Chaos Marketplace

I've been thinking about the idea of a next-generation economy. I don't really mean some kind of fancy revolution where we use unique keys as currency. I don't really mean anything built to replace the fundamental economies that make sure we have access to water and expensive coffee.

However, I think there's a place for a new economy, enabled by more powerful technology.

This has been running around my head for ages, ever since I saw Kickstarter. If you don't know what Kickstarter is, stop reading this and go there. Don't bother coming back to read this until you've funded some projects. I doubt it'll make any sense unless you understand that there is a hell of a lot of money available for small projects, self-funded by random members of the community. It is not uncommon to see projects get double or even triple the funding they ask for.

But, to me, Kickstarter is kind of... a first step. I feel like the idea can go further, especially if you combine it with other modern "opportunity media" concepts such as Twitter and Groupon.

See, Kickstarter's stated intention is to get you enough funding to get your project "off the ground". Get you "started".

There's obviously more money in the community than that.

A community like Kickstarter's can probably be easily adapted to being the primary source of funding throughout the lifespan of the project. (In fact, that seems to already be happening in Kickstarter's projects, if you look around a bit.)

IE, you don't need to really launch your project into the outside economy. Your project can, in fact, be sustained by the community itself. You'll still want to integrate into the outside economy as much as possible, obviously. If you're writing a book, you'll certainly want to sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. But it's become clear that there's enough cash in the community that you could probably get away with zero Amazon sales as long as there is community support.

I'm trying to make it clear that there's more money in these kinds of communities than most people really understand. I'm not saying that these communities should form walled-off economies and try to be self-sufficient. I'm trying to say that these communities can be used as an extremely strong and stable foundation for a project, radically reducing the risk and decreasing the amount of business acumen you need to succeed in modest projects.

Furthermore, with only a little bit of thought, it becomes possible to create a structure allowing people to help each other. If you have a lot of experience and business acumen, then maybe you'll do better helping non-business people with their projects. Instead of them having to search out through Craigslist or Monster or whatever, they just go to your profile page and read up on all the projects you've already helped with. Then there's some kind of helper function which makes it painless to negotiate some kind of simple (royalty-based, perhaps) payment structure that can be relied on not to screw either party over, especially with the might of the community to help fix any misunderstandings and negotiate settlements when things go screwball.

When I look at what these final projects look like, I see a few things that are similar to Kickstarter projects today: movies, books, and so on. But Kickstarter as it is now fails on the more long-term projects such as housing and farms and such. Oh, it funds the seed, sure, but after that... good luck!

The next-generation system allows interested people to track the project as it continues, add in funding as they see fit, subscribe to something if there is something of value being released, and in general keep up with things. This radically improves the community's ability to keep worthwhile projects alive, and creates an economy of personal responsibility and reliability that is quite distinct from the cost-savings consumer culture of our normal economy.

This would hopefully create a niche economy where a large community of reasonably well-off and/or hard-working people can support each other in medium- or long-term projects without being subject to the complexities of government grants, marketing to the masses, or just plain bad luck.

Hmmm... I would love to see that.

Advanced Pacing

I have a problem with most games these days, and that problem is pacing.

Not that the pacing in the game is bad. Oh, that's a huge problem in indie games, but experienced teams tend to have pretty good pacing in their games.

No, my problem is the pacing outside of the game. When you quit playing and come back. I'll call this "external pacing", just for the moment.

I've talked about this before, but today I'd like to talk about it in more detail.

At first glance, the main problem with external pacing is that you forget everything you were doing. This is a huge problem with complex games such as civ-style games and tactical RPGs.

Today's casual/social games show us one way to deal with it: reduce the amount of complexity in the game. If there's a giant sticker on the game telling you what to do next, you can always go and do it, even if you're gone for a month. However, this solution relies on the game not allowing the player to create anything significant.

In most open-world games, for example, your sandbox play is limited to collecting orbs or other almost zero-state situations. If you're in the middle of collecting orbs when you quit the game, and you forget what you were doing, it hardly matters. Orb-collecting will wait patiently for you to remember that it exists while you do other things. It is just as easy to begin collecting orbs again as it would have been if you had continued collecting orbs without the break. Hell, you could give it to a completely different player, and he would collect orbs just as effectively: there's no real unique state to the orb collection game. None that matters.

This is carried into every facet of the game. If you advance along the main quest line, it doesn't matter if you quit. When you return, the quest picks up with no more than five minutes of lost headway, and it picks up again with a crystal-clear "Do this next!" HUD element.

This is a trait of casual games, too. In fact, you can probably say it is the defining trait of casual games. Nearly all social network games are the same way, but with fun scheduling drama as well.

The point is, this is an extremely common practice.

A common practice I don't like.

If this "low state" method is used, it does allow players to drop and pick up the game as they see fit. But it means that players can't change the state of the game except A) in ways that don't matter or B) along the specific path carved by the designers.

Contrast this to a game of Civilization, where the state of the game is almost entirely determined by the player. If the player leaves and comes back, it's entirely possible he'll forget that he needed to build up Naples some more, or that Paris was about to be attacked. On the other hand, although it's hard to pick it up again after quitting, there's actually some meaningful play. It's not just meaningless zero-state play as you slide along the designers moving sidewalk.

Fundamentally, the more of the game's state I am allowed to modify, the more involving I find the play in a game. A game like Call of Duty doesn't appeal to me much because there's not a whole lot of ways to express myself. You can polish your skills so you kill the enemies better or worse, but in terms of the game world, there's no difference. Whether you just squeak by or whether you ninja them all to death doesn't matter.

I realize that's just my preference. This post is not about whether that's good or bad, it's about games that do want to include a lot more agency. For people who do consider agency important, the problematic fact is that external pacing is killer. Any game with real agency - such as Civilization - suffers dramatically from the breaks the player takes.

Some workarounds have been introduced from one side or the other. Call of Duty and the like shows us one method that works towards agency from an agency-free game: trophies. If you do specific cool things in the game, you earn permanent trophies. I guess it appeals to some people, but I actually find it a net negative. My hatred of the continuous popups telling me how far I am from another pointless trophy is renowned. I have quit games because of it.

Coming from an agency-heavy game to try to make external pacing work, we can look at MMORPGs. Most MMORPGs restrict the agency you have to very specific and numerical axes, while also keeping a strict record of all the things you are trying to do. It doesn't get along well with "open play" where you might just be doing something because it's fun, but it does do pretty well with most other situations.

The record is obviously helpful, since a player can just pull it up and read what the eight things they were doing were. However, the agency axis restriction is also very valuable. By restricting the player to expressing himself through equipment only, and not being allowed to make unique equipment, the MMORPG creates a very clean, mostly linear expression path. Players feel like they are expressing themselves by choosing hat A instead of hat B, but the way they express themselves does not require them to remember anything the next time they log in. Similarly, the skill sets are pretty linear too: you're not likely to screw your build up any worse after a break than if you had kept playing.

Personally, I don't like MMORPGs, either. Sure, a lot of good games have linear paths you follow, but those are normally backed by non-linear, relatively open play in other parts of the game, such as platforming or party customization. MMORPGs simply slap down a million fragments of linear paths to replace both the normal linear path and the normal non-linear play, and suddenly it's agency. I find that uninteresting. Less interesting than a game which is just linear, actually.

So, taking potshots at my personal dislikes aside, I thought about how to make a game with real agency that doesn't suffer from quitting and returning to it.

After some looking around, I decided the key is that you don't have to have all your agency in the same place. You can package it up so that it exists in different domains, each one of which can be reasonably managed when it comes to quitting and returning.

As an example, in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. You can express yourself by building a vehicle. Once built, the vehicle can then be used in the rest of the game. The vehicle part is not completely integrated: you're likely to finish the vehicle construction as an atomic operation, without quitting and reloading. However, even if you were to quit and return to an unfinished vehicle, it is reasonably easy to remember what you were doing and noncritical even if you do forget.

So the gameplay is partitioned - agency-heavy car building does not mix with exploring town for doodads which does not mix with missions. Each kind of play is reasonably agency-heavy, but not so intertwined that it suffers from quitting and reloading.

I'm not saying Nuts & Bolts is a great game, I'm saying it's an example of what I'm talking about. In the future, I imagine we'll see a game like Nuts & Bolts also have play elements that interact with you via the web, allowing for scheduling gameplay as well.

The idea here is to allow you to build up unique and interesting elements, express yourself as you see fit... and then compile it. Partition it. Instead of remembering everything all the time, you only have to remember a little bit... but your hours of play so far have been very agency-rich, made your world very unique.

There are certain kinds of games I think might be hard to do. Like tactical RPGs where you create two dozen characters. Even if you try to partition the character design into its own unit, you still have two dozen completely unique characters, each with their own specialty, each with their own optimal growth path. Who can even remember which ones you were going to use in the next fight?

It may be we see a descendant of this sort of game that does use play partitions, though. For example, you still make two dozen characters. But instead of being lumped into one monolithic list, you have to split them up into small units of 3 or so, each of which is located elsewhere, with their own concerns. Any given play session might be about any of these teams, allowing you to remember each of them and rediscover their strengths, without feeling like you're discarding 21 other characters.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. What are yours?

The Opt-Out

This is a rant. Maybe an unfair one, who knows.

So, I made a purchase from Etsy for Christmas gifts. I kinda like the place, and I have friends that do quite a bit of business through them. Today, I get an email from Etsy.

"We recently launched a new feature, Circles, that lets you connect with other people on Etsy. When you add someone to your Etsy circle, you can follow along with their favorites in your activity feed. It's illuminating!

Right now it's hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that's sad. Well, we're changing that. We're making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.

(If you don't want people you know to be able to find you, you will be able easily to opt out through your account privacy settings.)"

Wow, that is not at all something I'm even vaguely interested in. Okay, lost of good sites have features I don't care about. But read carefully: this is not a feature I don't care about. Turns out, I care deeply!

Let's review the severe problems in this message.

The only obvious issue is that they have decided to make my email address a public part of my account. This only becomes a real issue because they also automatically opt you into sharing your purchase history. Well, brilliant.

I can see how many people would find this a good new feature. For example, my friends that do a lot of sales through Etsy. But me? I find this an extreme breach of privacy. To the point where I am now significantly less likely to use Etsy.

I logged in and opted out of all that shit. Turns out there's no "delete account" option, by the way.

"Easy to opt out" is an oxymoron. "Opt out" is a poison term, it already means you raised a barrier specifically to make it more likely people will participate. Nothing can be "easy to opt out", because that's called "opt in". "Opt in" is the only responsible, ethical way to reveal client information.

The only points Etsy gets here is that they sent this email before enabling the new feature - it doesn't go live until next month. I don't think Etsy was trying to be sleazy... But linking personal email addresses to their purchase history in public? Yeah, that's not shady!

I'd stop using Amazon in a heartbeat if they did that, and I practically live through them.

Of course, I'm pretty touchy on privacy. I'm the guy who refuses to get a Facebook account. And I'm not really Etsy's target audience, or even a good customer. Still, it's a shame they took a sleazy route. I guess most people don't mind an utter and almost criminal lack of privacy. At least, I hope so, or Etsy's in trouble.

It's possible this is not sleazy, and they've just been really horrible about explaining it. However, that seems vanishingly unlikely given the reckless disregard for privacy shown by nearly every company these days.

Grrrr.

Terrain Play

I've talked about this before, but I'd like to talk about it again. Constructive terrain games. That is, games where you build a base/s. Whether it's Starcraft or Evil Genius or Civilization.

In thinking about these games, I've tried very hard to come up with the methods used to make them interesting and challenging. The challenges I'm most interested in are those related to building the base, rather than those related to putting the base in the right spot on the map. So I'm not going to talk about map-tile resource allocations or complex topography much. I'm going to talk about the parts where the player twists himself up in a knot of his own making.

There are three kinds of challenges that relate to this. Most of these challenges are expressed via semipermanent, fixed structures that you can place.

The first is the arbitrary challenge/facility. This is a situation where the location on the map doesn't matter. For example, placing a research facility: no matter where you place it, the research happens at the same rate and is just as applicable.

Arbitrary challenges are often simple treadmills to extend the gameplay. Plunk this down to steadily unlock stronger soldiers, if you have the money for it. However, they can also serve as a gating mechanism, unlocking additional facilities over time. This forces the player to build up their core base with a complexifying crowd of fundamental buildings, making the placement of advanced buildings somewhat tricky. Advanced players will often leave empty zones in their base as they build, knowing that they'll want to put advanced structures in safe places well inside their core base zone.

Arbitrary challenges are usually made a bit trickier simply by resource allocation. An arbitrary challenge facility will siphon away valuable resources, and your strategy requires you to balance the upgrades/abilities it offers against your more direct unit/facility purchasing.

They can also be made trickier by having very awkward shapes. This is especially useful if you're playing a contiguous base game, where every facility must be butting up against another facility, door-to-door. While any facility can have an awkward shape, this is the best type to make awkward, as the other types should be reasonably easy to place anywhere.

Speaking of the other types, in addition to arbitrary challenges, there are ZOC challenges.

Zone of control challenge facilities are those that have a radius of effect, or whose effect diminishes as range increases. For example, you put the lumberjack shack next to the forest so the round trip is tiny. You put the turret on a path that the enemies are likely to use.

A subset of ZOC are those that are required in order to place your own facilities, such as Protoss pylons or Dune's concrete. I'll call these "extend ZOC". These are worth mentioning as their own distinct type simply because if they exist, they are critically important parts of your strategy.

ZOC challenges sometimes relate to fixed map resources, in which case the point is to build a ZOC facility very near the resource. Combined with complex topology and extend ZOCs, this can actually be quite a challenge. Protecting a particularly remote facility may also be quite a challenge.

Other ZOC challenges relate to non-fixed map elements, such as traveling enemy soldiers or random resource spawns. Knowing the paths/likely positions of these elements is critical, and there are often "layers" of these kinds of ZOC challenges. For example, this turret protects against ground units, that one against air units. You place them assuming the ground units will go around the mountain and the air units over it: the ZOC has very different weights because they are addressing different kinds of non-fixed map elements.

The third ZOC challenge type is when the ZOC relates to your own base. Extend ZOC facilities are one example, but there are often other buildings such as police stations, repair droid ports, energy broadcast stations, sewage treatment facilities, and so on. Games with a lot of my-base-ZOC challenges are typically not heavy combat, but are instead heavy on building.

After arbitrary and ZOC challenges there is a third type: pathing challenges.

Pathing challenges are when the point is to direct units or resources along specific paths. For example, walls of sandbags to force the zombies to come along a torturous maze. Or electrical lines to carry power to your distant buildings. Or roads.

Pathing challenges sometimes intertwine with arbitrary and ZOC challenges. For example, any contiguous base game makes the whole base into a pathing challenge, where you may have to be quite clever with your base design and where you extend to. Pathing challenges may also interact with ZOC challenges, especially if you are putting down a path for enemy units: the ZOC facilities will cover the path and bombard the enemy.

However, the deepest kind of pathing challenges are those that change over time, or butt heads with changing situations.

For example, in Evil Genius, you have a contiguous base. Your minions walk through the base in a strictly simulated manner. The pathing you provide in the early game will rapidly become unwieldy as you struggle with larger numbers of minions and desperately trying to keep travel times short rather than putting that new facility a mile away where there's actually room.

Oldschool RTS players will probably remember difficulties with base placement in old games: you would build a base, then realize you had cut the travel path, and units couldn't actually get out. Another example.

This is relatively rare with things other than travel paths, though. Electrical lines can always carry infinite energy, water pipes can always carry infinite sewage, and so on. Still, that's just convention, and it can be bucked.

Another fun complexity to add to pathing challenges is to have multiple kinds of paths that have to coexist. For example, roads and railways. Or even just local roads and highways. Underpasses and overpasses become common, and as the situation changes, the roads inevitably become too limited and narrow. This is especially common in train games.

There are plenty of other ways to make pathing challenges interact with each other if you want.

The point is, if the game wants to let the player twist himself into knots, the game has to allow the player to build his own base, and make that the fundamental restriction on his future expansion.

The core elements of that are:

A) Gate facilities, such that you have to build certain buildings before you can build others.

B) Use ZOC (and possibly travel time on travel paths) to force the player to consolidate.

C) Use travel paths with load limits and steadily increase the load. Optionally use multiple kinds of travel paths that can't perfectly coexist.

...

There's a subcategory of games where you build your base for another kind of objective entirely. For example, the self-styled bases of Minecraft players. Technically, they use these same kinds of challenges, but the weights are very odd and often selectively imposed. Not every base has to have water, for example, so the water pathing challenge is often simply ignored.

These "erratic challenge" systems are another topic for another day!

Shadow Puppets

I came up with this idea while trying to invent a hacker game setting, and I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. So here's the deal:

Imagine that in the future, we have software that can analyze audio and video (and writing and pictures). By analyzing the media, the software can program a virtual entity with a personality and appearance very similar to the writer/actor/whoever is in the media you passed it.

The virtual entity is quite advanced. Assuming you have a good computer and the most recent pseudo-AI drivers, the virtual entity is almost indistinguishable from the original, at least in the context of media. The gaps in the seed media are overcome by careful guessing. That mean the virtual entity can act very reasonably even in situations not covered by the seed media.

In the game world I designed, problems arose when people began creating virtual entities of politicians and releasing very convincing fake videos of them saying or doing things they never did or said. It came to a head with a bevy of fake-porn cases in which the real versions of the virtual porn stars launched a whole lot of lawsuits for everything from character defamation to abuse.

The courts came up with a rather novel solution. Which, I guess, is the most fantastical part of this setting. It's called the "virtual volition" rule.

Basically, the courts ruled that everyone had the right to personal privacy. The programs were considered to breach that privacy by simulating that person's behavior and body in a way they did not approve. This was considered fundamentally different than drawing cartoons or even photoshopping lewd pictures because of the extremely high fidelity and accuracy of the virtual entities.

The misused virtual entities were labeled "shadow puppets" - programs that looked so much like specific real world individuals that they violated the privacy of those real world individuals. Shadow puppets became illegal. Later, the definition expanded to include virtual entities in breach of copyright, such as one fed on Mickey Mouse cartoons that looks and acts like Mickey Mouse.

Of course, it's impossible to ban a piece of software like this. Legal, open source software could be fed with publicly available media to produce a high-fidelity shadow puppet. Still, don't get caught: it's considered abuse or assault on the person being simulated.

Legal virtual entities abounded. Many simply were unrealistic, or a mishmash of media that didn't attempt to simulate any one person. Others were specific people or cartoons or whatever, but had very strict limits and would refuse to "fill in" the gaps and act beyond the "volition lock". IE, you couldn't convince your official Steven Fry virtual entity to strip down and sing show tunes.

In the game world, it had tons of ramifications and made the world a very complex place.

Anyway, there's not really any point to this essay. It's just a random interesting thing I thought I'd mention.

Connectivity

I was watching this archived webcast today. It gets contentious about halfway in, but I like that, it makes me want to write about the subject. This is a borderline rant, I guess, but I hope you enjoy it.

A lot of the conversations we have about the nature of technology stresses, well, stress. Just as an easy example, the author of that webcast specifically calls it "panic architecture" which, like many other terms, is coined to make a point rather than be useful.

Assuming you don't want to listen to the hour of webcast, I'll cover the bits I touch on. In this case, "panic architecture" is used to refer to the theoretical stimulus overload from tweets and emails and IMs all popping up at you all the time.

I can't help but turn down this kind of shallow analysis. Not only is there no real evidence to support it, but there's also no sign that these clumsy first-generation implementations are the only ones we're going to see.

We've developed tools to let us share with everyone, everywhere, instantly. We're now using tools that let us "hear" without having to be listening.

Every kind of "panic architecture" interaction is actually asynchronous. That is, the computer tells you that there's a new message, and you can get around to reading it whenever you like. Some pieces of software are worse than others - Twitter is only barely asynchronous, since if you wait more than an hour or so, you'll have a backlog too deep to sift through. So you lose a lot of data down the tubes if you wait.

I guess you could say that's a high-pressure environment, but not really. The only reason it's high-pressure is because you've tricked yourself into thinking it's important to view everything, and view it fast. Trying to make sure you don't miss any tweets is sort of like trying to make absolutely sure you see every single person who passes by the Starbucks. It's not a sensible reaction.

If we feel stressed by these "always on" tools, it's because we've tricked ourselves into viewing them in the wrong way. Part of that might be pure neurochemistry, but I think it's mostly a cultural maladaptation which will fade in time as we get used to the technology and learn, as a populace, that it's okay to let the river flow by without trying to drink it all.

Also, there is another generation of tools past these "hear without listening" tools.

Phone calls extend our ears so we can talk over long distances. But that's only this very instant. So we use emails, RSS and the like to extend our memory: we can think about something long after it has been said.

And now we're going to get a new breed of tool: one which extends our thinking about something across vast distances. Already, we're seeing it. We don't get all our emails: we get only the emails our outboard brain doesn't discard as spam. Many of us have dozens of rules about which emails are further flagged and sorted. This lets us determine whether something needs to be read soon, or whether it can be put off until we feel vaguely curious.

In the future, more intelligent tools will have a system for cuing things up. If it's important, it tells you immediately. If it's interesting but not important, it'll bother you with a quick line and link every few days. If it's something good for you that you can't seem to sit down and get through, it'll keep pestering you.

Essentially, this new breed of tool is a computerized version of the thing in our brains that says "hey, the roof is leaking, maybe we should fix that before it rains again."

Right now, we often try to deal with a true deluge of information right against our brains. I agree that this is not really a very good idea. At the very least, it sets a very low upper limit to the amount of things we can consider. By creating smart tools to deal with that deluge for us, we can consider terabytes of information every hour.

I need to stress that this isn't some fantasy tale of strong AI. We already do this to a great extent by using RSS feeds - we sign up for the news outlets we like, whether they're brand names or individuals with blogs. We use them as our roof-is-leaking engines. I'm simply pointing forward and saying "there's gonna be more of this." For example: Priority Inbox

It is true that humans sometimes feel lost and confused by advances. But this is nothing new. People felt lost and confused when the king changed, or weirdos with funny accents started settling in their alluvial plains. Change makes people feel stressed out, regardless of whether it's technology or culture or any other source.

So, yes, a lot of people feel stressed out by the "constant bombardment" of our "always on" culture. Except that it's not constant bombardment, it's not always on, and the tools for dealing with it gracefully are evolving as we speak. As always, we adapt to our situations and find out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities we are offered.

To me, the real "panic architecture" is the way soft sciences and media outlets continuously scream about dangers that never arrive, dangers that were never even dangers. It interferes with adult's acceptance of change when you scream that every change is a disaster. Kids don't give a shit - a kid will use Twitter and Facebook even if their parents think it is pure poison. But adults have to work to learn these tools, to integrate them into their life even a little bit, and panicking about them just makes the task that much more difficult.

I don't, by the way, think that the webcast I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that kind of panicky statement. I don't know enough about the author to say anything about her, and at worst, the webcast itself is kind of ambivalent on the subject. It's just a handy turn of phrase to steal her words and make another point with them.

There are actually a lot of other things I want to argue about that were covered in that webcast, but this is long enough already.

(By the way, I'm going to coin a term in opposition to the normal way of coining a term. "Roof-is-leaking engines", or RILEs: that's a term that could be useful, but it isn't very good at making a point. )

Tool Using Play

After a brief conversation about why some people don't consider Minecraft a game, I'd like to talk about it. Not Minecraft - about the use of play as a tool.

There are a fair number of games that feature content creation as a major play element. There have been some pretty much since we figured out how to draw space invaders to a computer screen. Let's talk about the way games integrate content creation.

In the "classic" style, games integrate content creation as a stand-alone editor and/or importer. For example, Pinball Construction Set in 1985 (one of my favorites as a kid) had a level editor you could play with. It's become pretty typical these days.

Many modern games feature an edit mode switch in the game proper. For example, Little Big Planet and Second Life both feature an "edit mode" where you can create and alter objects from wherever you're standing in the level.

But the method steadily gaining in popularity is when the edit mode is tightly integrated with the gameplay: as you play the game, you edit the game. An obvious example is Minecraft, which is basically impossible to play without editing the level. In such cases, you initially use the editor to survive and explore a bit, but once you get good enough, you begin to use the editor to do increasingly self-driven things, such as building a giant garden or the USS Enterprise.

Another example of integrated content creation is when the act of playing the game ranks content and makes other players more or less likely to see it. Later, I foresee a fair number of games where you'll run into random mutations of content and rank it simply by playing, allowing a fairly large number of players to participate in an evolving ecosystem of content. So you don't absolutely have to be creating content yourself: ranking and sorting content is a valuable form of content creation in and of itself. Well, assuming you have the requisite foundation of content to rank and sort.

In my mind, this final form of content creation is the future. Integrated content creation. It has the highest "pull" - you'll get more content per player (on average) and you'll get better sorting and distribution if you use integrated creation and ranking. Much more efficient than mode-swap content creation, and almost infinitely more efficient than level-editor content creation. (To be fair, I think most games will use all three to some extent: they have different specialties.)

Since content creation / player-sorted content is such a powerful tool, I expect to see more of it in future games. Therefore, how to do it best is also an important topic.

I'm not as expert as I would like to be on this matter, but here are three areas I feel should be on everyone's list:

Base content creation: how does your player base create content as they play? The more restrictive the framework, the lower the barrier to entry... but the lower the maximum quality of the content will be. Minecraft uses a rigidly square grid and almost no moving parts, allowing players a fairly easy time of it, but also crippling some high-end content. For example, no NPCs, no elevators, no swinging pendulum traps...

Distribution and sorting: how do your players share content? The more helpful your distribution system (IE marketplace), the happier your moderately skilled player base will be... but it will also be very crowded and full of crap. A sorting mechanism driven by player preferences can be very handy, but can also brutally suppress starting players who are still getting used to the editing system.

Content cooperation: how can your content be used in relationship to other content? For example, create a shirt, and you can put that shirt on any humanoid frame. That's cooperative content. The more ways content can interact with other content and/or rules, the deeper the system will be. If you create an axle with wheels, can you only use it with cars? Or can you staple a hundred of them to the bottom of a house? If you create a shirt, can it be torn up, made wet, transformed by the environment, mutated, tailored, or painted? Obviously, the more kinds of interactions content can have, the more potential to draw players in.

The primary drawbacks are A) the amount of time it takes to code those interactions and B) accidentally forcing players to wade through details when they just want a quick result. IE, if they're making a skyscraper and you force them to choose every door, every carpet... that's a big barrier.

Anyway, that's content creation as I see it. You?