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Sony Lays Out A LittleBigStatement

After pulling a bunch of levels off the servers left players bewildered, Sony has come through with some guidelines for level design.

Please stop working on your Three's Company level.
Please stop working on your Three's Company level.
Depending on who you talk to, the servers for LittleBigPlanet are either thriving places of pure wonderment or a graveyard filled with levels that fail to load because they've been banned and removed.

Sony, as you might expect, is focusing on the positive in the wake of some angry users complaining that their levels are being removed. ThreeSpeech, the might-as-well-be-official Sony blog out of the UK, posted a statement from SCEE that gets a bit more specific about what is and isn't allowed to be uploaded.

See for yourself!

Sony Computer Entertainment and Media Molecule would like to thank everyone in the LittleBigPlanet online community for an amazing start! So far a staggering 84,000 individual levels have been uploaded and more than 27 million level play throughs have been completed. We couldn’t be happier with the initial efforts from our community members; the variety and quality of some of the creations has been astounding. We’ve seen everything from great platform adventures, puzzles and quizzes through to stories and races. We have even had a wedding proposal created entirely in the game!

Sony Computer Entertainment and Media Molecule would also like to take this opportunity to praise the fantastic spirit that our online community has displayed. The vast majority of content uploaded to date has been fun and suitable for all of our community members. In a very few cases we have upheld complaints regarding unsuitable content or infringement of intellectual property, with less than 0.5% of levels actively moderated as a result of complaints from other users.

Sony Computer Entertainment are committed to continually improving our moderation procedure and the methods of communication we use, in particular regarding the reasons that user complaints are upheld. In the meantime, here are some suggestions for all of our creators:

Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it. Please respect other people’s intellectual property rights. For example, don’t use images, brands or logos that you’re not entitled to use. If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behaviour.

Thanks to everyone that has contributed to LittleBigPlanet so far. Keep enjoying yourselves!

So there you have it. Stop uploading your weirdo violence-porn levels and your levels based on popular '80s sitcoms and everything will be A-OK! I guess the question now becomes... is this game as interesting without all that potentially copyright-infringing stuff?
Jeff Gerstmann on Google+