Creation Roles
The Problem
While Rec Room offers an amazing environment for social creation, it comes with challenges. Creators have the freedom to collaborate openly, but this requires a high level of trust between participants. Many players are eager to learn and start their journey as creators, and Rec Room encourages this by allowing users to host their own creative classes and workshops, earning rewards for helping others develop their skills.
However, these spaces can sometimes be problematic, as creators have the ability to delete or steal others' work, leading to significant moderation challenges.
Design Solution

To address this, we focused on providing creators with robust moderation tools tailored to collaborative creation. Our goal was to ensure these tools supported growth and served a wide range of use cases, not just a niche part of the community. This effort marked an important step in evolving our in-app systems to foster a safer, more productive environment—one where creators can teach and mentor effectively, and where people from around the world can connect through fun, creative learning experiences in a virtual space.
Design a system that integrates seamlessly with the existing logic system
Enable creators to build their own moderation systems
Allow creators to customize moderation features to fit their specific needs
Collection


I put myself in our creators' shoes to deeply understand their needs. I conducted over 50 user interviews and surveys, working closely with creative teachers, workshop hosts, and engineers. From there, I mapped out the different ways creators might use the system, ensuring it could support a wide range of workflows and goals. I also put together creator personas, outlining the core needs of these community-driven creators and gaining a deeper understanding of their motivations.
Listed and organized all the tools and features creators need
Ensured these tools could be integrated into the existing system
Confirmed creators could customize features using logic
Researched and documented key tools and how current logic works
Clarified the differences between Room Permissions and Maker Pen Roles
Presented findings to stakeholders
Public Collaborative Creative Space
In Rec Room, Roles are used in the game system to assign players unique abilities. For example, interacting with specific objects in a room can grant powers like flying, louder speech, or higher jumps.
We leveraged this existing system to grant Maker Pen access (Rec Room's creative tool) to room owners. This enabled room owners to design custom systems for assigning Maker Pen permissions, tailored to their specific needs, rather than being restricted by a one-size-fits-all feature.

Since creative roles are designed to meet the needs of room owners for teaching and creating fun collaborative experiences, room owners can design their rooms to accommodate zone creation, individual creations, multiplayer creation, and open room creation not tied to specific locations. This flexibility allows room creators to keep their experiences open and versatile, using one system instead of a restrictive one.
Creative Roles Next Steps
Creator roles have served creators well, but they now want to do even more with them. These creative roles are designed for success for future iterations, such as:
Toggling off features in the Maker Pen Palette.
Setting up robust tutorial experiences, all created by the creative community.
These can be added to gameplay to create experiences like build-a-bear games, object-based games, creative timer games, charades, and creative battle games.
These are the kinds of features creators desire moving forward, and this system helps meet and grow with those needs.
Measure Success
Maker Pen Roles: Increase 60% creator engagement
Moderation: Reduce Moderation by 12%. Reducing support tickets caused by bad actors using the Maker Pen.
Creative Roles Template Room: Room ^MakerPenClass_Template has 144,370 clones.
Workshops: Creators host hundreds of workshops each year, and they rely on creation roles to do so.
Release: November 10 2022