Customisable platformer LittleBigPlanet looks like it could be a smash hit on the PS3, and with good reason. While user-created content has a long history on the PC, is this the game that will finally make a trend of it on consoles, as well as with the general public?

You’ve always wanted to make a GTA map of your hometown, haven’t you? Wouldn’t that be one of the best things in the entire world? We know it would, but as writers on a humble PlayStation magazine, we’ve had to “settle” with the preset environments of San Andreas, Vice City and Liberty City on our consoles. It’s a good compromise, for sure, but still we’ve always had the idea of it lingering in the back of our minds: what if we were the masters of GTA, and what if we could make that massive world resemble whatever the hell we wanted it to?

Naturally, this was an unreasonable frame of mind. Console games weren’t renowned for their customisation opportunities, and the best GTA mods (Multi Theft Auto, methods of combining all three areas into one environment) were confined to the PC. Then, Sony announced LittleBigPlanet, which looks set to streamline the task for console folk and enable them to share their ideas on the PlayStation Network. The move is bold, certainly, but it looks fun and easy enough to attract the mainstream audience it deserves.

That’s you! You’re the audience they want! Unless you’re absolutely hardcore (the sort of person that occupies the PC mod scene), your experience with game modification would be something like the restrictive TimeSplitters 2 level editor, or changing your team names to those of your school friends on Pro Evo. LittleBigPlanet, however, represents a fun, accessible and community-based way of doing much more.

If you haven’t seen the trailers for LBP already, then we suggest you do so: jaws will be dropped, tears will be shed and money will be gathered. You can literally sit there, watching the game emerge in front of you, and the level of detail you can slap in there is scary (see “LittleBigImagination”). The entire thing is cuter than a kitten, as well, which is a clever design decision in this world of Animal Crossings, Miis and puppies that you stroke with a stick (we hate Nintendo).

As such, you should see an entire generation of softcore gamers enter the mod scene without even realising it; there’s no boring file business or depressing texture adjustments here, and everything is formatted in a beautiful and free way. It can be as rude, cute or complex as you like, and the YouTube-style format of content sharing should ensure its success.

If LittleBigPlanet is to start a trend, however, it will first have to become a massive hit. When Sony announced LBP at GDC 2007, the hype that immediately surrounded the title was monumental, and Sony will have to hype the thing to death if they want it to play into casual gamers’ hands. If interest is as high as expected, we should see a trickle effect of different genres entering the PS3 mod scene.

The console was always created with homebrew in mind, after all. Cast your memory back to E3 2006, and Sony exec Izumi Kawanishi actually encouraged use of the PS3’s various mod tools, talking up the possibilities of users creating playable PS3 games and distributing them. Of the three major consoles, the PS3 is the only one that was created with this in mind. It’s not unnatural, then, to see Sony using LittleBigPlanet to make the complex process viable to modern, EyeToyplaying audiences.

In this format, it seems so much more creative to an average audience, and this is why publishers will get on board with it. Even if LittleBigPlanet isn’t a massive sales success, it may be special enough to pull more publishers into releasing console mod tools for your favourite titles. The PC mod scene, for example, grew in tandem with developer confidence, and they began to view the idea as an integral part of the experience (see "Keeping it PC").

Obviously, some publishers will be more conservative about it than others, and there are limits: don’t expect, for example, to see the entire cast of Final Fantasy X flying a Millennium Falcon around Middle Earth any time soon. The limit of the mod scene isn’t your imagination, remember, it’s whatever the publishers say it is. Everything has limits, but the defining factor here lingers on what the publishers will allow you to have.

This is still a fairly new idea on consoles, though, and making it mainstream is an even newer concept. As mentioned, however, most LittleBigPlanet users will be part of the mod scene without even realising it, and they could demand more once they’ve exhausted all of its possibilities. At that point, the questions will be asked: why can’t you edit your favourite titles? Why are you not in more control of your PS3 games? Thus, the publishers respond to that in increasingly elaborate ways, and so on. The scene grows.

That, then, brings us back to LittleBigPlanet. Since this is the first experience of its kind to bring usercreated content to the mainstream market, so much of what could happen rests on its LittleBig shoulders. The ideas are great, the concept is simple and the game looks lovely. LittleBigPlanet is but a stone’s throw away from being a user-created trend-setter.