Of course, you can game this with your design. Reload between levels and have very short levels, and you’ll pump up your popularity. Have random opening conditions, many of which are obviously poor ones, and the players will reload until they get a playable position (as in at least two of your examples) and pump up your popularity. Have a lot of bugs that lock up or crash the game, and the players will reload to get back to playing, and….

Not that coming up with rating systems that are both unobtrusive and effective at rating actual entertainment value isn’t a hard problem. But it sounds like Kongregate didn’t even try.

There are two reasons for someone in the industry to stop writing about it:

1) You very quickly get a reputation for being a thinker and a talker, with the implication that if you were really so smart, you’d be rich and keeping your mouth shut to avoid helping the competition. Nobody likes arrogance, and it takes arrogance to broadcast your opinions across the internet, as if they were better than other people’s.

2) The Eleventh Commandment of the game industry is: Thou shalt not point out the stink of thy neighbor’s shit. It’s the definition of “Professional” to most people in it. Beyond a certain very narrow range, where we have mostly either established consensus and there’s little to talk about (”Community is important!”), or we’ve hit circular reasoning dead ends (”Permadeath would be awesome if somebody did it right!”), it’s impossible to discuss game design without getting into specific implementations of it, and contrasting them. As soon as you do, you’re going to piss somebody off, and that’s going to affect your career (there is a whole set of people who flat-out won’t work with me, because I trashed their game’s design 7 years ago).

–Dave

Blogs. Not to be harsh, but frequently there are many blogs all saying the same thing. Whether it is posting the same link to the same news story or fake news story or linking to some other guy’s blog, frequently they are all saying the same thing. Though finding blogs to read by clicking other’s blogrolls is a much better way of filtering. Find one blog that has well thought out and well written posts and it will frequently lead to more.

Oh look, you let me descend into rambling. Not sure what my point was. I read too many blogs at work, and we need better ways to filter out the crap. I’ll make those my points.

Of course it’s artificial. Professional work environments are created purposefully by whatever management is in place. Any structure to user creation will also need to be provided by whatever professional organization is in place. But the point where cynicism over the quality of professionally created work leads to players paying for the privilege of making their own fun is when the game industry starts to die.

Maybe certain people want it to die, but not /yet/, damn it.

I’m not against the creation of incubators for potential employees, and in fact I think the FPS genre has that down pat with the release of SDKs and map editors with nearly every major product in the genre. But suggest anything like that to those who make MMOs and RPGs and you’ll get a lot of hand-wringing. Except that the organization of fan-driven projects will continue to be entirely unpredictable unless companies who enable users to create their own content get the help and guidance they need in the form of something other than just a load of docs.

For all the pretense of how great it’d be to allow players to create their own fun, a daily glance at the IGDA forums is all I ever need to note how few fundamentals of game production seem to filter through the thick skull of a typical game enthusiast. It’s almost as though a lot of them expect a “game engine” to be some magical piece of software where someone just presses a button and a nearly-functioning game is suddenly available, and all that is left to do is “tweaks” and “balances.”

In short, the game industry is making people stupid. That should stop before people get all fired up about them making content. “Procedural” content is only going to warp their poor brains further.

The transactions should be very easy to make so that the effort of paying does not influence you, just whether to pay or not (such as if Kongregate had your credit card, and if you like a game enough to play just press one button and presto you get it - not having to whip out your card each time.). Part of the money should get back to the content creators of course.

The difference between user created and created by the company that made the original game is that there are no/few controls first of all, which also means more risk taking is possible by the user creator since they have nothing vested in the framework/original game, and thirdly user created content gives you access to many many times the labor of the original company. One thing that people consume fast is content, yet no company could afford to hire all the people it takes to keep up and still make a profit - not with mmos at least.

That user created content might indeed just be another smaller company.

Well, imperfect tools, certainly, but I think you’re overlooking one of the best of them all: The HR department.

Talented people don’t always get hired, but frequently they do, and then you say, “Well, that’s not user-generated content. Those people are professionals,” maybe.

You’re right, but that just makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing.

The divide between user-generated content and employee-generated content is an artificial one, I think.

Side note:

Yeebo: Winding up with asshats like Bush in office has repercussions beyond the short term. McCain’s been a maverick in the republican party for a long time, and now he’s the Republican nominee… I mean… that’s significant (and actually, kind of a good sign if you’re not fond of the Republican party).

It’s almost enough to restore one’s faith in the democratic process.

And even if it isn’t, there’s not been a lot to restore faith in the alternatives, so… eh…

Ok, this is too political. Heh.

“Top rated” systems like You-tube and Kongregate, on the other hand, are complete crap. If you simply let the masses vote, you end up with asshats like Bush in office.