From Bungie’s Lips to Phil Harrison’s Ears - the parallels between Bungie’s Forge and Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet have been rattling around in N’Gai Croal’s head ever since Bungie announced the feature.

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It wasn’t until I actually brought a retail copy home, having finished Halo 3 eleven days before during a marathon session in a hotel conference room under a Bungie staffer’s eagle eye (a little over ten hours in two player co-op on Heroic, if you must know), that I finally experienced first-hand the awe-inspiring potential of Forge. Hence the title of this column, which refers to the name of PlayStation studio chief Phil Harrison’s keynote at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco: ‘Game 3.0: Developing and Creating for the 3rd Age of Video Games’.

To make sure that I wasn’t retreading ground that Edge had already covered, I re-read the Halo 3 issue, just to be sure. And with typical foresight and economy, there it was. A single sentence, kicking off your favorite gaming publication’s description of Forge: ‘Think of a cross between a standard Halo deathmatch and LittleBigPlanet and you’re about there’. (Damn you, Edge savants! Damn you all to hell!)

What’s great about both Halo 3 and LittleBigPlanet coming to store shelves within the space of six to nine months is the way in which both titles, coming at the same problem from opposite ends, can help prove the viability of user-generated content on consoles. For Halo 3, Forge is merely one of many terrific features; for LittleBigPlanet user creation is just shy of being its entire raison d’être.

The great leap forward that both have made – for action games, at any rate – is that the playable space and the creative space are one and the same. The slogan for LittleBigPlanet is ‘Play, Create, Share’, and it captures not only precisely the right elements of where games must go in the future, it lists them in the correct evolutionary order. Because if the act of creation itself isn’t playful, if it isn’t entertaining, then only the most motivated of people will bother to actually make anything. Media Molecule and Bungie, thank goodness, have ambitions on a much larger scale than having a handful of modmakers use their tools. If they have their way, we’ll all be using them.

Another insight both developers share is that amidst the massive flexibility on offer, each made a wise decision that narrowed the scope of what users can create, for the better. For LittleBigPlanet, which actually lets you design levels, it’s that while the objects and the world are 3D, the perspective it’s all viewed from is 2D. Creating 3D worlds well is a very, very hard thing to do; after all, if it were easy more of us would be pulling down architects’ salaries. By restricting the game to a 2D perspective, LittleBigPlanet eliminates the need for us to mess with a camera, which prevents us from being disoriented and which in turn makes the game accessible to a much wider audience.

Bungie, in its own way, goes one step further: Forge doesn’t let us design levels; instead, we can only edit the levels that Bungie has made. It’s an excellent choice, because we gamers only think we want to design levels – when we get right down to it, it’s tedious work that most of us just aren’t any good at. Forge eliminates the tedium by leaving the hard work of level design to Bungie, and gifting us with the joy of level editing by granting us control over item placement in the always-playable environment. It’s hard to imagine that most AAA games won’t also be doing this by the start of the next generation of videogame consoles.

The challenge for game developers as we go forward is this: how do they expose to players the tools and principles around which their games are built, in an appealing and entertaining way, so that players can quickly and easily remix the game? Because while I’m excited about the prospects for Forge and LittleBigPlanet, the two have only whetted my appetite for more.

From Bungie, I wouldn’t just like a list of additional features in Forge – like changing the time of day or swapping out backgrounds and skyboxes – I’d also like to see Forge extended into the singleplayer campaign, so that I can remix the encounters in story mode right down to assigning Perfect Dark-style Simulant personalities to the enemies. (In my Halo 3, fearless grunt lieutenants would boldly lead squads of cowardly armored brutes into battle.)

From Media Molecule, I’m hoping that the company will release expansions that offer two other perspectives – top-down and isometric – thereby turning LittleBigPlanet into the complete 2D game creation tool. For all of us armchair game designers, the future looks bright indeed.