The best thing about Scribblenauts is not that I can type the word “BURRITO”, click a button, and watch an actual burrito pop onto the screen. The best thing is that I didn’t have to draw it. Plenty of games give us ways to bring a real-life object into their worlds. You could draw a burrito in Crayon Physics Deluxe, mod it into Half-Life 2, upload a pic of it to LittleBigPlanet, or heck, just break open Microsoft’s Visual Studio and code yourself a Grand Theft Burrito. But I didn’t have to do any of that. I just asked Scribblenauts for a burrito, and it gave it to me.

Back before the releases of Spore and LittleBigPlanet, we heard about the promise of user-generated content, or UGC: games would give users the tools to shape the game in their own images, by building levels and modeling objects and then share them over the net. To quote Sony: “Play, Create, Share”. But user-generated content turned out to be a niche. Not everyone has the chops to learn the tools, and even fewer gamers have an idea they want to see through. Instead of revolutionising games, it merely adds another rung on the ladder from “player” to “gamemaker”.

But what if you make personalisation easier? Consider a game that brings your real world into your game world, all on its own. It could grab data from the internet about the real world and the gamers that live in it, and weave it into the game experience, for an effect that is both surprising and personally meaningful. You would see yourself in a game without having to put yourself there. It’s not user-generated content: it’s user-generated, machine-mediated content – UGMMC, or as I like to say it, “Ugh-Meck.”

And some games are already doing it. With its extensive library of real-life things, Scribblenauts takes your inspiration and cuts out the perspiration. The helicopter or black hole you conjure may not look exactly the way you would draw them, but they do the trick. In-game ads keep up with reality by advertising new movies, new fast food promotions, and even presidential candidates. (By the way - still waiting to hear how Obama’s polling in Paradise City.) In Audiosurf, the music game where you play on top of your own music collection, you can broadcast your taste to the world by getting the top score on your favorite XTC demo cuts. And fantasy sports leagues draw millions of people who draft real athletes and score their progress with real games. How many fantasy football leagues would collapse if they had to name all the jocks themselves?

At its E3 presser, Microsoft announced it would integrate Facebook and Twitter into the 360 dashboard. It would be a shame if the only reason to hook into a social network was to chat in your down time. For example, in the DS’ The World Ends With You, players can eavesdrop on the passing thoughts of people around them; why not pull some of those thoughts from Twitter? Fantasy and sci-fi games often dump their lore into libraries or terminals, where players can study them at their leisure. These are often called a cheap dodge – who plays a game to read? – so why not make them interactive, by taking you to a wiki where players can turn a static text dump into a lively debate? And heck, hundreds of games include bathrooms. Why can’t we all write on the walls?

Turning this stuff into gameplay isn’t easy. You can’t use text without moderating it, and numbers have their own problems. Real-world data can be irregular, capricious, and snarfed by errors and outliers. If you don’t massage it, your game has no balance; smooth it out too much, and you’ve defeated the purpose. And you need a backup if the third-party APIs you rely on change or shut down for maintenance. Not to mention that game designers usually wall off their worlds for a reason. Pulling random interesting pics out of Flickr is fun, but they’ll make your carefully constructed environment look like Second Life.

But even used sparingly, Ugh-Meck personalises an experience for even the laziest user. It shows us our reflection – however tiny, however distorted – inside our games, an experience that is guaranteed to mesmerise us. Ambitious players will still go pick up the tools and learn the languages that let them mod or make their own games; but while they’re busy with that, Ugh-Meck can invigorate our content - and give us a little more of what we love: ourselves.

Chris Dahlen writes about games, music, pop, and tech. You can find him online at @savetherobot, or drop him a line at chris [at] savetherobot.com.