User-created content

In case it slipped under the radar this weekend, there is an article by Dave Kosak over at GameSpy which uses the recent Second Life announcement as a jumping off point in a discussion about user-created content and the future of MMOGs in general. The majority of it is made up of quotes on different angles of the subject but it's pretty interesting and has some good tidbits from folks like Wright, Mulligan, (our own) Rickey, etc. The article is part of a longer series on MMOGs. Also (courtesy of the link at /.) an article on TSO (may be old news to some but I'd not seen it yet).

Comments

[Ren]

1.

First – hi to everyone I met in NY and sorry to be so _polite_ I’ll try to get back to my normal online self which I take to be somewhere between direct and just darn rude

User generated content is a fascinating topic. And of course we should clarify terms here as users already create masses of content, not just fan sites, fan fic and fan art but the actual acts of playing the game. What we are discussing here are user created objects in game worlds (and not just assemblies of exiting stuff – as I think Cory insightfully noted (note to self: must find excuse to disagree with Cory ).

I can see that we are going to enter phase three of this debate:
Phase 1 – IPR issues
Phase 2 - Forget IPR its all about limits of contract
Phase 3 – Forget contract what about economic and censorship

Economics (puts Ted hat on for a moment)
There is a compelling argument in marketing that if you get your customers do your work for you, you are on to a winner. However there are issues. One is that the content they create might be rubbish. There was a long discussion on MUD-DEV (remember that, the listserve that terranova killed) called Player malleable worlds (was Expected value andstandard deviation) where this sort of stuff was discussed. Player content is all very well just so long as it adds to and does not detract from the game experience. Clothes and stuff certainly do seem to enhance the social worlds that they are currently being employed in one wonders though how far this can go and at what point choice becomes a burden,

Censorship
So in second life you can create what ever clothes and stuff you want – right ?
Well no, As we found out in NY all stuff goes though a vetting process, actually a single person. _nude_ look clothes have been banned, so have all obvious trade marks – enter civil liberties groups – so where does this end, how political or obscene can I be with the stuff I create in these worlds ? There is no limit to what I can say (actually I think that some worlds do use text parsers to keep things clean) so who are the likes of games companies to tell me what I talk about through visual language.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Dave Rickey]

2.

More interesting on the issue of trademarks is parodies. The 'Sig Heil Bill G.' graphic uses the (trademarked) Windows logo on a Nazi flag in place of a swastika and dresses Bill up like a Hitler Youth brownshirt. An obvious parody, and it would be a complete waste of time to sue over it, Cafe Press wouldn't blink over it (in fact, if I looked I could probably find a t-shirt with that on it through their site, or make one myself). But would the Second Life content reviewer understand that well enough to pass it through? Or would fears over trademark and "controversy" lead them to prohibit it?

--Dave

[Ren]

3.

Dave Rickey wrote:
>Bill up like a Hitler Youth brownshirt

Or just dress up as Hitler Youth generally.

Unless there is no content control I can see aspects of There being just as nasty as _here_ and my second life being as brutish as my first - which simply virtualizes all the arguments over free speach we have been having since, well, speech i guess.

ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Richard Bartle]

4.

Dave Rickey>But would the Second Life content reviewer understand that well enough to pass it through? Or would fears over trademark and "controversy" lead them to prohibit it?

By having content reviewers, 2nd Life accepts responsibility for its content. If anyone does sue, 2nd Life will certainly be in the firing line. Their editorial process means they can't use a "common carrier" defence. Thus, the content reviewer is more likely to be conservative in their interpretation of what to allow (unless they WANT the company to be sued).

The new EULA clause may thus be interpreted as "you own any IP you create, but we reserve the right to prevent you from creating it".

Richard

[Cory Ondrejka]

5.

Second Life DOES NOT, repeat, DOES NOT vet, approve, or otherwise examine content when it is created or uploaded.

There.com does this. Second Life DOES NOT.

As someone correctly pointed out to Will Harvey (There.com founder and the person who spoke about naked avatars) attempting to approve content doesn't scale, and as Ren, Dave and Richard point out here, approving content is a tremendously bad idea.

Editorial control of content is, IMHO, just about the worst thing a user created world could do. Much like the IP issue (where there is a fundamental contradiction between "create clothing" and "There.com owns everything you upload") it was clear to us in the early stages of Second Life that the decision about vetting content is a nice overlap of the best answer from a business perspective (no possible way to scale an approval process, blocks our common carrier status, &c) and the right answer (people should be able to use the system as they see fit and have a good time).

So, I apologize for being a little repetitive, but this is such a critical distinction that I want to make sure that everyone is clear: Second Life DOES NOT approve content upon creation or upload.

Also, remember that users are not "submitting" content to us at all. They don't build in some offline tool like GMax and then send it in. Instead, they are freely creating in real time, in world. I tried to hit this in my talk, but 10 minutes was very little time. Everything (OK, over 99% since the terrain and sky textures are ones that we built) that you saw in Second Life demos and screen shots were built by our users, generally collaboratively, in world. When you are creating, you aren't crafting but are instead actually sticking various pieces together in any way you see fit, completely interactively. In fact, while you are building, other users can see exactly what you are doing, since everything is happening in the world, not locally on your machine. So, your creation is done when you want it to be done, with no additional cost to submit and NO APPROVAL process.

User created content is, as you might expect, near and dear to me and to Linden Lab. We are taking tremendous care, both on the technical and the legal sides, to ensure that users have the power and flexibility that they need to build a compelling world and it would be a mistake for us to do something that would interfere with that.

Oh, WRT naked avatars, Second Life has areas that are zoned either PG or Mature. In PG areas, nudity and cursing is a violation of community standards (so please cover up :-)!) while in Mature areas the standards are much looser (so to speak).

With both Second Life and There.com giving demos and talks at the conference it is easy to confuse them somewhat, but understand that they are profoundly different products and companies with very different approaches to building online worlds, but perhaps that should be a different thread :-)!

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Cory Ondrejka>Second Life DOES NOT, repeat, DOES NOT vet, approve, or otherwise examine content when it is created or uploaded.

Oops! Yes, of course, you're right. I stand corrected.

>With both Second Life and There.com giving demos and talks at the conference it is easy to confuse them somewhat

I've been trying to figure out why exactly I got confused, and have finally concluded that it was because Philip Rosedale looked to me like a character from There. Then again, Clay Shirky looked like Tom Hanks but I didn't ask him about his latest movie role (I hope).

The salient points I picked up from the demos was that There seemed to be about overturning buggies (spilling passengers everywhere) whereas 2nd Life was about wind (that blew adjacent flags in opposite directions).

>Second Life has areas that are zoned either PG or Mature.

So it's more "You own any IP you create, but we reserve the right to uncreate it if you created it in the wrong place"?

>they are profoundly different products and companies with very different approaches to building online worlds

This did come across in the demos: There seemed to be Britney Spears to 2nd Life's Pink.

Richard

[Ren]

7.

>>Cory Ondrejka>Second Life DOES NOT, repeat, DOES NOT vet, approve, or otherwise examine content when it is created or uploaded.

>Richard Bartle>Oops! Yes, of course, you're right. I stand corrected

I'm sorry for confusing There and Second Life too - everying started to merge into one in NY.

Now the distinction between There and Second Life has finaly hit home I cant wait to log onto both and see how the different approaches plays out.

ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Cory Ondrejka]

8.

>Philip Rosedale looked to me like a character from There.

LMAO. OK, that made my morning.

>So it's more "You own any IP you create, but we reserve the right to uncreate it if you created it in the wrong place"?

Sure. Much like the real world, different locations have differing standards of conduct. In SL, in addition to the PG/Mature distinction, we also make the orthogonal distinction between safe and unsafe areas. In safe areas, avatars don't take damage and it is inappropriate to shoot them, bounce them around, or cage them up in hamster wheels. However, in unsafe areas all of those things are OK and avatars can even be killed (although the penalty for death is quite low as you are merely teleported home and don't lose anything). We've really focused on giving players options.

Cory

[Richard Bartle]

9.

Cory Ondrejka>LMAO. OK, that made my morning.

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have said that about a man who just made the acquaintance of 50 lawyers...

>However, in unsafe areas all of those things are OK and avatars can even be killed (although the penalty for death is quite low as you are merely teleported home and don't lose anything).

Do you foresee any widening of this in future? I know you have other things to do right now, but might you at some time allow people to create areas with other limitations on them decided by their creators? I might, for example, prohibit more than 10 people from entering my area at once, or only allow people who have no weapons. More extremely, I might want all safety controls off so that characters can actually be destroyed if they do the wrong thing in my area. Could that kind of thing ever happen in 2nd Life?

Not that I'm wondering how easy it would be to use 2nd Life as a hosting system for sub-worlds or anything...

Richard

[Dan Hunter]

10.

Richard's last comment leads me to wonder about the connection between land control, property and governance. If 2L (or There) allow sub-developers like Richard to control areas of their world, then there are some interesting results.

First, it will provide an opportunity to think about the nature of governance for those spaces. For example, if Richard sets the entry conditions ("Bartle's All Nude Nature Reserve") then presumably it's up to him and not 2L/There to police these conditions. This is a great benefit for the developers, since (imo) the trainwreck on the horizon is the community-developer governance problem. Ceding some form of control on a space-delimited basis helps the developers here. Of course it creates it's own challenges, but it's a step in the right direction (by which I mean for the developers and the commmunity, I think that it's win-win).

However, it will create unintended consequences for the nature of the community. Ownership (or mere control) of land will tend to atomize the individual users, and will almost certainly lead to the emergence of land-holding and non-land-holding classes. To the extent that this will entrench the physical assumptions about society then this is (again, imo) a bad thing. Even if you don't hold a utopian ideal for VWs, it's also a bad thing, I think, for the developers. Unless the developers engage in fairly radical schemes for redistributive equity/justice, the haves will remain in game, but the have-nots will leave. This means a small user base, with no prospect of growth.

For those who would say, "well, just hand out more money" remember that there is an exchange between these worlds and the real. You can't hand out virtual cash without actually handing out real cash. Handing out money is, generally speaking, not a good longterm strategy for companies that want to survive.

This stuff is too much fun.

[Cory Ondrejka]

11.

> Richard: Do you foresee any widening of this in future? . . .

Actually, land owners can already do things like "only let 10 people onto my land" or "only let people who pay me L$10 onto my land" or "only let people from my group onto my land", &c, so land owners already have a lot of options. As for "destroying" characters, I'm not sure what I mean. We have death, which means "get teleported home, which might be far away" but nothing like "destroy". However, you can ban people from your land permanently, which from the perspective of being on your land is a lot like being destroyed.

> Dan: "Bartle's All Nude Nature Reserve"

Yes, Richard could already do this (if his land was owned on a mature area), although since the scripting language can't detect nudity, he'd need to hire a doorman/doorwoman to enforce it.

c

[Richard Bartle]

12.

Cory Ondrejka>We have death, which means "get teleported home, which might be far away" but nothing like "destroy".

What I meant was destruction, ie. permanent death. Complete obliteration of a character. If you walk through the gateway and a big sign flashes up saying "No, really, you could LOSE YOUR CHARACTER FOREVER if it gets killed here!" and you keep on walking and your character gets killed, it stays dead?

I do have a reason for asking this. I'll explain.

When social textual virtual worlds appeared, people spent a lot of time creating stuff for them but eventually drifted away because there wasn't a lot else to do but show off your creations. To make these virtual worlds more interesting (for them), players would therefore get together and make sub-games. Sometimes these were simple things like chess and Monopoly - recognisable games. Others, however, played with the form as well as the function, and created sub-worlds within the virtual world. You're seeing thge first stirrings of that now in 2nd Life.

In textual worlds where this happened, eventually the super-world became regarded as the interface to the sub-worlds, since the sub-worlds had the game content that the players of these worlds wanted. You played the social game because it was your portal to the adventure game.

The reason I asked my question was to find out how flexible the overall 2nd Life development system was. It's possible to implement an AberMUD in an LPMUD but not vice versa. Legal issues asside, would it be possible to implement EQ in 2nd Life?

I asked about permanent death because this is the ultimate in opposite to what 2nd Life is about. If a player could implement that in 2nd Life, they could implement pretty much anything.

Richard

[Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz]

13.

Does 2nd Life have stats? Are possessions tied to a character? If the Avatar can be easily and quickly recreated, then "destroying" it means something different than in most advancement driven MMORPGs.

On the other hand, could the sub-world track stats and items and even character names internally? If so, then the "character" in the sub-world is sort of an avatar of an avatar. So, you could permanently kill the avatar of the avatar even if you couldn't kill the avatar.

Right?

--Phin

[Cory Ondrejka]

14.

Phin,
That's right. The EQ in SL would be tracking stats separately, so in that sense you could destroy the character you were using. However, to answer Richard's question, SL doesn't support that kind of destruction at the character level. The idea behind that was for reputation permanance, since we didn't want people doing the "I'm going to run around grieding until I get bored, then destroy myself and start over" problem.
Cory

[Richard Bartle]

15.

Phinehas>could the sub-world track stats and items and even character names internally? If so, then the "character" in the sub-world is sort of an avatar of an avatar. So, you could permanently kill the avatar of the avatar even if you couldn't kill the avatar.

Yes, it looks like you'd have to use such a second layer of interpretation. You can't run your EQclone on the 2nd Life engine directly, but you can write an engine for your EQclone that does run on the 2nd Life engine directly (albeit somewhat slower, I should imagine).

Richard

[Cory Ondrejka]

16.

Richard>Yes, it looks like you'd have to use such a second layer of interpretation. You can't run your EQclone on the 2nd Life engine directly, but you can write an engine for your EQclone that does run on the 2nd Life engine directly (albeit somewhat slower, I should imagine).

Yes, although things like character motion, physics, gestures, &c would all operate directly through the main engine and would be full speed. It's all in how you write the script code. You should really try SL and talk to the folks working on DarkLife since they are exploring this terrain as we speak.