At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, Sony representatives announced (with much fanfare) a paradigm shift in gaming that they called "Game 3.0." The provided a large list of concepts that made up the characteristic of the next generation of games. If you actively update your MySpace (or similar) pages, play in Second Life, write regular blogs, or actively distribute photos to your Flickr friends, some of these concepts may seem familiar. They include: community, content creation, creativity, customization, collaboration (I picked all the "C"s but there are more).

Sony wants to enable you, via its games and network, to create social networks, create content within games, cooperate with others within their games, etc. The company is hardly alone in this goal, nor is this a particularly new vision.

Games like "The Sims Online" and the eagerly awaited "Spore"from Electronic Arts are significantly focused on player-created content and networking players together. "The XBOX Online" service is an effort at building community, as is Nintendo's network of customized "Mii" icons for their players, as is "Second Life." All of these efforts owe much of their DNA to lessons learned not just from blogs and community websites of this decade but also to the pioneers of on-line community and online gaming from several decades ago.

Back in the bad old days of text-only computing, online text adventure games referred to as MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and their descendants allowed players to create homes on the Internet with rooms they customized, decorated, and populated. They had avatars that allowed them to look like almost anything they wanted, human or otherwise. The catch? Everything existed as text descriptions instead of images (initially.) Meanwhile, most commercial games (both console and PC-based) ended up as closed environments for decades because of both technological and corporate limitations (primarily the latter). Few games allowed for multiple players across networks, and almost none of them allowed players to create game content.

For an entertaining look at how much of gameplay remains the same (with or without graphics) check out this rendition of the most popular on-line game, World of Warcraft, as a text game.

Last month, when Sony representatives announced Game 3.0 as a concept and mission that they believe should spread across the industry, they demonstrated two "in-development" projects. The first, called "Home," is a Sony branded and accessible virtual world. In Home, you create a virtual living space to hang out with your friends on-line, similar to the text MUDs of the ancient days or Second Life today. In a Sonyfied spin on the concept, you can show Sony movies and play Sony music in your virtual living room (for a price, of course) To see what it looks like, you can find a Home movie on the PS3 web page.  The base level Home services are free, and may get some folks to buy a PS3; it's part of the PS3 network (though there'll be a ton of ways for you to spend your money with it).

What will get ME to buy a PS3 is a new game coming out called LittleBigPlanet from a new company called Media Molecule. It's a very simple platform game (in some respects) that allows for a lot of creative play and creative content creation. Using only a simple set of techniques (run, jump, push, etc.) and a set of tools to customize the system, players can create their own obstacle courses and mazes within the game. It's somewhat difficult to describe, but looks like incredible fun to play as you bounce around the screen.

You can take a look at LittleBigPlanet being played here. It's shot right from the onstage demo and a bit rough, but gives you the developer's voice-over describing what's happening.

Whether Sony has defined a new level of gaming, or (as I believe) has merely labeled existing trends that go back to early computing history is unclear. What is clear is that in Home, Sony is raising the bar for the slickness and commercialization of the on-line world concepts. It's also clear that Sony was clever enough to support Media Molecule and what looks like an exceptional game for all ages that will sell a lot of hardware.