Look What I Made! (Part 1 of 2)

Back in the first part of my case study on Simon & Schuster, I mentioned the questionable business model of FanLib, a forthcoming fanfiction community, but I don't believe I gave much background on what that means. Fanfiction is an important topic, because it's part of the ever-expanding circle of what's called "user-created content" available today. User-created content is one of the many things that gets some people spooked--as usual, probably unjustly so.

I'm not sure quite how to describe user-created content (since all content is, to some degree, created by its own users), so I'll start with examples. Fanfiction, since I've already started on that, refers to works of fiction using characters and settings borrowed from popular books, movies, TV shows, and so on. One of the larger repositories is fanfiction.net. It's by no means a new thing; such works have been created for hundreds of years, though they weren't called fanfiction at the time, but it's something that really took off in the later half of the twentieth century.

I'll say right now that most fanfiction is pretty bad; a small ratio is good, but most is pretty bad. The vast majority of it exists for the purpose of romantic hookups between fans' favorite characters, fans' favorite villains becoming good guys, and for fans to insert themselves into their favorite TV show, movie, and so on. Some of it is really bizarre, but it fills a niche; people enjoy it.

But the world of user-created content goes beyond that. The field naturally expands into fan films. A good example is Steam Trek, though again, good examples are by no means the standard. Three or four years ago, I was part of an (admittedly) horrendous Star Trek fanfilm that must have set some kind of record when every single person who came to see it (for free, in our defense) had walked out by the end.

One of the newer forms revolves around user-created content for video games. "Modding" is the creation by amateurs of new levels, campaigns, or even entirely new games based on existing, professionally made video games. Certain computer games come pre-packaged with modding tools that make it easy to do this, while others are modded by savvy programmers based on the game's source code. Large online communities, such as the Neverwinter Nights Vault have grown up around modding. Some mods are highly impressive, such as this work-in-progress which uses the source code from Freespace 2 for a mod based on the Battlestar Galactica TV series.

Despite how majorly into video games I was since I was 7, I now only own three games for my computer, those being Neverwinter Nights, Unreal II, and Titan Quest--each of which come packaged with a modding tool. With the amount of player-made mods I can download for free, I could go for a long time without any of those games getting old.

Really, if you name any type of media, there probably exists some sort of user-created version of it. Japan, where certain derivative works are legal in the commercial market, is home to a large number of fan comics. Numerous online communities revolve around remixing popular songs. The list goes on.

Admittedly, user-created content is not for everyone. Fan comics really don't interest me, given that I could spend years trudging through all the back issues of some of the comics I do read; and even with my favorite movies, derivative films and stories of compromised quality generally aren't at the top of my things-to-do list.

Though a lot of people are similarly ambivalent, others hate it. I mean, really hate it. Bestselling author Anne Rice has expressly forbidden fan-created work based on her books (though how successful she is or can be in enforcing such a ban, I have no idea), and music companies aren't known for reacting well to anything they might be able to yell "copyright infringement!" at.

For the companies and professionals who create the original work on which user-created content is based, the scariest thing about it is that it's so darned impossible to control. Like DRM, it's just not something that can be policed by any level of regulation. Even if all the fanfiction communities and modding networks were closed down, people would still be handing around phocopies and burned CD's of their own fan works. In an industry that's increasingly paranoid about copyright and the violation thereof, this is not always an easy notion to deal with.

A question that comes up pretty regularly is what we in the industry can do to make user-created content work in our favor. FanLib made a spectacular pratfall in that regard, but it's certainly not true that fan works are an inevitable blight on the industry. Come back soon for a little more about how it does and can work for us.