Helen calls them the “Hurrah!” buttons. L2 + R2 + both analog sticks held upwards. Whenever she wins the most points on a LittleBigPlanet level, she presses these buttons, and her grinning Sackgirl lifts both arms in the air in wordless celebration. My Sackboy, meanwhile, tends to scowl and storm off the side of the screen, fists clenched. Or, after a particularly stressful level, he might pull out a frying pan and hit Helen’s Sackgirl over the head. Helen tends to take losing slightly better. She will drag my Sackboy away from the camera, mid-disco dance, in a vain attempt to take the spotlight. Either way, nigh every level ends in a comical scuffle between our characters without a word spoken between us in the real world.
Communication between players has…show more content… When he finds the wrong switch, Sackgirl shakes her head angrily and points again. This time my Sackboy gets it right, and Sackgirl grins and gives a thumb up.
These complex interactions between players and characters blur the borders between language and gameplay. Much like every other element of LittleBigPlanet‘s aesthetic, communication is rendered tactile and tangible within the game world. Just like the cardboard car with a cellophane windscreen, or the stars dangling from the sky on strings, you can see the dialogue between the characters.
LittleBigPlanet 2 takes things a step further by occasionally, perhaps counter-intuitively, removing Sackboy’s gesture-based language from the player’s control to use it in cut scenes. While other non-player characters talk or use on-screen text bubbles, Sackboy and Sackgirl still rely on gestures and facial expressions—ones scripted by the level’s creator, not the player. They’ll quiver with fear when a dragon flies overhead; they’ll smile like goofy dogs when they save a