Personally, I don’t find worlds like Second Life a natural environment for players as co-creators of a cohesive narrative. Maybe if a user ran her own private island. Otherwise, it’s just a big open playground where anything goes. No one narrative holds up.

I don’t think it’s important to credit a player base when the work product generated through gameplay can’t be usefully exploited. In small multiplayer games, say with a group of a dozen or so players, all players and the game operator benefit from story co-creation. I am thinking of Neverwinter Nights as a good example here (having ran a 3-year story-driven campaign using NWN). The operator of a game session typically puts in up to ten times the effort of the players into making operable play spaces, designing for a degree of player authorship. The relationship here is that everyone puts some work in, and everyone benefits from that work.

In MMOs, as with social networks such as Facebook, or worlds like Second Life, there’s a higher risk of exploitation. If enough players/users generate content/data, the operator’s workload can be drastically reduced. These systems are arguably exploitative by design: dangle a carrot in front of your user base, save or make money off the work product.

Incidentally, unless the EULA for Neverwinter Nights has been changed, users do not own what they make with the game’s tool set. Initially, all UGC was owned by the publisher. I spoke up about this during the beta [http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/multimedia/2002/06/53352] and the rules were slightly relaxed (not attributing this to me, btw).

The backlash against bad end-user agreements or ToS agreements is nothing new. I’ve personally been complaining about it for about 7 years now:

http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/the-conditions-of-corporate-community/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/diary-orkut-grabby/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/milking_gamers_for_content/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/youtube_gets_grabby/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/the_non_grabby_terms_of_gaia_online/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/the_moviesuser_created_content/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/all_your_movies_are_belong_to_activision/