The Making of "Sack Trek: Arena"

Pardon a little fuzzy-headedness; I'm running on what amounts to two hours' sleep, and that sleep marked by dreams so vivid and involving it might as well have been wakefulness. Dreams of shifting platforms, flickering menus, pistons, gears, pulleys and explosives, and the constant cycle like a fever-vison: fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo. Welcome to the late-nite madness of LittleBigPlanet authorship.

Now, making stuff with LittleBigPlanet's creation tools is easy. Knocking together, say, a functional fire-breathing dragon – or, perhaps more amusingly and certainly more demographically likely, a giant dick on tank treads launching electrified sperms – is the work of a couple minutes. Making an actual entire level, a level more sophisticated than the thousands of worthless “steep hill with ramp” stages clogging up the LBP servers, is more arduous. When my first opus, a cutsey adventure featuring a ride on an owl and a mission to aid a group of deer-worshipping cultists, got vaporized by the close of the pre-release beta period, my heart kind of went out of it; I was content just to meander through the work of others. Yesterday, though, I was inspired to rejoin my worldwide brethren and sistren and get back into the wonder, joy and toil of creation.

Creation... otherwise known as “intellectual property infringement." Unless you move in certain subcultural online circles you may not have heard the howls, but they have been loud and echoing in the hidden chambers: LittleBigPlanet publisher/developers Sony/Media Molecule have been perceived as being hard and merciless in their moderation (i.e. deletion) of LBP levels featuring famous properties. Unfortunately, this means a Pac-Man-shaped portion of the LBP pie is living on borrowed time; seventy per cent of the “community content” – and almost all of the best stuff – has been themed on Batman, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto, Sex and the City (?!) or some other familiar touchstone. This is natural and wholly predictable behavior for early-adopting nerds, and its censure pisses them right off. In old-school fuck-you solidarity, I abandoned my original IP, the deer-cult-owl thing, and set to work on a stage based on the original-series Star Trek episode “Arena". The one where Kirk fights a lizard man.

Sleeves rolled up and elbows-deep into the toolkit, and the depth of possibility LBP makes available becomes more apparent as every new idea becomes quick reality, even (or maybe especially) when doing the broad strokes. Hang a big black rectangle, spangle it with stars and a moon or two, and bam: Space... the final frontier. A few swipes with some grayish-white material, and there's a recognizable Enterprise. Hollow out bridge, Captain's quarters, turbolift shaft, transporter room... drop to the “planet surface," pull in the readymade Desert scenery, click three times and there's a passable ruined colony, still in flames from the Gorn (aka lizard man) attack. Bam, bam, bam. I am like unto a God, a Roddenberry in virtual styrofoam.

Ah, but... God's in creation, and the Devil's in the details. Two hours of tinkering to get the turbolifts a) working and b) not crushing the player against a bulkhead. Another two or three puzzling over how to create a beam-down effect before just saying Fuck It and letting gravity (and a transparent tube) handle the problem. Tinkering with the Gorn character 'til 3 a.m., first fussing over the motion of its limbs (there's a fine line between threatening and spastic) then fine-tuning the aim on the deadly boulders he's chucking. Agonizing over a spring-loaded death-contraption where Kirk has to zipline over some flaming spikes – it's not canon, but no LBP level can be called complete without flaming spikes. Now to model Kirk's improvised musket...

And that's just the mechanical stuff. What really traps you is the set decoration, the need to get everything exactly right. As long as I spent modeling the Gorn, I spent at least twice that furnishing my Enterprise. The red-alert lights, the space-plants and astro-tapestries in Kirk's Love Chamber. The bridge decor: Captain's chair, consoles, viewscreen and the alien face thereon, Spock's dialogue, background electronic ambiance. Machinery of the transporter room, Scotty's red uniform, sound effects of the beam-down...

The only way to stay sane is to stop fighting for fidelity and let yourself roll with LBP's lo-fi arts-n-crafts aesthetic – suggest, rather than simulate. A viewscreen? Here's a sticker that looks kind of like a TV; slap it up on the wall and move on. Players will get it. Here's the power and glory of theming your level on an established pop-cult property: readymade context. Build a big, urban level with lots of ziplines and pulleys and a big black hotrod... fine. Begin that exact same level with a tuxedoed gingerbread man saying “Good evening, Master Bruce!” and suddenly those clankity traverses become Bat-Ropes, that car becomes the Batmobile, a narrative is in play, and it's f'n sweeet.

I think Sony/MM will relent on their IP-infringement crackdown; I think they'll have to. Their core audience – which in the case of a crowdsourced-content game like LBP is also their core creative team – are bred-in-the bone fanboys, remixers, nostalgists and payers of homage, and those folks won't play (or make) ball if their work's a moderator's click away from becoming electron dust just because it has a picture of Mega Man in it. Meanwhile, look for “Sack Trek: Arena”, coming soon to a Planet near you... just as soon as I get those goddamned boulders right...

LittleBigPlanet: crazy shit toolkit

A quick look at my search history (only slightly redacted) over a day of fooling around with Sony's snugglestyle platform-playbox LittleBigPlanet shows a rapid arc from eager curiosity to wholly bought-in obsession: “littlebigplanet levels” -- looking for videos to while away the beta demo download time; “littlebigplanet tutorial” -- that's when I was hoping to learn the secrets of how dudes were coming up with some of the crazy shit I was seeing; “how to knit” -- when my love of woolen mascot Sackboy bubbled out into desire to snuggle him/it for real, for ever.

Developed by Media Molecule, whose founders were responsible for the indie Rag Doll Kung Fu, LittleBigPlanet's prototype working title was “Craftworld”, a name that bombs from a marketing perspective – sounds like something you'd leaf through out of boredom while your Mom shops for scrapbooking supplies – but actually describes the game well. LittleBigPlanet takes the aesthetics of DIY handcrafts and grade-school dioramas, all chunky fabrics, corrugated boxboard, rubber stamps and glitter, and puts them in front of an almost unspeakably robust toolkit and engine for the creation of physics-based platform-game worlds.

Level editors are nothing new; as far back as Lode Runner in 1983 games were shipping with construction sets that let users design their own playspaces and/or use game elements to draw cocks and spell out swear words. It's much less common for the toolkit to be the game, to have creating and sharing content as the whole point of the experience, to have exploring content created by others comprise the overwhelming bulk of gameplay. Sure, LBP comes with plenty of pre-made material, but the only meaningful reason to play through “story” mode is to earn more tools for your kit and to get a glimpse of what those materials might make possible.

Did I say “overwhelming bulk”? That's an understatement, if anything. The game's still a couple of weeks from its official retail release, but the handful of people playing this preview beta – a few tens of thousands worldwide, a relative drop in the bucket – have cranked out enormous quantities of content, powering through the curve of learning and accomplishment from tentative first steps to near-masterpieces in maybe ten days of activity. One short afternoon's power-drive through this cloud of creativity, and you'll see some crazy shit you won't believe, constantly pushing LBP's engine to, through, and beyond the limits of what you might have thought it capable of.

Gamers being gamers, our culture of old-school reference, homage and parody is exceedingly well represented. The first thing you might notice as you orbit around LBP's planetoid menus are dozens of attempts at recreating favorite Super Mario Bros. levels, with various levels of success. From straight re-creation – Sonic's in there, too, and Mega Man, all done up in virtual burlap, paper and felt -- you go on to the adaptations: Grand Theft LittleBigPlanet, LBP Miami Vice, Indiana Jones and the LittleBigTemple of Doom, LittleBigSilent Hill, a Shadow of the Colossus riff that has to be seen to be believed...

Speaking of Silent Hill, by the way, there's another exciting thread of LBP creation, a vector that's inevitable whenever toolkits are opened and an open commons established: subversion. A mathematically trivial quantum of time elapsed between the launch of the beta and the posting of the first levels actively subverting the game/tool's wholesome wuzzy-snuggle style, deploying shapes, textures, sounds and physics to create dark places, horrible dungeons, bloodbathed abbatoirs and weird German-expressionist noir spaces where Paper Mario meets The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by way of Godzilla.

Then, subversion beyond aesthetics – subversion of mechanics. Limits-testing geeks putting the dazzling flexibility of LBP's Rube Goldberg mechanisms to work tricking what is basically a run-and-jump platform-game engine into becoming, for example, a vertical shooter a la Space Invaders. Or a trivia game. Or an excruciatingly difficult Lunar Lander riff. Or a machine that uses LBP's sound-trigger elements to play the intro, first verse and chorus of Sweet Child o' Mine. Or – most subversive of all – a side-scrolling shooter: the pace of technical development aimed at giving sweet, pacific little Sackboy a big motherfuckin' gun to tote is dizzying.

This pace of innovation is powered in large part by a degree of sharing that goes one step beyond merely making levels available. Creators can choose to present their lovingly crafted gimmicks and gewgaws as rewards for completing their levels: play through some guy's military-themed level, for example, and you might come away with a functional model tank you can then add to your own creations, take apart to study its workings, modify as you see fit. Inasmuch as comparisons of games to film may or may not be valid, imagine: watching Touch of Evil rewards you with all the technical details and resources necessary to realize a four-minute continuous tracking shot; sitting through The Ten Commandments gives you a complete Pharaoh's Throne Room set to use in your next student film.

Sony's hoping to make Sackboy the face of the PlayStation 3, a mass-friendly mascot to soften the console's steely hard-core image heading into the midgame of this generation's battle for market share. It might work; the little bastard's adorable as all hell. But beyond the cuddliness and the frolicsome jingle-jangle of a soundtrack from The Go! Team, LittleBigPlanet is a populist game-making tool of almost terrifying power, and it just might change the medium for good.