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- Feb 21, 2018
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The main issue here is discoverability. My experience with developer-supported community content is mostly with the following games:
- Portal 2
- Super Mario Maker
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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:
- With a lot of community content coming in, it needs a large team to check all of it.
- You can't really judge stuff like that objectively; if you could, you could just use an AI for it.
- There will be accusations of bias and discrimination.
- 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...
...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?