It was inevitable. After a halcyon week of free and easy user-generated content, self-expression and uninterrupted creativity, the bods at Sony have started cracking down on Little Big Planet players who integrate brands, pop culture and copyrighted materials into their game levels.
The game, which has an unprecedented toolkit for players to develop their own challenges for others to play, was released last week to great fanfare and rejoicing. A note to the President-Elect for the United States: it didn't take long before the dogs started to rip it apart.
Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that either Sen. Barack Obama or Little Big Planet are in for a mighty fall, I'm just saying that the powers that be have agendas of their own. And for the PlayStation 3 game, those powers fall under the heading Sony and its umbrella of mighty media properties.
Sony's relationship with the ludic spray surrounding its games (that which consumers generate purely for the love of it) has been rocky in the past; leaving its music division policies to the side, long-term gamesblog readers may recall the launch of Station Exchange, Sony's attempt to control the user-generated content sales of EverQuest and other Sony-owned intellectual properties to and from players via eBay.
You may also recall the backlash against the publishers after they attempted to bamboozle social media users with an ill-placed marketing video, alliwantforxmasisapsp.
Sony unfortunately has relationships with big players who don't understand what remixing the web is all about, and so it was inevitable that content which used copyrighted concepts would be removed from the public Little Big Planet library. But we should still give them kudos for trying this out within their constraints, rather than tear them down and declare this all a disaster.
I am, however, looking for someone with the cahones - and perhaps the convincing skills of a superhero - who'll create a product which allows free and open remixing and re-purposing. I don't expect it to come from my generation, but I have high hopes for the next one.
cheers for the link bambino_tostare!
