Help players tell their stories

Chris Hecker has a fascinating GDC talk up on his site: "Achievements Considered Harmful?". Its long, but totally worth viewing.

In the Q&A section at the end is a notable question, about the 61:40 mark, which is about how sometimes players will take a video of something really cool they did in the game and post it online, sort of like asking for a verbal reward from other players. The question to Chris was then "is there a way to have players decide when it is time for a reward, and what would be the result of that?"

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly and foremost is that this is an area of game development which, in my opinion, has been largely unexplored.

What support is provided in the game? In some you can take screen-caps, some have built in video capture. I forget which FPS it was, but some even provide instant replay video capture - that is, you don't need to actively and consciously turn on the video capture facility, you can instead say "omg, that was cool, what the hell happened" and press the instant replay button. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a game that lets you do an instant replay and show it from multiple camera angles, not just the one you saw.