Do you have a problem describing LittleBigPlanet? So does Alex Evans, co-founder of Media Molecule. To this day, he has a hard time describing it to people who have never played his game.

"We had this laser-focus that we wanted to do creative gaming. We had no elevator pitch and no name for the studio," Evans said at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas on Friday. "I think we called ourselves Brain Fluff originally, which is worse than Media Molecule. But we had complete conviction that it was worth giving it a try--we had a super arrogance that it was worth trying."

The guts to take on this experiment paid off since Evans took home a staggering eight Interactive Achievement Awards Thursday night.

User-generated content is not a new idea, says Evans. High scores listed in arcade games were essentially a form of user-generated content, and there have been game creation kits and level editors. "We wanted to pick our place within this broad church," he says. Media Molecule saw LittleBigPlanet fitting into the landscape of Spore and Boom Blox. And to make it stand out, the studio realized it needed to make its game fun.

Of course that was difficult to do since LittleBigPlanet was seen primarily as a tool for user-generated content. So the way Media Molecule made that experience fun was through the expressive Sackboy and Sackgirl characters. They gave the game a personality.

"User-generated content gives you epic pain," says Evans. "LBP is easy because you get the users to create the content." It is an interesting notion because when players are given creative tools, they have an investment in the game. "It's all very well to have Trophies, Achievements and high scores...but ... when they make something, they become evangelists not only for their own content but for the thing that made it. You have this insane level attachment."

When Media Molecule started the game's beta trial, all the levels "sucked," he said. They were so bad, that Media Molecule considered wiping the content before the game launched. He posed the question to the community, and 90 percent voted to keep the content--including people who weren't in the beta.

"You build up a sense of total investment with your players," says Evans. LittleBigPlanet is the result of people taking a massive freaking risk for no other reason than that their gut tells them they are right.