Project Spark Staff Worried by User Created Content

In some ways, Project Spark was the best thing to be shown at E3. It’s LittleBigPlanet, without boundaries. But when you give people the opportunity to easily create a world for other users, there’s one inevitable truth: there will be penises.

Probably hundreds of them, fighting one another with little penis swords.

IGameResponsibly had chance to chat with developer Soren Hannibal, the technical director on Project Spark:

He reiterated several times throughout the talk that they literally have no idea what users are going to do with the tool once they have access to it. They’ve painstakingly attempted to forecast the future, but there’s only so much that a small team can account for. When the topic drifted to possible moderation practices Hannibal hilariously admitted, “We’re scared about letting you put in your own textures.” Hannibal and crew don’t want to heavily moderate the service since that would be against Project Spark’s core goal; letting users create. But there’s certain things that people do with freedom that are offensive, unruly, and even perverse.

There’s never any easy answer – especially when there are going to be people who just try and create the most disgusting thing possible. Still, like LittleBigPlanet, the best of the community do enough to make up for a few bad eggs.