Budding game designers may want to pay particular attention to LittleBigPlanet when it launches, because Media Molecule will be paying attention to them. The company's Pete Smith said it will be looking at the game's user generated community content to spy potential new employees for its dev team. How novel -- practically inventing your own hiring pool. 

"If a user becomes known as being great at making levels, I can't say we wouldn't but I don't think we'd want to take his level and then charge people for it, because it's free - that's the whole premise of the game," explained Smith.  "However, we will be aware of who those awesome designers are and certainly there's the potential to get them building levels as part of the dev team."

He also talked about the potential to "commission" certain community designers to create official work for Media Molecule: "I think if we were gonna do that we'd rather get the top ten guys and commission them to make some amazing stuff for us ... But we'll be watching it closely, because it'll be a great way for us to recruit great new designers."

LittleBigPlanet is certainly looking like one of Sony's first truly essential titles, and hopefully it can live up to the hype. After what has seemed like forever, the game is finally shipping in just a matter of weeks so we can finally put this game's expectations to the test. Let's just keep that mention of charging people for levels out of our dirty little mouths though, eh?