Creativity is alive and well and living in your PlayStation - and hopefully your head, writes Matt Greenop.
When UK game house Media Molecule unleashed Little Big Planet in 2009, it challenged many gamers to get a bit DIY. Accustomed as we are to sitting on our collective backsides and playing other people's games, suddenly we were given the opportunity to make our own - without the need
for complex software and training.
So Little Big Planet nearly drowned in awards, as PlayStation owners ate up the game's "play, create, share" philosophy. It took the unusual step of combining cute platform play with the ability to make cute platform games yourself, and now there are three million-plus gamer-designed levels shared on the PlayStation Network.
With the release of Little Big Planet 2, this number is going to grow significantly, and we're set to see just how far players can stretch their imaginations with new godlike powers to make levels exactly how they want to.
Media Molecule studio director Siobhan Reddy says the development team she runs (and likens to "herding cats") was stunned by how far users' creativity stretched.
"With LBP2 we really started off with the notion of allowing creatives to make more than just platforming levels," she says. "In LBP 'One' the tools that we provided were really around it being simple to make these creations. A lot of people took the tools to places that we didn't really know were possible and expanded on that quite significantly.
"With the new one we wanted to be able to create richer game experiences and our community did also. So we tried to figure out what tools would be needed in order to do that.
"We wanted there to be a breadth of creations, ranging from different game genres from platformers to top-down experiences like racers or strategy games, to side-scrolling shooters to things like music videos and cinematic movies.
"Everything that's in Little Big Planet 2 we built using the PlayStation 3 controller. It's completely possible for someone to make the game that we have - which is pretty awesome - and take it even further. We will definitely see some really exciting things happening with LBP2."
An area that "the Molecule" has really opened up with the new game is collaboration - there are near-boundless opportunities to create everything from levels to soundtracks or even small movies.
"There's different types of people - some are in it just for the playing, some are into creating, and other people just like being a critic. We've tried to add features that help all those types of people - but a lot of us are just combinations of all three.
"I actually really feel that we will now see the rise of the Little Big Planet team. There's such a range of tools - you might be really into level design, I might be really into cinematics, a friend of ours might be into composing music, another friend might be into creating their own HUDs and score systems. We could join together and make our own game - it could last for just one level, or 20 levels and last for several hours."
Creative gaming isn't a new concept, with machines like the much-loved Commodore 64 allowing some 8-bit adventure - but certainly not in high-definition 720p with matching surround sound. And in Commodore days, we weren't dining out on such a large diet of pre-packaged content that using our own imaginations seemed a bit redundant.
"We've had to define what this type of game is for this generation of console," says Reddy. "Obviously creative gaming has been a part of gaming in past consoles like Commodore 64, etcetera - so we've been defining it for PlayStation 3 as we go. It's like jumping into the abyss rather than looking at all the competition and figuring out what you what you need to do to be cutting edge.
"The thing that we still get excited about is that sometimes it's easy for people to lose faith in the creativity of humanity, but if you look at LBP it's so awesome to see the amount of creativity that these people have, and that there's a platform that they can use to express that."
LOWDOWN
What: Little Big Planet 2, out now
Who: Siobhan Reddy, head of the game's development team at Media Molecule
