Stewart Butterfield on How Glitch, His New MMO, Will Introduce User-Generated Content

Glitch, a new web-based MMO from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his team at Tiny Speck, launched last week, and so far, I’m enjoying its quirky humor and graphics, and lack of old school swords-and-sorcery gameplay. (Now you can too -- I have invite codes at the end of this post!) And while it’s not a user-generated world like Second Life, SL itself had a pretty strong influence on its development -- I found that out a few months ago, when I chatted with Stewart during a Linden Lab party. He told me he wanted to introduce more user-generated elements into the game. But first, he said, it was more important that the MMO-style game elements work, and then user-generated content aspects could be introduced later on.

“There are two different things going on,” Stewart tells me by e-mail now, when I asked him to expand these thoughts:

“[Glitch] is a game, and not a total open virtual world. There are some tools for creative expression now and more will be added, but anything which would count as ‘user-generated content’ will have to fit within the constraints of the game (without the constraints, there's no game left). So, much of that will be visual customizations (to avatars, houses, locations, etc.) and some of it will be ‘other’ stuff (the non-visual: collaborative music making, player-created games, etc.)”

That said, he continues, there are plans to add more user-generated content:

“As the systems of the game get more stable and we have a large enough player base, we can, for example, start to ‘remove the scaffolding’ of the game economy (the fixed-price vendor system, the system-run auctions, etc.) and let players drive the those systems. We will also start releasing new locations which are closer to ‘blanks’ which will be visually upgraded by players and upgraded in terms of the resource distribution and production capabilities. That's more like ‘user generated world-building’ since ‘content’ so often means drawings, pictures, writing, etc.

“Bottom line,” he says, “the game will always be the core, but, within that framework, we'll give players as much control as possible for how things develop and unfold.”

A great vision, in my opinion -- frankly, if Second Life had launched that way, it would probably be much larger than it is. In any case, Glitch does have a 3rd party developer program for APIs now. If you’re interested in exploring the game, the folks at Tiny Speck have given me several dozen fast pass invite codes: Click here to get one while you can.

Comments

[Deep Semaphore]

It's great how many efforts like Minecraft or this one, dream of graduating to the level of complexity of content that Second Life can afford ... in the future.

[Veeyawn Spoonhammer]

Loving Glitch.

[Adec]

ehhm.. great as a facebook style game.. but I don't think I'll be spending any time there... sorry..

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Integrating user-generated content into an MMO without destroying the coherency of the virtual environment is a challenge, and I wish Stewart luck.

It makes me think of the player-built McDonalds in Ultima Online. UO's Britannia, in lore, has had contact with 20th century Earth via magical gateways, so it's not inconceivable that a merchant would learn of the franchise and emulate it.

But it's jarring. More troubling, in RL terms it's a blatant violation of trademark and trade dress laws.

On the flip side, one of the reasons The Sims Online flamed out in spectacular fashion is that they didn't resolve the question of user-generated content before launch and dragged their feet on it after launch. By the time they had a system, the game (rebranded EA Land) was in a terminal coma and expired soon after.

[Johnny alt]

Wow Glitch looks lovely. Really love the art style.

Looking forward to learning more about the user generated content aspect

Will content creators be able to cash out ?
What kind of content can we create for Glitch ?

[Ananda Sandgrain]

I kind of hope for a more specific follow-up. As it stands, Glitch doesn't seem to be anything other than the scaffolding of an MMO. It's got all the cute parts and all the mechanical aspects of a game enough for me to have already spent a lot of time grinding in it, but I guess I'm having a hard time seeing where you could expect to take that apart again and still have anything left.