Now, I'm sure some might accuse me of hyperbole in the face of relatively little evidence. And it's true that I can't tell what's going to happen to the community based around the game, when the full weight (and, hopefully, ingenuity) of the PS3 masses are brought to bear on it.

But the game has managed to do what console titles have thus far shuddered to provide - an open, easy to use creation system that lets the community make the magic, while the creators stand back and marvel.

He goes on to lay out the points he sees as particularly important, from the ease of creating content to relative freedom in creation to the tagging system. This issue of user-generated content is so important — even big universities have people scurrying around trying to figure out how to make it easy for reasonably clueless people make cool stuff, too — so it will be interesting to see if all of these predictions pan out as planned.

Why LittleBigPlanet Is Web 2.0 For Games, Fulfilled [GameSetWatch]

According to Gameplayer, each user will have a limited allotment of server space for their LBP creations. But there's kind of a neat catch that helps demonstrate that Media Molecule is taking their role as user-generated-content-messiah seriously:

Writes Gameplayer:

If their scheme works, users who upload the most popular levels will be rewarded with more space. It’s common sense, really — when lurking on YouTube, do you look for the videos with five stars, or with one?

On the other hand, if you wanted to play Devil’s Advocate, you could accuse Sony of some subtle social engineering here. After all, server space is so cheap these days that it’s effectively free. Just think of GMail, and Flikr, and all those sites that let you upload files that are hundreds of megabytes in size — for free.

So it’s not an issue of cost — it’s an issue of quality.

Sony wants to create a sense of value for those who’ve bought their game. By rewarding the best LittleBigPlanet players with more online space — and by restricting those who, well, suck — they can make this dream a reality. Or at least, that’s the plan.

A system that depends on community content, one could argue, ends up subject to quality issues; Microsoft has attracted criticism to that effect regarding its community games (and responded to it). But a system that holistically encourages and rewards quality creations has a good shot, right?

Server space in LittleBigPlanet to be limited [Gameplayer]

More pics of the sneaking souls in our gallery below. We await the flood of user creations when the game officially streets in North America this week.

In a new interview with Level Up, Wright explains why letting users create their own Spore creatures was so key to the experience:

You never really hear game players telling each other about the cool cut-scene they saw in the games they are playing but they’re always talking about the cool unique things they discovered to do on their own. By focusing on giving the players narrative freedom the game becomes more immersive and they show a much higher degree of ownership and authorship over the experience.

Wright said there've been 500,000 user-generated creatures made using Spore's creature creator. No small sum. In fact, guess how long it would have taken Maxis to make that many all by themselves?

Using traditional tools like most game developers (Maya, 3d Max) it would typically take a professional artist a couple of days to make a Spore-like creature. A large art team might have as many as 50 artists working on a project so to create 500K creatures that team would have taken about 55 years.

Welcoming Our New Sweatshop Overlords, Part I: Will Wright On Outsourcing Content Production To the Players of Spore [Level Up, and pic credit]

"SCEE and Media Molecule can guarantee that all consumer-generated content will be free at launch. We know how important this is to the LBP community and what we want most is for people to enjoy playing, creating and sharing their content," Sony told Eurogamer.

Monetizing user-generated content has been a hot-button issue in video games' adjacent virtual worlds sector, where casual multiplayer social games usually rely on microtransactions support to make money, and community content to drive engagement. It'll be interesting to see whether LittleBigPlanet can set the standard for bridging those two worlds with what Reeves calls an "iTunes meets eBay" system.

How willing are you, Kotaku readers, to pay for something another player has made? Or will you just stick to the free stuff?

All LBP user content to be free at launch [Eurogamer]

...Wait, wait, don't glaze - in plain language, this means making it possible for the levels you built in Echochrome or your Spore creature creations, for example, to be swapped around to any platform where the game resides. Ever wonder why you can't transfer user-created Echochrome levels between the PlayStation 3 and PSP versions of the game, when it seems so theoretically possible?

Echochrome associate producer Kumi Yuasa explained at Croal's Level Up:

There is a large size difference between PS3 levels and PSP levels, PS3 levels being 8 times larger than PSP levels. So if a user decides to create a small PSP-size level on PS3, technically it may be possible to have the levels downloaded to PSP.

However, Yuasa told Croal that the goal for different platforms was decidedly different experiences - meaning more than technical compatibility is at issue here:

The team didn't want to implement the markup solution to make PS3 and PSP levels compatible because of the basic rule of this game: optical illusions. This game is based on optical illusions when you see a level as a whole, not when you zoom in certain parts of levels. So if you were to convert a level into something 8 times smaller and transfer to PSP, it would make it very difficult to see levels unless you can zoom in.

Basically the team wants users to experience the difference between PS3 levels and PSP levels solely. PS3 levels are larger and more dynamic, whereas PSP levels are smaller and more condensed/concentrated. Smaller the level does not mean easier it is to clear.

Ohhhh. See, this is why I just write about the games. I'll just duck back into my media cave now.

The XML-ization of Videogames, Part I: A Chat With Echochrome Associate Producer Kumi Yuasa [Level Up]

The idea of creativity can be quite daunting to a lot of people. You give a blank piece of paper and a pen and say, "Be creative!" What do I do? People are looking for inspiration. With LBP we want to create a fuzzy felt experience, where we give the component parts to trigger the creativity. I don't think any of us as kids had a problem with cracking on and creating something when we were given a Lego set; it didn't really matter how it ended up. We're trying to give people the bare bones, and then we'll let them go. Obviously there are going to be sophisticated users who will make incredible things because they'll know how to create textures and images, import photos, videos, audio files. They'll know the things to do to make their contributions incredible, but at the same time incredible things can come from simplicity. Someone can do something unexpected which might spark a whole string on the community. It's going to be emergent.

The only downside is that after launch, any content Sony creates for download will probably be for a fee, though talk of seasonal content (like for the Olympics, etc.) does sound like fun. Sharing among users won't cost anyone a dime and (if I could make a prediction) will most likely be the more interesting content. Kim Phu

Interview:Little Big Planet [Guardian Unlimited]