User-Generated Content and Editors in Games: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of user-generated content and editors in video games, highlighting recent developments, challenges, and future directions in the evolving UGC landscape.

Contribution

It offers an expanded, refined framework for classifying UGC and editors in games, incorporating recent complexities and providing insights into future trends and ethical considerations.

Findings

Developed a more detailed classification framework for UGC and editors.

Identified key trends and challenges in UGC development.

Provided insights into future directions including AI and ethical issues.

Abstract

User-Generated Content (UGC) refers to any form of content, such as posts and images, created by users rather than by professionals. In recent years, UGC has become an essential part of the evolving video game industry, influencing both game culture and community dynamics. The ability for users to actively contribute to the games they engage with has shifted the landscape of gaming from a one-directional entertainment experience into a collaborative, user-driven ecosystem. Therefore, this growing trend highlights the urgent need for summarizing the current UGC development in game industry. Our conference paper has systematically classified the existing UGC in games and the UGC editors separately into four types. However, the previous survey lacks the depth and precision necessary to capture the wide-ranging and increasingly complex nature of UGC. To this end, as an extension of previous work, this paper presents a refined and expanded classification of UGC and UGC editors within video games, offering a more robust and comprehensive framework with representative cases that better reflects the diversity and nuances of contemporary user-generated contributions. Moreover, we provide our insights on the future of UGC, involving game culture, game genre and user creative tendencies, artificial intelligence, its potential ethical considerations, and relationship between games, users and communities.