User Content, Social Software & Online Games

Shannon Appelcline, my colleague at Skotos (an online game company that I founded in 1999), has been writing for several years a sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly column on the topic of game design called Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities (rss feed for all Skotos Articles including TT&T).

His latest column Social Software & Gaming: User Content discusses issues of user content and user facilitation that apply both online game communities and social software:

...the more user content that we allow into games, the more troubles we have separating the good from the bad, the signal from the noise. As we introduce user content systems into games, filtering it will become the next challenge. Fortunately there are already some answers in our nearby field of Social Software.

As I wrote about in an older post, Shannon has also written a number of interesting columns on the topic of designing social games:

• Social Gaming Interactions, Part One: A History of Form
  
• Social Gaming Interactions, Part Two: Competition
• Social Gaming Interactions, Part Three: Cooperation & Freeform

More recent articles by Shannon have ranged in topics from analysis of the use of auctioning and majority control techniques in board games, how communities work in online games, the importance of enthusiasm in business, intellectual property and licensing, on transcreation, and much, much more.

I always find Shannon's articles rich and deeply thought out -- I think you will to.