Spore, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts 

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. According to our previous reporting on the upcoming game Spore, we knew that the PC and Mac versions could exchange data, while the owners of the iPhone, mobile phone and DS versions could share only share levels with users of the same specific platform. We conducted an email interview with Spore senior development director Eric Todd to get some more insight into the XML-ization of Spore; here's what he had to say:

 Echochrome, developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. First up is Echochrome associate producer Kumi Yuasa, who's based at Sony's Santa Monica Studio (the game itself was built at Sony's Japan Studio). As it turns out, PS3 users can share the Echchrome levels they create with other PS3 users, but not with PSP users. Similarly, PSP users can share created levels with each other, but not with their PS3 counterparts. We asked Yuasa about this; here's what she told us via email:

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