Content, who has it?

I’m going to edge in on a Friday blog fight to artificially inflate my traffic.

The long and short of this whole ordeal, is that Tobold doesn’t seem to count anything as content unless developers put it there, crafted by hand. Syncaine and evizaer seem to disagree. Syncaine uses the argument that Tobold said he would (for the most part), while eivzaer systematicaly counters the base assumptions and premise to refute Tobold’s claims.

Perhaps what I found so interesting in Tobold’s post, was his complete dismissal of combat and player created content. That because he thinks player created/generated content cannot be measured, it is of no value, or should not be included in the bucket of what we call “game content”. Does anyone actually care where content comes from? If I go into Darkfall, do I care that the city I’m laying siege to was put in place by PCs instead of developers. I mean, I care, because it will probably result in a more fun, and meaningful experience, but do we gamers as a whole care? Do we put preferential game time towards developer created content over player created.

Then again, maybe the problem is the word “created”. Where do you draw the line at creation and generation. A few posts touched on this concept, and most seem to agree that a different color palete and set of attributes on the Vicious White Wolf compared to the Mangy Grey Wolf does not warrant creation. However, if you’re using a program to generate new frameworks for enemies and tiles for scenery, that’s creation? Is there some predetermined level of effort, or a measurable quantity of time to say that I created something as opposed to just generating it.

Then again, why discount proceduraly generated content at all? I played Diablo 2 exhaustively. All the way to max level (99 or 100, which ever it was). I saw the same areas relativistically, and fought the same looking beasts over and over again, but I always had something to strive after. Should content instead be measured by how much play time it gives to the gamer instead of what was physically created? Does developer created content even matter if we as players don’t see large portions of it because the game took us past that content too quickly?

I don’t know, I’m getting rambly, and just avoiding work at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, content is unimportant if it doesn’t get used by the majority of the player base. Also, the player base doesn’t care who makes the content, as long as they have something to do. I’ve played the same scenarios in WAR more times than is probably healthy, but I don’t care. My soccer field of Battle for Praag has all the potential content I could want.