Gaming Communities – User Generated Content?

Long long time ago, there was this conference called Community Standard. On that Conference Erling Ellingsen from Funcom told us about Communities in MMO Games (presentation title “Being a God – Creating Virtual Worlds”).  So on one slide of his nice power point – BTW I hate power point – presentation was called “The Process” and it was showing the process of creating a Virtual World of AoC. The process goes like this:

Step 1 – A good idea

• Brainstorming meetings
• Get the ideas onto paper
• Create a “design bible”

Step 2 – Planning

• Structuring the project
• Hiring the right people
• Milestones and processes

Step 3 – Production

• Code, art and content
• Prioritizing, cutting
• Putting the parts together

Step 4 – Test and distribution

• Product quality assurance
• Sales and marketing
• Distribution to the market

I’m pretty sure that’s just a very simple way to show how it really looked like – we all know nothing is that simple ^^ – but in case of this post what I want you to focus on is  keyword “content“. Let’s have a look on all 4 steps. They look like a very universal 4 steps to build anything from gaming virtual world to any other web based community service.  From what I understood from this speech was that the most challenging thing for “Gods” in Virtual Gaming Worlds is that it’s them who have to create the content FOR the community. So I started to think, what kind of content gaming communities have/create.

1. In-game content made by game developers. New extensions (like Lord of Destruction for Diablo 2) new lands, new creatures etc.
2. In-game content made by users. Small like new cars, items etc. or bigger like full game mods or whole cities (Second Life).
3. external content made by users. Fan arts, websites, forums etc. On-line communities created by In-Game Communities (can I call it like that?)
4. old fashioned marketing content… doesn’t really matter :P Social Media FTW!

so as you can see we have like a lot of content types.  So to speak here is where we differ. In magic, not mentioned :

Step 5 – Keep your community alive. Providing content or getting content?

For sure it’s easier if you allow your Gaming Community to provide 2nd type of content and put it inside the game – check the success of Second Life – but this is a very risky way to go.

• you have no control on the posted content – moderating it is not too “social”…
• you have no control on the quality of injected content..
• because of point 1 your business model of in-game advertising is compromised
• that should be enoguh ;)

that’s amazing for me, I work in GoldenLine where UGC is our best quality ( ~22k posts/day, all signed with name, surname and a picture of the author with a CV attached, like LinkedIn but with real life attached ) but in our case that Content is (as you can guess from UGC short) provided totaly by users.

• How to deal with that issue ? Yeah, for me it’s an issue, are you surprised? :)
• How to motivate your gaming users to WAIT till you provide them a new content – wait inside your world.

I have nightmares because of those 2 questions and because of that I will make an interview ith Erling soon and I will definitly post it in here :) Till that time, if you have any ideas please post them in comments.

Update #1

I forgot about one thing, I’m a gamer myself :) So I went back to the past when I was waiting for Call of Duty 4 patch with new content (maps etc.). What keept me with this title?

• custom modifications – well yes, they were unofficial and they were in most cases crap but still, something new.. (second type of content)
• glitches on exsiting content – some maps had some bugs which I didn’t know and that was like a fresh content to me :) (first type of content)
• people, most of us play multi player games because of people, doh, I know some people who play games they don’t even like.. they just like the people they play with..
• soooo many leagues to check..  esl.eu, cybersports.pl etc. (third type of content)

so from that we can assume that the best solution is to keep your world closed for custom modification, keep its integrity but allow – and even give tools – to create custom made worlds with your brand name… in that case you have a lot of new stuff that shows your game to the world and you’re not even responsible for it… briliant :)

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