Posts tagged 'user-generated-content'

Define Offensive User-Generated Content?

It's an interesting question... and a challenge the industry faces as user-generated content becomes more prevalent. Most people can agree on certain areas of content being "offensive"; racial, sexist, or exploitative content comes to mind. But I just saw an interesting post on Crispygamer.com which states that a user-generated boxer resembling Adolph Hitler is "the most downloaded user created character for EA's boxing game FaceBreaker".

The writer goes on to ask some interesting questions:

“Is it because people want to beat the hell out of history’s most notorious demon, a man that epitomized evil and wiped out millions? Or could this seemingly harmless user created character be used as a way to promote antisemitism? Or perhaps we are reading way too much into all this?” 

 I certainly don't pretend to know. However, what did catch my eye is that a piece of content that I would have personally assumed could easily be defined as "offensive" by the community might actually not be so in this context. Maybe people really do want to vote their opinion of this historical character by using it within a game? Who knows? But it highlights that the next few years are going to be really interesting as games continue to evolve their support for UGC. I'm looking forward to seeing LittleBigPlanet's support in action - they've obviously thinking about this for a while.