Helloooo!
Tomorrow, the 2007 edition of ArtFutura begins in Barcelona under the title The Next Network. Uhm… interesting. The thing is, we arrived at ArtFutura by another path, while following the trail of one of the upcoming releases for the PlayStation 3 console. It’s
Little Big Planet
, a production of Media Molecule, who are presenting their creature next Sunday the 28th (at 5 in the afternoon, to be exact) at the festival of culture and digital creativity that is ArtFutura. José Luis de Vicente explains it very, very well here, on elastico.net, so we’re not going to waste much of our efforts either.
The story of Media Molecule is quite paradigmatic, and you can find parallels in any other creative field: a small independent studio/group/collective achieves some recognition in small circles with one of its innovative products (in this case
RagDoll Kung Fu
), a mega-company (in this case Sony) sets its sights on them and hires them to do the same but with a budget a hundred times greater.
We don’t know if Little Big Planet will represent a genuine break within the video game industry, although it does seem to be pointing in the right direction. And at the same time, it reaffirms what we have always thought: the Wii is a rip-off (said with the intention of stirring up controversy). Ultimately, what is the difference between moving a character with a joystick, a few buttons, or a controller that you have to shake like a madman in front of the television? The degree of interaction with the game is still the same! No matter how frenetic the action is inside and outside the screen, the player’s role remains as passive as before. On the contrary, the key terms in the player’s experience in Little Big Planet are ‘creativity’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘social’, yes, those fetish words of the 2.0 ¿or 3.0? era in which consumers are also content producers. The truth is that the creators of the game are the first to use them, so we’ll see to what extent the thing is reduced to a typical marketing ploy consisting of using the buzz words of the moment; but on the other hand, it seems important to think about how (in a perverse way) Sony capitalizes on these concepts.
