Community-generated content has been a fantastic staple of PC gaming for years. Since the days of Quake, players have enjoyed endless user maps, weapons, models, and even total conversions. To add to all this, the vast majority of it has been totally free, enabling some games–such as Quake and Half-Life–to have an infinite replay value. Some mods are even played more extensively than the original game to the point of fanaticism, such as the dubious Counter-Strike. Some actually make games playable. I’m looking at you Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

In this day and age, however, the community seems to dwindle. The popular Source engine is a little more difficult to get one’s hands around than its predecessors and Valve is capitalizing on the best modifications and teams, going so far as to buy up Turtle Rock Studios and Nuclear Monkey Software (which is fantastic for them). The latest stand-alone game released on the source engine, Left 4 Dead, is entirely reminiscent to Community Mods that came before it. This leaves most to pay ten dollars to take funny pictures with Garry’s Mod, and fix broken games such as those previously mentioned. So the PC side of things aren’t as great as they used to be, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had. It’s just strange to have to open up my wallet for Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, and a fancy (albeit wonderfully so) version of Narbacular Drop.

With all that monetary success, of course, comes the advent of user-created content on consoles. Well, when I say “consoles”, I mean the PlayStation 3. With Microsoft’s “Pay-For-Everything” platform, it’s rather difficult to get free custom content on the Xbox 360. But it’s not as if the PS3 has been a golden ray of innovation, oh no. It started strong with mods for Unreal Tournament III working almost (but not quite) seamlessly. That inclusion opened the doors for that same experience PC users had 10 years ago with an endless surge of maps, weapons, models, vehicles, and even brand new play-types. This nostalgic experience was perhaps short-lived with the release of Little Big Planet.

The game itself is magnificently akin to Communism. The inclusion of in-game access to the level community and direct download of user-created content was an excellent idea, but they’re fundamentally flawed. We as humans seem to be unable to create original content, if not evidenced by DeviantART’s multiple variants of Sonic the Hedgehog and Soul Calibur IV’s dirge of Street Fighter and anime replicas, then by the many, many World 1-1’s and Mirror’s Edge Demo levels of Little Big Planet. Copyright Infringement is serious business, and while the levels should have more creativity to them, such regulations have no place in freely-distributed content. Players have been replicating their favorite game/television/anime characters for years. Why, even Valve released a mod as blatant tribute to the original Quake.

Even if it’s ridiculous and banal at this point, people have a right to freely create and distribute what they like, and if that’s taken away, many people will lose interest in the game.

But even for those willing to look past it, Sony is still burying itself with its heavy-handed moderation, deleting the stand-out original levels. The game is rated E for Everyone (if you’re in the USA), but an explanation never hurt anybody. Heading over to their official forums, you can see Sony doing it’s best to listen to the community and rectify the situation. But at this early point in the game’s life, and the nature of game sales, they may have buried it indefinitely.

The problem lies in the hosting. Sony’s using it’s own servers to directly download the content into a user’s Game Data file. There’s no alternative. Were user’s allowed to host their own files separately online, and then download and install them through the game (e.g. Unreal Tournament III), then the situation would rectify itself overnight. One can only hope Sony makes the right move to fix this problem, because the game itself is excellent. And if the problem persists, it could easily spell disaster for user-created content, not just on consoles, but on the already limping PC platform as well.