SDForum & user-created content

So I’m here at SDForum in Palo Alto, listening to a whole host of people talk about virtual worlds.

Some common themes: VCs looking for ways to make money. Lots of talk about community. Lots of moving away from games alone. Lots of referencing MySpace as a virtual world. Lots of people talking about networks rather than individual world. And a few game guys defending games as a viable hook into virtual worlds.

It’s this latter point that I really wanted to drive home… people like content, and building a space just to have a space isn’t ever going to be what brings this sort of space to the mainstream.

As I write this, I just had Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab log into Second Life on my tablet, and walk around on the projected version of the conference that is happening on the wall here, as the audio is streamed into the virtual world. That’s content he’s interacting with.

One of the panelists — I think it was Jerry Paffendorf — said that games are one of the best forms of content we can provide, and I agree with him. Yes, the other mentioned was porn, but Jerry made the point that the kinds of emotional arousal provided by these two are similar in degree if not in kind.

As I type this,John Welch of PlayFirst is passionately arguing that the point of gathering in groups is to have fun, and that yes, games need to grow up in order to reach Google-level audiences, but that just customizing a profile isn’t enough — that at some point, you finish customizing your profile on MySpace, and run out of things to do.

There are two key reasons to enable user content: to hope that some of it is content that others want to see, and to provide the sense of self-satisfaction that people get from creating things. Both are key pieces of the puzzle; it only takes a very small audience for a given content creator to feel like they’ve touched somebody with their work.

But I don’t think that all the hoorah over user created content (which I am a huge supporter of, as you know) means that professionally created content is going to go away. It’s not. In fact, the likeliest path for the future of user-created content is derivative works. Derivative works rely on there being a core of something really cool there first.

If we really want to enable user created content, we should be looking to create fandoms.