Player-Generated Content
There is an interesting phenomenon in games that involves creativity and imagination. Whether intended or unintended, a game can serve as the backdrop for what’s called player-generated content—content that a player creates tangential to a game. This is particularly noticeable in youth when kids make pillow forts or play hot lava tag. I think this factor, player-generated content or PGC, is important for a game’s longevity.
My thoughts on PGC arose after viewing a video about Old School Runescape by a YouTuber called J1mmy called “Runescape Doesn’t Need Nostalgia.” Nostalgia seems to be a recurring topic in my blog posts, and it’s no wonder given people’s tendency to reminisce about the “good old days.” The topic gained traction when another YouTuber/Streamer, Asmongold, reacted to the video and a seeming disagreement arose between them about what significantly contributes to a game’s success. While I don’t think there’s really a disagreement as both J1mmy and Asmongold acknowledge other factors, they both place different levels of importance on the factors. I’ve already expounded on the quality (objective factors) of a thing compared to the appeal (subjective factors) of a thing, and this is a necessary distinction when considering games alongside this overall topic of PGC. Nostalgia is one such subjective factor—one’s sentimental feelings for the past. Nostalgia is different but understandably related to whether a game is good. Old School Runescape is a great example of this distinction—is player engagement with Old School Runescape due to nostalgia or due to the game being good? I think it’s both, but I favor J1mmy’s stance more in that nostalgia isn’t great at player retention. Nostalgia is certainly great at garnering interest or getting players in the door to reexperience something, but once that short-lived dopamine hit is gone there has to be something more to keep players hooked. One such thing J1mmy points out as being important is PGC.
Sticking with Old School Runescape for a bit, J1mmy gives plenty of PGC examples like prop hunt, ironman mode, and a variety of self-imposed rules like solely leveling one skill, restricting bank access, restricting inventory slots, and staying in specific regions of the game. I myself did a bit of these like leveling only the strength skill without attack, defense, magic, or ranged skills and imagining myself as this deranged buff but otherwise incompetent character. And yes, back in the early 2000s when Old School Runescape was just Runescape and I was a wee lad I’d do tons of imaginative play (i.e., PGC). I learned to type really quickly out of necessity to get my messages read in the highly populated western Varrock bank, and then I’d convince other players to follow me into the basement and I’d roleplay a bank heist and even troll them with the prospect of a drop party only to drop a pair of leather boots and run away; I’d also occasionally put monk robes on my character and have him visit the Edgeville Monastery to pray for a bit before massacring the other monks because I decided I was a rogue monk.
I have some other examples of PGC now from Asmongold’s wheelhouse in the game World of Warcraft. As a hunter, I’d jump off semi-high places to land in front of other players and then click my feign death ability to confuse them and then miraculously come back to life. As a rogue, I’d simply walk through the streets of Stormwind while stealthing and trying to avoid other players seeing me before adjourning to Cut-Throat Alley and pretend it was a sort of home base. There were plenty other class-specific ways I did PGC, as well as profession-related stuff like putting on a fishing hat and going over to a beach to fish and say random things to players who passed by like “Fine day for fishin’, ain’t it?” I’ve heard of other crazy PGC like players holding weddings and funerals in the game, as well as players creating gambling rings like deathrolling. Asmongold himself conducts events like transmog competitions and mount-off competitions. There are RPG servers where tons of stuff goes down that I don’t think I could even scratch the surface of if I tried, but role-playing itself is a massive source of PGC.
Dungeons and Dragons is probably the best example of PGC pretty much being the driving feature of the game, as role-playing is fairly fundamental (but not required). I’ve not played D&D much, but I figured I’d mention it. All the above examples are also very much community-driven. I wanted to go over some examples of more small-scale and even single-player games that have PGC. Super Smash Bros. Melee was big in my childhood, and the friends and neighbors I played it with had all sorts of ideas for how we should play. When we got tired of competitive fighting we’d make up other games like seeing who could last the longest avoiding traffic in the stage Onett; we’d choose our favorite cars in the stage Big Blue and pretend to race each other; and we’d test out which characters could survive in the air off the right side of the stage Temple. Another game that I spent more time doing PGC than the actual game was Kirby Air Ride. Its City Trial Free Run mode was a playground that I did just about anything you could do in; I imagined various jobs or services Kirby did around the city depending on which star Kirby rode, including using the wagon star (what I nicknamed the “trash mobile”) to clean up the dilapidated houses; I pretended to be an evil Kirby conspiring to destroy the city while in the hidden cave beneath the forest with a mini city model; I pretended to be drowning when landing without a star in a whirlpool (and would wait to get unceremoniously “saved” when another player ran me over, knocking me out of the whirlpool); and I would go on “tours” of the city countless times to visit every spot I knew of from the flower atop the Castle Hall to the other flower atop the mountain by the volcano to the secluded icy room within the volcano and so on.
Okay, all these game examples aren’t strictly single-player, so I’ll describe some actual examples of PGC in single-player games.
Yoshi’s Island is a childhood favorite game of mine thanks to its music and art style. I’d do various things depending on the stage like letting Yoshi laze around, smell the flowers, take a swim in some water, and do trick shots with Yoshi eggs. I’d even take baby Mario to some enemies to intentionally make him cry to punish him.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker had vast oceans to explore, and I did tons of random imaginative playing around like living out a real vacation at the Private Oasis or throwing pigs at the kid who always had snot hanging from his nose. The amount of nonsense I did on Windfall Island like locking myself in Tingle’s prison or visiting the bar at night and pretending to be a rough-and-tumble sailor also were things that happened.
Super Mario Sunshine is pretty much heaven for PGC. Every single area is basically inviting players to do whatever they want. To keep it short with one example, I’d visit the underwater area in Noki Bay to just swim around and observe the Nokis floating on jellyfish.
All right, there’s a point to describing all these examples of PGC. Whether it’s purely imaginative (like pretending to be a garbage man in Kirby Air Ride) or more down-to-earth (like exploiting people’s proclivities to gamble in World of Warcraft), PGC is what I feel should be taken into account more in game design because it’s when players are arguably the most involved in a game. They’re immersed. I think Kirby Air Ride’s Free Run mode succinctly encapsulates the idea of PGC in its name: just be free to do whatever and run with it. From my consumer perspective, I find this to be most enjoyable. From the perspective of a game developer, I imagine this would be a point of pride (and monetary sustenance—particularly for subscription-based games).
Games that last long—that is, they have loyal player bases—don’t necessarily need mountains of content to keep players playing them. The best example I can think of for a game oversaturated with content is Tears of the Kingdom. Granted, it has massive potential for PGC given its scope, but I think both the staleness of its intended content and the overwhelming potential for PGC is detrimental to its longevity. This sort of exemplifies how leaning too heavily on PGC can be a drawback. So, yeah, the overall point about PGC, I think, is that it’s fun and it’s immersive, but only with proper degree and balance with what the rest of the game provides.
