User-Generated Content and Editors in Video Games: Survey and Vision

User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content that has been created by users rather than the developers of online platforms. The UGC has been playing a very important role in video games. For instance, Counter-Strike (CS) and Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) originated from modifications of Half-Life and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos respectively. As a promising trend, the UGC will be increasingly developed and extended to wider scopes in virtual worlds, such as the metaverse, which is highly promising for further study in both academia and industry. However, there are few existing surveys that systematically discuss the UGC in video games. In this paper, we systematically review the representative UGC in video games and their corresponding UGC editors based on a decision tree-style classification method. Then we enumerate the propagation methods of UGC in video games. Moreover, we propose our vision of the future development of UGC in the metaverse.