Jeff Hoy, American

A whole lot of people have been lamenting the fact that LittleBigPlanet has been a commercial flop.  It was supposed to be a system seller, it was going to change the way games are played, it’s was one of the most hyped games of the last couple years.  It should be selling like hot cakes! But it isn’t!  Why?  Simple — most people that play games don’t actually want to make them.  LBP is like YouTube where people would rather watch other people’s funny cat videos than make their own.  And just like YouTube most of the user created content just isn’t worth playing.  There’s some exceptions of course, but there have been hundreds of thousands of levels published since it’s release and only a few are actually worth playing.  Of the community levels I’ve played, even some of the highest ranking ones, many were littered with small errors and issues that would have never made it past QA at a pro developer.  The rest, well the rest don’t even warrant a mention, they’re just awful.

User generated content for games is nothing new.  Games as far back as the original Doom had user generated content, or “mods” as they were called back then.  I got my start with making multiplayer maps for Half-Life with it’s Hammer editor.  I made many maps but never considered releasing any of them because they weren’t very good.  It was difficult and time consuming back then, only the most dedicated and talented creators actually made levels that people wanted to play.  It’s still the same today, even though LBP’s level creation tools are simple and easy to use, designing, building, and releasing a high quality level is still difficult and time consuming.  And despite the absolute cool factor of mechanical calculators and Game of Life implementations, people can’t actually “play” those, they’re just nerd porn, most people don’t care.

Beyond the user generated content of LBP the story mode is short and can be downright aggravating, especially if you’re trying to 100% complete the game.  It’s no wonder that each level has so many checkpoints and each checkpoint gives you more lives.  There’s even times when the developer admits “okay, this part is going to suck” because they’ll give you a ton of extra lives to get through it.

Beyond the aggravation and shortness of story mode and the useless user content LBP is great, I actually love it.  Graphically it’s awesome, the sound and music matches the feel of the game perfectly, and it’s just too darn cute.  But I’m the kind of person that would like to make games, so the tools included with this game are what interest me the most, not the game itself.  As a creative tool it’s downright awesome, but people can’t play creative tools, they can only play games.  And that’s why it’s not selling.  As Gertrude Stein once said “There is no game in this game.”