There's an interesting item over on Spong about the management of user-generated content in the Playstation 3 game, LittleBigPlanet. In LBP, you can create and share your own game levels - which resemble sort of a cross between Toy Story and Super Mario. The debate concerns the deletion of user-generated content by moderators.

This is a story we've seen play out recently in Spore, where gamers were making, um, compelling characters who earned the nickname "Sporn." There are two ways to deal with this: the company deletes offensive content, or they leave it up to the community of gamers. It's sort of the arrival of the Miller test in the virtual world - who gets to determine what constitutes "offensive" content and why? Who is the community behind this? What are the community standards? YouTube is probably the biggest example of a company that has relied on it's own self-policing community. It really is astonishing that so little porn creeps on to YouTube, though it's hardly full-proof. As Spong rightly points out, the debate surrounding these early days of so-called "modeletion" could have a large impact on the future of games and user-generated content across the Web.