GDC 2009: Chris Hecker Discusses User-Generated Content Everyone’s favorite heckler…er.. Hecker is in the news again, this time with a speech from GDC on the topic of user generated content.* You can read the whole scoop at Gamasutra. “But is that still user-generated content at this point?” asked Hecker. If so, is Diablo II’s randomly-generated loot UGC? The line is blurry, he argued, citing other games like EVE Online as titles that can arguably be considered to rely heavily on user-generated content, even just in the form of behavior and social and economic conventions — such as in the recent widely-reported conquest of a major in-game faction by another. “It’s hard to impress upon you how important this is,” he said of the entirely player-driven event. “This is thousands of dollars and hours of thousands of hours of people’s time vaporized.” After going through an impressive selection of Spore content, Hecker showed a picture of his young daughter: “Here’s a piece of user-generated content I’m particularly proud of,” he said, but also noted her shirt — which was ordered from the website Threadless and which he also considers to be user-generated content. link here
