In recent years gaming modifications, affectionately known as mods, have gone from a small niche hobby for hardcore gamers and programmers to a mainstream activity with a new name – user generated content (UGC).

Games including LittleBigPlanet (LBP), Spore and Buzz! have allowed players to take control of the gaming experience and use their own imagination and skills to create and share new levels within gaming environments.

Through this, game lives are extended like never before, with new levels and experiences being shared globally by the game owners themselves. Just go on YouTube and search for LBP and you’ll see videos of the hundreds of cool and quirky levels gamers just like you have built.

Developer Relentless is also keen to highlight the longevity UGC offers – it recently announced that since introducing UGC to Buzz!, players have contributed 218,750 quizzes made up of more than 1.7m questions. That’s enough to fill 350 standard-sized Buzz! games on disc.

During the last 18 months or so, developers have provided more and more UGC opportunities to gamers, which has allowed players to realise that it isn’t necessarily such a huge and difficult task to create good content – if the tools for creating and delivering it are good. As such, a huge new gaming community has been ‘activated’.

‘People have noticed that they may have cool ideas themselves, and that creating this great content is possible,’ says Antti Ilvessuo - creative director at Red Lynx, the developer behind upcoming game Trials HD. ‘In addition, YouTube, blogs etc: the phenomena made possible by the internet, have concretely shown the masses that they themselves have all it takes to create good content. You don’t just have to wait passively for what someone else offers.’

But why, you ask? Well, over the years developers have watched people search out or build their own tools in order to edit ‘complete’ games. They saw the demand and in response have provided gamers with the tools they crave.

‘The Spore team looked at content people had been making and sharing in earlier games like SimCity and The Sims and we wanted to really enhance that experience,’ explains Caryl Shaw, producer at developer Maxis. ‘We wanted people who hadn’t necessarily thought of themselves as being creative to be able make interesting creations easily and then be able to share them with others.

‘I think we included the opportunity for our players to make and share content with each other because we knew that they would be able to make all sorts of cool stuff that we couldn’t even imagine. And they really have,’ she explains.

UGC supported by developers looks set to grow over the next year and beyond. Expect to see an expansion of the sharing opportunities and the chance to make even more personal and individual content.

‘We are sure that there will be some really cool and radical innovations around UGC in the future,’ says Red Lynx ceo Tero Virtala. ‘Just think how unseen YouTube, Twitter, even MMOs were years ago. There will be many things around UGC that will first amaze everyone and then make them think how obvious that innovation should have been.’