And that’s the point really. No gets to define what user means, much less what user content means. The web glorifies piracy, calls it by many names, but essentially, it is a boundaryless fire zone of expression and there is nothing except sloth and incompetence that makes a difference.

It isn’t the fixed form nature of copyright that causes it to be inadequate: it is the scaling complexity of the forms (how much work will you do to learn to code), the antiquated points systems for shreddin’ the natch, and the auditability of collections. The adaptive response is to change from unit pricing to services pricing. There is no way to control copying so copy distribution becomes nearly irrelevant or at least, much more sensitive to control costs (how much money will you spend to enforce it and how do enforcement means affect the marketability). Meanwhile, in a related dimension, the same technologies are slowly creating new opportunities for collboration and content generation, but are not necessarily being applied to the control processes themselves. For example, why would one want to submit a cassette or printed sheet music to register a copyright and pay a fee the is exorbitant with respect to volume of submissions? Why would one use a points system based on unit sales to divvy profits?

I give you the newLively example because that IS user-generated content at another level and the game is not to capture the castle, but to capture a market segment. In this case, one left abandoned, but at the same time, an attempt that shows how weak the market actually is with respect to the overlapping topics of IP and user-generated content. Nothing based on secret sauce has much past the first few cycles to recommend it to a venture capitalist. The IP is fast becoming a yawner.

IOW, to the original question, on the web it is ALL user-generated content from one hierarchy to the next level. As you said, “the lines between user and developer are blurring, and that this may in fact be a historical imperative”. It isn’t a historical imperative; it is a technological imperative. DRM followed the culture of the money. Content followed the culture of the technology. Complexity of content type and talent are the wildcards.

But the effects are staggering in what they are doing to the economic business models.

[...] Auch Raph Koster schreibt in seinem Blog einen schönen Artikel über User Generated Content in virtuellen Welten. [...]

Isn’t that what machinima really is? Or pasting ASCII art in chatrooms? A subversion of the fundament to force it into a different medium? If a user-produced piece of Thing doesn’t fit well, at least in spirit, into what it was made for, do we consider it UGC?

Users treat boundries as damage and route around them. If they can’t do it within the context of the virtual world, they expand the context. What’s a pirate server except a user or group of users that has decided to skip directly to tier 5 of Raph’s hierarchy? And isn’t an armchair designer whispering ideas in a developer’s ear on a message board a less efficient but more acceptable form of the same principle?

I think it’s central to the nature of players/users. We are, by definition almost, the people who aren’t content to sit back and be passively entertained. We want to be active participants. And a large percentage of us don’t want to just listen to the stories or participate in the stories. We want to MAKE the stories.

I think many designers are sympathetic to this, because it’s the exact thing that motivates them. They push at the barriers from above to help empower users, even while the users are pushing at the barriers from below.

And meanwhile, the bean counters and lawyers see Pandora’s box starting to split at the seams…

Its encouraging to see the reigns loosen a bit on the idea of giving players a shovel and a pail :9.

My friend Brad and I have been doing made-up-on-the-spot “text adventures” for the last few weeks now, then posting them for others to enjoy. I consider it a form of performance art in chat… and maybe some “on-the-fly collaborative game design” as well, if you want to get fancy about it.

http://bradshaytextadventure.blogspot.com

Isn’t that what machinima really is? Or pasting ASCII art in chatrooms? A subversion of the fundament to force it into a different medium? If a user-produced piece of Thing doesn’t fit well, at least in spirit, into what it was made for, do we consider it UGC?

Similarly, your initial “if” (“If your platform supports a decent high level language…”) isn’t even remotely the case in many apps (this post is not about VWs alone!), but it is certainly something that is a growing trend.

I agree that replicating Lively in a month is impressive and important. But Lively was also no great shakes, replicating the basics of it is not hard, and I think it could have been done very quickly in many ways. On Metaplace we replicated the substance of Club Penguin (not the content — analogous to what Newlively has done) in a matter of days. So where does that leave us? That yes, X3D/VRML is a great platform. Nobody said otherwise. Is it upending the industry yet? Not yet. May it? Certainly.

What you in this industry won’t accept and can’t accept because your greed won’t let you is the basis in standards required for that.

You’re defending X3D/VRML against an attack that has not been made. Nothing in the post is arguing against standards at all. It doesn’t even come up, because it isn’t germane to the topic. Everything I wrote can be done with standards, or without them. And they can be done with or without formal standards as well. (Using the common usage of standard here — “whatever most people use”. Lots of the web is built on informal standards).