Chart: Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online. Raph’s Website » User created content. David Edery has a nice list of reasons why user generated content works.
The big rap against user-generated content, of course, is that it’s directionless. It leads to a hodgepodge, and users who enter an environment built from it quickly feel that there’s nothing to do, because a rather small fraction of user content is actually finished. (Which just goes to show that the most needed attribute for a creator in any field is persistence!) Will Wright, back in the Sims 1 days, used to show off a User Content Pyramid, displaying the fact that a very tiny percentage of users made good content tools, a somewhat larger amount made content, a fair amount distributed it, a largish amount — a plurality as I recall — downloaded content that was user-generated, and the broadest base didn’t so anything with it.
Because of this, Sims 2 pursued certain types of user content even more — namely, the movies and screenshot stories that were the big surprise in terms of Sims 1 content. The DAEDALUS PROJECT: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology.