Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this little opinion piece/story on your page, Video Game Reporter. I hope I can now put this series behind me. You’re giving me this opportunity because you know I will, don’t you?
Article:
Create. Play. Share. LittleBigPlanet once had a flawed, but fair system. You made a level. You uploaded the level. The level would trend on “Cool Levels” and if enough people liked it, it would earn the right to stay there for longer. Media Molecule wanted to give control to the community, wanted players to decide what levels deserved attention, what didn’t.
This probably worked as Media Molecule expected. Great levels got played. Dumb, crappy-looking ones did, too. Most of the Great Levels tended to look really nice and play very boringly (to be honest) but that’s another discussion.
(Personally, this bizarre, shitty level made by some five year old was more fun than 70% of the would-be, “Top LBP levels”.)
Unofficial websites began appearing for LBP, websites that were made for exposing Great Levels because a lot of them were being uploaded to LBP and getting no plays. The websites were there to give Great Creators a chance.
Media Molecule began directly recommending Great Levels in LBP2. They would check out the unofficial websites and recommend the best stuff from them.
Meanwhile on “Cool Levels,” the 100% in-game LBP2 community began showing signs of progressing like some organic “online community” ala 4chan. It started to have stupid memes, trends, jokes, fashions. You began entering levels that were only references to this culture.
Yes, this is an example. An “emo dress-up” craze went viral amongst LBP2’s younger players. Levels full of emo sackboys were in.
They never worked hard on a level but you could tell that the kids of the in-game community were having a lot of fun. They felt connected. While things might not have gone exactly to plan, Media Molecule had succeeded in its goals. It had created a community-world that children loved, something that had emerged from the kids’ collected efforts just as much as it had from Media Molecule’s.
You know those Great Makers I was talking about? Their levels don’t engage with the silly in-game LBP community, never reference it. The Great Creators are older than the children who are into that kind of thing.
Most of them considered LBP’s “Cool Levels” to be broken, frustrating, ruined and filled by cancer. It’s why websites like LBP Central existed in the first place, they were spaces away from the cancer.
When it was time for Sumo Digital to make LBP3, they started hiring some of these Great Makers to help come up with ideas for the game. Cool Levels wasn’t included in the released game.
I can’t tell how the in-game community is holding up. I can’t tell if it’s alive. Kids still post meme levels but they are the same ones from LBP2. And none of them get played. None of them are able to be popular.”
I know that I come off as a little extreme, here. Please stress – VGR – that I think Sumo Digital did an excellent job with LBP3 and that I’m not even fussed about the launch bugs or the weird new features or any of the other issue-topics that make up the body-arguments of the rest of the community’s LBP3 opinion-pieces. And if it you want, you can remove the whole thing at the end that basically accuses Sumo Digital of removing Cool Levels w/ immature reasoning. I honestly have no idea why Cool Levels is gone. At the same time, I kind of want it in there for a whole bunch of reasons.
Anyway, thanks.
Regards,
Anthony.
The Strange Video Game Report 