Phantasmal Site > DGD > Game Design Issues > Player Content

Player-Created Content

Many games allow some degree of player-created content. This can be player houses, guild halls, crafting skills, restringing of items, writing of notes on walls or paper, and many other things. This is relevant to your MUDLib in many ways, but it's mentioned here because in-game persistence makes it a larger issue.

If you have persistence of item locations in your game, players can place items as easily as your wizards can. Not create them necessarily, but place them. If you have persistence of creature locations, then enterprising players will even be able to place creatures, to some extent, if there is any way to charm, teleport or herd monsters in your game. A monster that reponds in any way to player actions (fleeing or pursuing, for instance) will be able to be herded by a patient player. That means that the player, unless prevented, will be able to have aggressive monsters as guards for areas, and may even effectively be able to set up mini-dungeons. Few players will, but any player will be able to.

If players can craft items or create areas (as a house or guildhall, for instance), the problem is more acute, but also more regulated, and less specific to persistence. In that case, administrators will simply need to approve content in advance, or look at it after the fact, to guarantee adherence to theme (no science fiction areas in a 1920's historical setting, for instance), as well as grammar, spelling, politeness and so on.

Restraints on what a player can create and how it can be created will often help here. If the player can build rooms, but must saw logs or cut stone for the raw materials, and the room descriptions are set automatically, the player has much less ability to produce inappropriate content. Similarly, the ability to dig a hole with a shovel in outdoor rooms is unlikely to create any problem more severe than vandalism.

You should bear in mind that if you give players an ability that changes the world in some minor way, players will tend to use it in every room where doing so is legal. So either an effect should be temporary, or it should be reversible. For instance, it should be possible for another player to go through with a shovel and fill in all the holes the previous player dug, and better yet would be to have a custodian to do so in appropriate places, so a hole dug in the woods might last for years, but a hole dug on a college campus would be fixed by the next day.