There’s an excellent Will Wright interview on Popular Science (Link) discussing the much-anticipated game Spore. It’s long and I recommend reading the entire piece, but here’s Will Wright explaining how the user-generated content gets distributed:

Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play. And whenever I encounter this content I actually end up building a little card deck in the game that we call Sporepedia, there’s a little card to represent every piece of content, every creature, every building, every vehicle, and I can see who made that. I can see what its stats are. I can bookmark that person if I like their stuff and have their stuff… like I can find my best friend and say make sure my best friend’s stuff comes into my game, so I encounter their worlds first. So it’s almost what we were seeing people do with The Sims, where they would go browse web sites looking for cool stuff and then download it, except we kind of burn it all into the gameplay. I don’t have to leave the game, put it in my folder, go browse the web – it’s now part of the gameplay experience.

There’s more, but what else is there to say?

via Terra Nova