Sony had (and still has) a lot of hopes pinned on LittleBigPlanet. Since it was unveiled to the gaming masses last year, it’s been hyped up, cooed over and smothered with optimistic opinions. I can’t blame them, as the game itself is fantastic, and the reviews have spoken for themselves. However, in the early days of the game’s release in November, there was a bit of fuss stirred up following Sony’s apparent loss of sanity when it came to deleting levels that apparently contained copyright-infringing stuff throughout.

Read all about it after the jump!

Those of you who have LittleBigPlanet (that’ll be a handful of you, as it’s still not selling very well) will know what the score is when it comes to reporting content. If you see something unsavoury, you hit Select, crop the screenshot of your current situation to show the offending content, select a reason as to why you’re reporting it, and send it away. With a screenshot of whatever has disgusted you, you’d think that a normal human being would sit down, review these reports and decide which ones were rightly reported and which ones are to be ignored.

It’s worked in part, admittedly. The controversial “9/11 simulator” was dealt with swiftly, so we know that the system sort of works. Sort of. The “bad” content was swept away, never to be seen again by innocuous eyes.

The thing is, I’m at odds with Sony as to what the meaning of “bad” content is. Recently I argued that the deletion of some (fantastic) levels based on God of War, Metal Gear Solid and others was too harsh and that there was no harm in creating a level based on copyrighted content as long as you weren’t netting a profit from your work. “Trying to recreate what you’ve seen in one game in another is a huge creative challenge in itself” was how I summed it up and a lot of you agreed.

Even Mark Healey, the creative director of the game at English developer Media Molecule, agreed. In an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK he said that he wasn’t disappointed in “Mario knockoffs…because it’s cool that people are excited by that”. And he’d be right; as examples of creating ‘anything’ in LittleBigPlanet, Mario 1-1 and the Green Hill Zone are perfect.

Sony didn’t seem to agree though, and went on what I can only describe as the mother of all power trips and appeared to delete pretty much any reported level that was thrown at them. And here’s where the controversy lies.

A few days after my first post on the subject of copyrighted content in LBP, a petition was started in response to Sony’s deletion of the levels called The Azure Palace and World of Color: two magnificent levels that were entirely original in their content and both sculpted over hour after hour by their creators. That Sony seemed to automatically delete any level if it was reported – even if it contained no offensive content whatsoever – smacked of laziness or just sheer stupidity.

Sony didn’t even bother releasing a statement, which makes you wonder if they even had a clue what was going on. It made them look ridiculously strict when the situation arose, and gave the impression of apathy towards the subject when they didn’t even release an apology when the ‘offending’ levels were put back up.

For their arrogance and their silence on the subject, Sony’s LBP power trip is one of our top gaming moments of 2008.

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