This is amazingly cool — someone’s implemented a simple calculator using built-in level design tools in the Little Big Planet beta. You might have seen this in my Google Reader shared items (it, and links to a variety of social networking sites, etc. are below under “Contact”). Check the video, and note that though the initial calculations seem like not that big of a deal, wait until the camera pans up and you can see the sheer amount of virtual “machinery” needed to make this work:

Pretty wonderful, huh?

I’m very intrigued by Little Big Planet — it’s basically a sidescroller/puzzle game, but, as you can tell, has a phenomenal degree of customizability. As a consequence, this is the first game that I’d consider getting a Playstation 3 for. There’s a vibrant community building up around the game already — and it’s not even out yet! — making me wonder what’s in store when the game’s officially released. (And, incidentally, I wonder if this will be the first game to make people go out and finally buy the PS3, two years after its release).

As someone who purports to study “design” with games, I’m naturally interested in digging up the communities in which level design in Little Big Planet is discussed. And, especially, I’d love to see more things like this math case — examples where people have taken a game and pushed it beyond the simple notions of level design (something for other people to play through), and have developed new games, virtual machines, or other complex mechanistic “things” inside the game. Design practices in which players redefine what a game is even about are the most intriguing to me, though I have, as of yet, not figured out how to study them.