remnant_phoenix said:
So I realized the other day that I'm pretty indifferent towards the idea of user-made content.
Skyrim mods, user-made levels in Little Big Planet, and some of the crazy stuff that gets made in Minecraft sound really cool to me...in theory. Games that allow users the tools to create their own stuff are definitely a good thing.
But then when I actually sit down with modding tools to make my own user-made content, I find I'd rather play something someone else made. Also, when I play through someone's user-made content I generally find myself preferring the game content that the original developers made. A few months ago when Skyrim was all people would talk about, anytime the subject of "mods" came up I became completely disengaged.
So...yeah, I'm happy that user-made stuff exists, but I'm not very interested in it personally.
Let's discuss.
I like it, but at the same time I feel that we're not at the point where we see creation tools capable of letting the typical user creat decent content exist. As a result it can be very difficult finding anything worthwhile out of all of the stuff churned out by a user community.
What's more there is a tendency for the companies producing such tools for their games to not really allow a full range of use from the users. I remember Bethesda blowing a gasket over fan-made nudity mods a few years ago (Oblivion I believe), and then we had all of the stuff about censorship in things like "Little Big Planet" if something was not considered family friendly, or somehow came too close to something someone else had done.
While hardly a huge fan, I do think "Second Life" kind of had the right idea in the way how it put extremely powerful creation tools in the hands of the user base, and then for most of their history too an entirely hands off approach. People did amazing things, some of which were definatly pretty disgusting or sexually oriented, but still pretty amazing. It was actually downhill for the enviroment by all accounts when Liden Labs started selling out and actually trying to limit what people could do with the creation tools, and in the process demonstrating a slippery slope. It started with things like user harassment, then moved into going after kiddie porn and stuff, which were good, but like many such well intentioned crusades things kept right on sliding until you had a lot of people afraid that anything that was going to push the envelope could get them in trouble or see their hard work destroyed or deleted, whether they paid for storage space or not. Kind of a case in point about how when it comes to these kinds of things you can either give freeom or creativity, or not, you really can't cultivate the wonders of a fully creative enviroment when you start putting limits on it. You have to take the bad with the good.
Right now I don't get excited about the possibility of user created content, because it's usually just not worth the trouble, and frequently takes all kinds of effort to use even at the best of times because you wind up neeing to make sure the toolkit used for the content matches the right patched version of the game (since the companies don't watch out for this), and then inevitably anything good requires you to usually use a series of user created mods from a number of sources which depending on whatever else you might have wanted to try might not play well together... and well, you get the idea. On top of everything else, general accessibility is limited. You have your best chance of getting a mod to work if you happen to get it immediatly right at the same time as the patched version of the game is the same as when it was released. If you want to make someone's mod work from say a year beforehand, good luck with that, especially if he built on other people's work. The odds of everyone involved in that having remained interested enough to keep updating, fixing, and tweaking their mods in relation to each other are pretty bad.
