The UK ads may be encouraging you to ‘play with everything’, but the deletion of player-made levels from LittleBigPlanet’s servers suggests that Sony isn’t willing to embrace the full extent of gamers’ imaginations.

Many levels deemed to be offensive have predictably got the chop, but the inevitable LittleBigPenises aren’t the only thing to have received Sony’s censure. Players have found their otherwise innocuous designs removed for containing copyrighted elements, inflaming a debate about who is obliged to police user-generated content, how they do it, and the liability of creators using the game’s tools.

Just two weeks after the UK launch of LittleBigPlanet, Sony issued a statement that less than half a per cent of the game’s 84,000-odd user-made levels had been actively moderated, but controversy was nonetheless stirred when content including the likenesses of characters and locations from Metal Gear Solid, Pac-Man, Sonic The Hedgehog and Scrubs was pulled from its servers, in some cases without clarification as to why this occurred.

One user complained about this lack of transparency: “I was given no explanation as to why they moderated it or why they won’t let me republish, even after making changes.”

“Secretly it makes me smile, to know that even big companies like Sony are making the same mistakes we here at Lionhead made three years ago,” says Sam Van Tilburgh, community manager for dedicated The Movies site The Movies Online. “Most players don’t appreciate it when their work is being pulled or moderated from the site. It all comes down to how you communicate this; it’s absolutely paramount when you moderate user-created content to explain to people exactly why it was removed. But of course the lawyers will tell you that you can’t explain the specifics of every case to people and that you have to be generic. Finding the balance between what the lawyers want and what’s good for the community can be tricky.”