Spore. LittleBigPlanet. Second Life. What do these titles have in common? Each of them allows a regular user to utilize embedded tools to create content. Although it's clearly too early to say that this is a trend, it's definitely an interesting development in game design.

Why should games offer users the ability to create in-game content? Are the risks worth the benefits? In today's column, we'll take a look into user-generated content, and whether or not it has a lasting place in video games.

Players have been creating user-generated content in PC games for years. Most notably, many FPS titles have enjoyed longevity well past initial projections, through players' ability to modify in-game content -- like creating new playable maps, avatar skins, even going as far as affecting the physics of the game environment. These so-called "mods" have become nearly ubiquitous in the genre, and it's virtually mandatory for a game company to include such tools in modern releases.

Until fairly recently, these elements were confined to the PC platform, but game consoles have evolved to the point of being able to offer storage capacity and ubiquitous connection to the Internet, both requirements for enabling user-generated content. Storage capacity gives players a place to keep reusable content, and Internet connectivity allows them to share that content with their peers.

So what happens when players are allowed to run wild? More often than not, penises.

At least, that's what you're most likely to have heard. Famously, Second Life (or SL) ran afoul of this phenomenon during an interview with a prominent land baron in-world. It's a shame that for many non-SL users, this was their introduction to the capabilities of the platform. One of the biggest draws of SL is its suite of 3D creation tools. Players -- or residents, as they call themselves -- all have access to an application running within Second Life that provides basic 3D primitives like spheres, cubes, and pyramids, and various tools with which to sculpt them. Nearly everything in SL is resident-created, from buildings, to landscapes, to toys, right down to the shape of a resident's avatar. What hasn't been created by the residents were set in place at launch by Linden Lab, the creators and managers of Second Life.

Despite what the outside world might think, the platform is not a haven for pornographers, seething with perversions of all sorts; that image is a favorite one of the sensationalist media, who rarely commit anything other than the most cursory sort of research. Sex sells, and weird sex sells even better. This is not to say that it's hard to find sex toys, nude avatars, and explicit animations in Second Life, but just as in real world society, it's merely a single element of a continuum. There are far more beautiful, artistic, imaginative works to be seen and enjoyed than there are licentious objects, but as with so much of life, one sees what one wants to see.

Second Life has also proven to be a powerful environment for game creation. There are a clutch of resident-created games that have achieved varying degrees of popularity. They range from the thoughtful, Myst-like The Pot Healers Mystery; to Tringo, a puzzle game that proved so popular that its creator, Kermitt Quirk, was offered the opportunity to port it to both PC and Nintendo DS. Essentially, Second Life is the living, breathing apotheosis of the "If you can dream it, you can build it" approach to entertainment. But how do other games match up?