14 DAY TRIAL // James Spafford, who is the community manager at Media Molecule working on Little Big Planet, has said during a session at GDC Taipei that, when the game was first launched, “share” was less important than “play” and “create” because social media was still in its early days.
Since then the balance has changed and Spafford believes that, “Content discovery is a massive part of the experience. Without discovery, content is painful, and you wind up watching the wrong thing.”
“If you make something, if you created it, it's yours, no matter what the EULA says. Technically PlayStation owns it, but you made it,” he then goes on to say.
Initially, it was hard for the players who were looking for new content to make sure that they got to the best titles.
The team at Media Molecule first implemented ratings to deal with the issue, but they added a Trophy that was linked to the maximum 30 heart level, which led to spamming and made the mechanics almost irrelevant for real level discovery and sharing.
This was not the only mistake the Media Molecule made, with Spafford adding, “Like the star-rating, we forced people to tag levels. And when we did, we only displayed five of the 40-something tags. Again, people just hit the tag button, and every level had the exact same tags.”
The developers managed to remake the entire system with Little Big Planet 2, getting rid of tags and adding list to make level browsing easier.
According to the community manager, the entire franchise now has more than 6.7 million levels created by the community, with another 5,000 of them added to the servers every single day.
Media Molecule is now no longer directly working on the Little Big Planet franchise because it is exploring a number of other, undisclosed projects.
The series is getting a karting-oriented installment next, which will continue to use the Play.Create.Share concept.