Home Team Wants User-Generated Content but Moderation a Hurdle

Second Life is brought up in virtually every comparison made when talking about Home. At its most basic level, it’s a very similar premise, so it’s perfectly understandable. Second Life is famous for being so friendly to user-generated content, even though that content can easily be some of the most graphic, vulgar (albeit hilarious) things you’ve ever seen. The development team working on Home would love to feature user-generated content – they even see it as “the Holy Grail” – but they also admit “there’s a huge moderation issue.”

Creative director Ron Festejo and lead artist John Venables spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about the Second Life comparisons and how they view Home’s content evolving in the future.

For example, if you allow people to import their own textures to clothing, for example, how can you guarantee a safe environment for younger users?

John Venables: Well, there’s a huge moderation issue.

Ron Festejo: And I think that the problem is, at this point in time we can’t do that just yet. We’ve got some moderation tools in there where you can report people, but I think we’ve got to do this in baby steps – see how people react to the clothing that we give them, and we’re working with partners to provide a huge variety, to appeal to different types of people.

In the future we’ll continue to listen to what people have to say, and of course – if it gets to the point where the tools become sophisticated enough to do these sorts of things there’s a whole bunch of work that we need to do behind that to make sure there’s nobody walking around with an offensive T-shirt.

On the PS3 it doesn’t work like that – you’d probably get away with something like that on PC because it’s such an open platform, but for PlayStation, and the type of audiences we appeal to, I think there’s a certain level of responsibility that we have to ensure that offensive stuff isn’t in the universe that we create.

JV: Yeah, to summarise, we want to push user-generated content as a feature, definitely – however, moderation and the quality bar are big issues. As Ron says, iterative steps, and maybe the toolset will slowly expand over time.

I can imagine how frustrating it must be as a developer to want to allow gamers to create their own content and import it into Home, only to be prevented by those who want to produce horrific images. (Yes, I’d admittedly dabble in that.) Perhaps they could somehow segment Home (without actually breaking up the community) by allowing those who are verified to be at least 18 into areas with user-created content. I know it’s not a perfect solution, but nobody said this was easy.