But, then, there's your hook; the game is designed to look cute and offer an almost limitless number of options for building simple objects that all have physics properties. Because the game is all shown from a 2D perspective (everything we saw took place in a back yard, with slick depth of field making the white picket fence, lightly-bloomed HDR sky and tall blades of grass off in the distance fuzzy and out-of-focus), it's easy to use the analog sticks to place something in 3D space with simple modifiers to tell the game you're pushing up or down to move things in or out of the Z plane. Same with shaping said objects, which means in a matter of seconds, you can, say, drop in a nice, steep ramp carve out a smooth slope and then place a huge skateboard at the top for a motion-blurred fuzzy cheek-flapping ride down the hill and off a jump.

Everything in the world is made up of familiar objects, but often they'll have physical properties that sort of endear themselves more to the world of what feels like stuffed animals brought to life -- a felt tree, a plastic star-on-a-spring bed of flowers, a burlap rock. Depending on how these are all placed, the gameplay is created by simply working together with up to three other online players. You can build the world together, messing with each other's stuff (in the example we saw, a king was slapped onto what looked like an animal pelt pulled tight that tore off and billowed realistically when the image was stamped onto it, but was then vandalized with huge eyes, a rock fist and buck teeth) or just trying to get through things.

Another example: you have an orange and a soccer ball. Now, since they exhibit real-world properties, if you jump about halfway up the soccer ball and just hold on, the weight of your little guy is going to start to roll it. However, if someone jumps up onto the orange, then the soccer ball and holds onto the other side, when you jump off the orange, grab the ball and then jump up again, you won't disturb it. Alternatively, you could just do like the folks at Media Molecule discovered and roll the orange back, then pushing it forward, grab it as it's rolling and use the momentum to fling your little stuffed avatar up and onto the ball.

So long as you place things in the world where gravity and physics best act on them, the gameplay essentially makes itself, and that was precisely the idea. A massive suite of tools for sharing all of your creations with the rest of the world (all of your creations in habit a zipped-up "pouch" on a patchwork planet, though the levels are obviously bigger than the size of the planet would suggest, hence -- we're guessing -- the title), meaning everything you create can be played, rated, commented on, and from within the game, messages can be sent, popularity can be determined, buddies can be added and plenty more.

So yes, fine, we'll admit this whole "emergent gameplay" phrase that's going to be bandied about way, way too much over the next few years actually applies. In fact, we can't think of a more fitting way to define the phrase than with what LBP is doing. The level of graphical detail, of interaction with the world and your friends, of building a community, all of it is tailor-made to unite PS3 owners and get them to show off their creativity. The game will hit toward the end of the year in online-only form, but the more creative of those folks that jump in early can get their design pre-loaded on to the Blu-ray disc-based version of the game that will drop in early 2008.

Now we begin counting the hours until we can craft our own patches of the world...