little big planet- the new plasticine?

07/16/2008 05:19:15 PM
Critics have been pretty excited about the forthcoming PS3 game, Little Big Planet.

There's something very interesting about the game because it allows the users to play with and interact with levels and characters in a way that hasn't been seen before. Yes, there have been level and character creators in games, but they've always seemed like after thoughts and nice to haves, so gamers can feel involved.

Little Big Planet does something different- it makes these tools central to the experience and invites the user to play with them and create the game experience on the fly. The developers are basically giving users plasticine, a place to play and telling them to get on with it.

The openness here is a refreshing change from the authorship culture that we've been so used to- where the creators are gods and players are forced to play games in the way the authors intended. In such a world, there's little role for the user to play creator.

With LBP, as you can see from the interview with Alex Evans of developers Media Molecule, there's a tacit understanding that the 'crowd" might be better at creating levels than they are.



Obviously, it remains to be seen if gamers will embrace the idea of making games as much as they do playing them, but there's a clear lesson here for any content creators.

How can you act like a composer and allow anyone to recast and recreate your composition anyway they like.

Could we make ads that are more like games?




Posted by Ed Cotton
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