Yeah. I took a look around your site when I did my audit in May and remember user-submitted content being the concept.
In fact, it was one of the few websites I distinctively remember during the audit because it had an unusual concept.
Think that's a vital first step.
Since I already decided I'm not going to do anything with this idea let me share a bit with you.
During one of my Idea Dump/Jams I started comping something called
MyVirtualWurld.
It combines the the Virtual World concept with a Pet and God Game. 85% of the content (roughly) is User Generated.
It would be up to the staff to:
- Provide Starter-Content so users understand how the mechanics work
- Provide an over-arching world that explains how something like this exist
- Provide the Hosting and Functionality so people can manage their own games, called Wurlds.
Users are thrust into a Universe and assume the rule of a young God or Goddess who as a show of their power by their God-Parents must shape a healthy world full of little creatures and protect them from harm. They create a little Ant-Farm-like Universe and within one of the titular Wurlds where most of the action in the game will be happening.
Within your Wurld everything; from the name of your Wurld to the creatures that live within it, would have been created by you -- or bought from the Marketplace which I'll get to in a minute. You name your Wurld and create/upload an Image Map that has your various areas. Or you can just have a list/series of links for a simple version.
After that you create your creatures.
You can either upload your images or buy artwork from the Marketplace. Then, you name them and can set the game to generate pretty much any stat, called attributes, at random upon the creature's creation. You decide how many stages the creature has. You decide whether it can be created by a link, discovered in an area, or unlocked through a quest. I actually think the majority of the programming work would be in here; allowing creators to only be limited by their imagination.
Then there are the other things you can create: Items, Shops, Dailies, and Quests. You touch not a line of code with any of them but rather go through menus that link up with each other and allow you to get something working in a couple of clicks.
I think the aim behind this idea was less about making a super special and unique game and more about the social aspect of creating. I wanted to create a social network-like community of creators who either played each others games or took part in the other major part of this game; the Marketplace where you could sell your work or buy the work of others. That (and selling add ons to the Wurlds) was going to be how the game generated money. You sell extra Wurld and Pet Slots and whatnot. You get a cut of whatever's sold in the Marketplace. Sellers can choose to either sell one-off rights (meaning if someone buys it no one else can) or they can sell unlimited rights (multiple people can buy an artwork).
I didn't abandon the idea because it wouldn't work.
On contraire; I feared that it would work
too well.
The question I couldn't easily solve for was how I was going to moderate people loading their own pets and items onto the servers and into the marketplace. Free-Upload will be Chaos when you get up there in User-Count, but getting everyone's stuff up and approved at a reasonable pace would require around-the-clock staffing.
You need to offer a variety of the gameplay and social roles as well, allowing users to chose who they want to be and what type of gameplay fits them. Otherwise that would be just an economic strategy / pet training game / forum / casual farm simulator etc. - put in the specific type of gameplay you offer. User generated content has nothing to do with this particular genre. All of the virtual worlds we know have such content only in the form of player built locations created with a construction wysiwyg and materials offered by the game (meaning that players are actually just playing, not doing the devs' work drawing tiles and objects, developing pets and monsters, calculating balance, writing lore etc.). It's a necessary part of the virtual worlds to provide users a possibility to build their own things through customized craft and visual construction engine. Virtual worlds don't exist without that, but this is not their only part. Think The Sims, Second Life, Starbound / Terraria, No Man's Sky, Minecraft... or even Skyrim and WoW, though they are kind of limited in these terms. A virtual world game isn't something that a single person or even a middle-scale studio can handle unless you're a genius and developing a new Dwarf Fortress.