User-Generated Content is Here to Stay… on Your Console

LittleBigPlanet hopes to revitalize interest in the Playstation 3 in a pretty simple way: by giving all the creative power to the players. Given how hard Sony is pushing this title, you’d think this was the first game in history to encourage user creativity. The idea of fostering the creative juices that lie dormant in each of our gaming skulls is far from an original idea, given that the modding community has been alive and kicking for well over a decade now. So why is it that LittleBigPlanet is being credited as the next big thing when other new titles that encourage user-generated content, like Kenta Cho’s Blast Works, haven’t been receiving any kind of recognition?

User-generated content (UGC) has been a staple in the gaming community since the dark ages of gaming, when players had to run their own dedicated Quake servers if they wanted to play online. For as long as there’s been a captive online audience for the mod community, there has always been UGC. Rarely did the PC titles of the early nineties have built-in editing tools, which left it up to hackers to crack the game’s code and make their own. It didn’t take long for developers to catch on to this, however, and games like Half-Life and Starcraft had editing software on the game disc.

Until recently, console games haven’t been able to make as much use of these tools given the limited disc/cartridge space and the lack of a complex interface. Sure, a lot of console games have had character customization and limited interface manipulation, but it was uncommon to see anything that could be called a level editor on a console. Since the hardware specs for this console generation aren’t that different from our PCs, their only real disadvantage over PCs is the interface. The analogue sticks of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 just don’t have the precision controls offered by a point and click interface like on a PC… or the Wii.

Thankfully, this potential hasn’t gone unnoticed. This past June saw the release of Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy, a port of Kenta Cho’s freeware title Tumiki Fighter. To justify creating a full retail release of a game that was already available for free, ABA Games (Cho’s company) included a massive, if simple, development tool to allow users to create their own side-scrolling shooter levels. It also makes use of the Wii’s Wi-Fi connection to allow players to share their levels with others.

To draw a comparison to Blast Works and LittleBigPlanet is a little unfair, given that Blast Works is a 2D shooter where LittleBigPlanet is a 3D platformer with a finely crafted physics engine, but the core gameplay ideas are the same. So just because LittleBigPlanet is a PS3 exclusive doesn’t mean creative Wii players are left out in the cold. Now if only Microsoft would get on the ball…