It still happens — I get into a conversation with someone, and they say ‘but, surely user-created content can’t work on the Internet? Won’t most of it be bad?”

Then you get a story like this, wherein we learn that the users of City of Heroes, given 24 hours, made more missions than the entire dev since the game was first started — and what’s more, around 10% of them got rated as 5-star by the other users.

In a letter to the community posted on the official City of Heroes website, Matt “Positron” Miller revealed that within the first 24 hours of the new updates’ existence, players in both hero and villain factions had created more than 3800 story arcs, each consisting of five missions a piece – more content than the development team had created during the game’s entire existence.

Really, the quintessential challenge here isn’t going to be volume of high-quality content. It’s going to be filtering, bubbling the good stuff up to the top. But this is a largely known problem these days on the web. So  it’s about time that the skepticism stop. Yes, users can be just as good at game design as pros — what they usually need is tools with a low enough barrier to entry, and the context within which to create.