Case Study 1 Little Big Planet

When doing the research for Playspace I was largely trying to stay away from video games as mediums of play. For while they are excellent distractions and in my personal opinion an emerging medium for art they are of insular and competitive experiences. Even games such as World of Warcraft while they consist of complex social interactions between thousands of people and are inherently a mulitplay experience they are very competition oriented and almost always violent, things that I was trying to shy away from in my pursuit of play. However since the beginning of this project one game has come out that has bucked the trend and has I hesitate to say almost beaten me to the punch in terms of collaborative/generative play. and that game is Little Big Planet





Having finally gotten a chance to play the game in its entirety through the generosity of my friend (I barely own a computer let alone a Playstation 3.) If the game were not so delightful I would almost feel dejected for its execution of an idea so close to the one I am working on, and it executes it very well. First for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of playing the game it is a wonderful blend of simplicity and overwhelming complexity. You exist as you avatar, the adorable and infinitely customizable Sackboy (seen above) whose actions are limited to grabbing objects, running an jumping in a game that is as simple as any video game has ever been this simplicity makes the game accessible to essentially everyone. Where the game really shines though is in its level editor, which come packaged with the software. It is a toy box with hundreds of textures, objects mechanical components and sounds which can come together in any million of different ways. Rather than attempt to explain the incredibly complex method of some of its capabilities I would direct your attention to a series of Youtube videos containing the vast array of user created content ranging from the relatively simple to the incredibly complex.


Sweet Child of Mine
Calculation Computer
Tetris
Combustion Engine


As you can see in these examples there is no shortage of creativity out there for these people and the tools are all there to create. I attempted this in my toys experiment, giving people a lot of tools to work with and there was success people seemed apprehensive alot of the time. Clearly this is not the case with Little Big Planet as when I looked yesterday there were thousands of levels on the sharing service. So I wonder what is the reason that these people are so keen on creating content? It seems that it is almost of a boastful nature, still very competitive, there is a feeling of "look what I have done , its the best" and so it seems that competition has pervaded here as well. However on a 2nd glance aside from popularity there is no reward for the creation of this content and to create something as complex as the computer, seen in the video, would undoubtedly take hours at least along with the relatively steep learning curve. I need to look into why people do this more, I think it could be of real use to Playspace