The new genre with great multiplayer depth

Everyone plays shooters, fighting games, RTS'. MMORPGs, and/or sports games. But there's a new type of game that has a great chance at adding another genre to that list. User created games. I've been following LittleBigPlanet since its announcements but it's far from the first game of its type.

You could argue Paint -the software that comes standard on all Windows computers- was the start (Mario Paint might have been the console's start). And while there were character creating/editing, map making, and play making tools (sports games) there wasn't another big advance until Line Rider. Line Rider let you draw whatever you could think of and gave you a little character to do run around your creation. And the last major innovation was probably Spore, while the game structure was there the aesthetic look of the universe is unique to the user. Two months after that release LittleBigPlanet is making its debut. Allowing you to create your own levels, goals, and objects. So I mean hopefully innovations are going to start coming in more quickly.

I'll leave it there. I love shooters, fighting games..... anything heavily multiplayer. But I've always been drawn to the games that have creation tools in them. That's the kind of multiplayer community I'd enjoy being part of the most.

Side note: Maybe down the road there'll be a game where there's two user-communities supported: the creators and the players. (LittleBigPlanet technically is that game but there's gotta be more emphasis on the players side i think.)

I don't think it is new, as much as becoming more accessible. I used to make maps for Doom. I used to play around with files so that weapons and enemies behaved differently. Others made new graphics or full conversions, but a lot of that stuff was hard. I'm not a PC gamer anymore, but other games that seem to have had a healthy mod community include Quake, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament. Some of these were nothing like the original game (Counter-Strike plays much differently than Half-Life), and there were plenty of mods for Unreal Tournament that changed the goals a match as well as the basic physics/speed etc. It's not just first person shooter either. I've seen complete mods for RTS games using the games in-built tool, plus there is stuff like RPG Maker.

While obviously we still have to get our hands on LittleBigPlanet, it seems more like a level editor than an actual game creator. It does seem pretty robust though, and I don't know too much about the goal setting aspect, so I could be wrong; there could be soem very interesting challenges thrown at us far different than what the developers ever expected.

I think the key thing about LittleBigPlanet is the accessibility. If you can think of a design, you can probably whip up a prototype in a few minutes and test the idea. The fact that it is relatively unheard of on consoles (at least of this depth) is another reason why people are excited about it (Blastworks does come to mind though).