Interviews// Sony's Phil Harrison - Beyond Home

SPOnG: Regarding LittleBigPlanet, how much pre-made content will go out with it? And secondly, how important would a tutorial be, for example?

Phil Harrison: We’re going to debut the product on the PlayStation Network first, as a commercial release, and then it’ll be on Blu-Ray disk in 2008 -- hopefully early 2008 -- and our goal is to be able to access some of the user-generated levels onto the disk when we sell it at retail. Maybe not the first version that we sell at retail, but future versions that we sell at retail can have user-aggregated content on them.

As far as a tutorial is concerned, I’m sure we’ll do something to make it easy for people to start off, but that’s also part of the interesting cross-over between Home and LittleBigPlanet; we could have a LittleBigPlanet space in Home where you can show expert user videos -- imagine that in a classroom setting where you’ve got people sat down who are LittleBigPlanet designers and somebody going: “This is how you make boxes, this is how you make spheres, this is how you assign behaviours to them.” That’s really interesting.

SPOnG: What’s the reward system going to be -- what will you get if you make the number one played level?

Phil Harrison: We’ve got some interesting ideas on that which we’ll share a little bit later, but we hope that star creators will be recognised and rewarded for their efforts.

SPOnG: Maybe with jobs in the games industry?

Phil Harrison: Why not? Why not? If that is one of the side benefits of what we do with LittleBigPlanet then I will be extremely happy, because that will help address some fundamental challenges that we have in training and creating new human resources to take our business forward.

SPOnG: And I assume if your level is put on the Blu-ray disk you’ll be paid as well?

SPOnG: Like I said, we’re not ready to talk about the specifics and I’d really prefer not to get drawn into that too much right now, but we’ve got some cool ideas.

SPOnG: It seems to me the key to a game like that is finding out all the best things you can do that maybe not everyone else knows about?

Phil Harrison: But that’s the great thing about the social element of audience-created content or user-created content. The fact that somebody makes an innovation, they upload it to the network and instantly everybody can see that innovation and it filters to the entire network. That’s the emergent entertainment that we’re most excited about, that we are not going to define, we’re not going to set the rules, so we’ll just see where people run with it.

SPOnG: Thanks for your time, Phil.