to the content itself. such as what some feel is the case with George Lucas or JK Rowling. At the end of the day if something really does stand out or grab a large audience that feel ownership over the content through their love of it, the creator should maintain control. Even if that means the creator running it into the ground with bad decisions.

The issue of discovering the good or exceptionally content can be handled through the use of in game options such as tabs for new or high rated content. But social media can be a game changer if the community uses it. Having YouTubers, fan pages, or highly reputable users could be a edge that makes it easier to find high quality user generated content. If some "higher council" is given the ability or weight to have their votes mean more it could lead to more high quality content being pushed to the top. The problem would be how to figure out who gets that ability.

 

[Golden Xan]

In the same regard as @Brolnir is saying, I think an exemple of natural equilibrium in that sense would be, for example, me enjoying a content someone else made and then looking it up on YouTube. Then I find the people who are talking well about that content, and then I start looking into what other things that person talks about. That is an instance of grouping, except it happens outside the game. If it could be inside the game, it may work even better. I don't know.

 

[Brolnir]

Word of mouth and independent searching is usually how I find games or other media to enjoy at this point. Independent searching was how I found out about this game originally.

When DHS is released and people start making content for it it's likely to be flooded after a few months. If I were to see people like let's say @Golden Xan post on discord that he found something that's really good I would likely give it a chance and take his word for it given how active I have seen him in the community.

Now me and him could have different interpretations on what's considered good, such as the examples with SMM. which is ultimately fine since if I take his word for it once or twice and don't view the content to be what im looking for i could always look at the forums here and see if maybe their are community polls that are run every quarter or bi-yearly depending on the amount of content where people can vote for best user created content by its "type."

If I find no luck their I'm sure YouTube will have content creators such as @Calypso who maybe do a "best user created content for the third age of DHS" video or videos in a similar fashion. Given the emphasis on twitch integration, which admittedly I don't really use but I'm sure streamers will also help to highlight some content.

All my suggestions don't really solve the issues of how content, especially new creator content is highlighted in game unfortunately. If a new creator wants to see their content highlighted they would likely need to do external work from the game like posting it on here, discord, or Twitter to try and advertise it.

 

[Varik Keldun]

My best suggestion for new content would be on the page where content is listed make the front page "new this week" / " new creators" / "last weeks best rated" before seeing older stuff to give new content the best chance of being seen.

 

[Calypso]

this is a hard one. DOOM 2016 had a bit of a messy filter for creator content but it was still sorted. if I recall it had a 1-5 star rating or something also.

as messy as this might sound id love it be shown on an overworld map with a toggle option of "community content" and "official content".
Whether something is good or not is in the eye of the beholder though. And yes i plan on making "best content this week" stuff whenever its possible.

 

[derula]

I agree with everything people are saying, but I'm not happy with it. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I don't want to first find out where I have to look in order to find good content before being able to find any.

If a built-in solution is truly not viable... then maybe the game could promote places to look for content? Maybe even with an in-game browser (think Steam overlay) that will open external websites without leaving the game, and from there, the player could click on a link to the content and the game would recognize that and load it. Maybe that could be a compromise.

Or maybe the way community created content works with DHS is completely different to begin with, and this problem isn't even something that can occur?

 

[Denis Dyack]

A detailed response to this topic is warranted. In fact, I might need to create a video as a response. It is based on a content theory that I been mulling over for several years, that has the same trajectory of interactive streaming. The medium of video games has progressed from single-player games -> multi-player games - > meta-player games. Similarly, content creation has also changed from single-author -> multi-author -> meta-authors.

This response revolves around topics like League of Legends, Game of Thrones and the SCP foundation:

I am happy to say this already bearing out faster than hoped with a great example of @Varik Keldun' community-created content:

Poems

So Denis had posted the following in the general chat today on discord. Crimson dreams with consciousness streams, the Leper King is crowned. Crimson dreams with consciousness screams, the empire of men are bound. Crimson dreams with consciousness beams, the white knight is found. Crimson...

deadhaussonata.com

CRIMSONS' TWILIGHT
Cursed dreams, with cursed screams,
The wound the blade had brought.

A board, a game, of mortal claim,
Two lords a battle fought.

Of death, and change, those stars arranged.
Lords' master wanted ought.**

These seven suns, this Islirith,***
He had heard of naught.

To sage and priest the white knight went,
To cleanse the blade he caught.*

They prayed, they plead, in dire need.
Though, it would matter not.****

 

[Varik Keldun]

The SCP foundation stuff is really fun to read / watch... i've enjoyed quite a few of them.

 

[Iain Stenhouse]

The SCP foundation stuff is really fun to read / watch... i've enjoyed quite a few of them.

We've definitely spent a lot of time at Apocalypse researching how the SCP Foundation forum works. Also, if you're interested in a cool horror game to play, SCP Containment Breach is a really great horror game @Varik Keldun!

 

[Varik Keldun]

i've watched VoDs of it and its def. interesting to say the least.

 

[derula]

So I have no idea how the content selection or promotion works with SCP, but one thing I know for sure: I have never had the aforementioned Community Content issues with SCP. Sure, some articles are more memorable than others, but I never had to dig through tons of bad articles to finally get to a good one. Of course, I never tried to look "behind the scenes" to see how this high amount of quality came to be, but that's besides the point. Having a content delivery system like SCP - however it works behind the scenes - will avoid the problem I mentioned in OP: people won't be scared away by having to wade through tons of bad content before finding an eventual gem. Instead, they will be blown away by all the high-quality content, and some of them will want to look further and start creating their own.

I will add a third option to my poll.
I'm considering renaming my thread; I didn't mean the title to be so controversial / clickbait-y. Not sure what title would be better though. There, I hope that's better.

 

[Denis Dyack]

'm considering renaming my thread; I didn't mean the title to be so controversial / clickbait-y. Not sure what title would be better though.

Seems fine to me - no need to change anything.

 

[derula]

Seems fine to me - no need to change anything.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

If I understood correctly in the stream, they were hesitant to show it at all because of the title, and that's really not the reaction I meant to cause. It troubles me when my speech has unintended adverse effects, and at least on the Internet, I can sort of fix that.

 

[Denis Dyack]

Thanks, I appreciate it.

If I understood correctly in the stream, they were hesitant to show it at all because of the title, and that's really not the reaction I meant to cause. It troubles me when my speech has unintended adverse effects, and at least on the Internet, I can sort of fix that.

Oh, I didn't catch that but I have been buried with work and have seen the stream yet. I do think the title is fair and no need to shy away from challenging topics, if that was the case. No worries in any event.