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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?

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I'm glad Media Molecule is seeing the potential of the gaming community, and has opened the door to using some of us gamers if our levels are good enough.

Awwww Damn if only I had a pS3

Ooooh this gets me excited! I'm gonna be blowing HOURS on the level creator...

Not every man and their dog is going to get hired, but this does mean that more effort will be put into user created levels.

Which will result in more awesome levels to play with.

Cool. Not only will it create competition for the best levels but they're possibly getting new employees out of it. Good deal.

I like this idea, should be interesting to watch.

This usually breeds quality. Google offered $10 million to the best Android app and they're getting a lot of good applications. MS did this to a lesser extent but a lot of guys that made great XBL games got picked up into dev teams. Now MM is doing it which will undoubtedly bring very creative levels.

This is a great idea and as many of you said this will help ensure that people put more thought and effort into their levels.

I just can't wait to see how much freedom and tools we'll have to work with and how long it will take for us to become comfortable with them. LBP is right around the corner, now we just have to decide where we'll preorder it from