Whatever your opinion of Little Big Planet as a game, its pivotal role in shifting user-generated content from gaming’s periphery to its mainstream is indisputable.

By giving players a well-featured tool set with which to make their own levels, and then encouraging the promotion of these creations on Youtube, Sony has also formalized a neat structure for spreading viral videogame clips.

Come up with a clever, different or referential level design, upload it to YouTube and become an internet star, terrifying ‘deletable offences’ notwithstanding.

Now we’re a few weeks post the game’s release, I thought I’d survey the most popular UGC levels, not in terms of in-game downloads, but rather in terms of viral interest on the internet, to see if there are any common characteristics that have driven their popularity.

Searching for Little Big Planet videos on YouTube and then filtering by view count shows the most popular level as being upsilandre’s Little Big Computer, an electronic calculator, described by Ste Curran as being “powered by the cell processor, user-generated content and autism.”.

This is one of the first levels that I saw widely posted around the Internet and, with over 750, 000 video views, 16 video responses and 2,500 comments, it’s by far the most widely linked-to and viewed UGC creation from the game.

Next up is user Danzoop’s stark, red and white tribute to EA’s recent freerunning title, Mirror’s Edge. It’s almost tied for second place with Japanese user RRR30000′s inscrutable and extraordinary side-scrolling shoot ‘em up, titled ‘Gradius 1’.

With a quarter-of-a-million views apiece these videos are trailing Little Big Calculator by some margin but both have been extensively linked to around the Internet. I was in Japan the day I first saw RRR’s level. That evening during dinner with a development team from Square-Enix one of the lead artists mentioned this unbelievable Gradius-themed level he’d seen earlier in the day, demonstrating how quickly word had spread around the world.

In fourth place with just over 200,000 views is user DimmuJed’s Love and Marriage level, an interactive marriage proposal to his girlfriend and the latest in a slew of in-game proposals this year.

On a completely different theme and in fifth place is the rudimentary 9/11 Simulator which does pretty much what it says on the tin albeit it with knitted antagonists and papercraft twin towers. This is standard YouTube fodder, simplistic but nevertheless effective trolling that employs UGC as a means to rile, shock and polarise its comment-leaving audience.

Yesterday Boing Boing’s Offworld linked to the extraordinary Automatic Reversi (also constructed by a Japanese designer). This is hosted on Vimeo with just a few thousand views to date, and hasn’t yet hit YouTube but I’d wager it’ll rise through the ranks quickly as soon as it does.

Searching for a common thread as to what makes these particular levels virally potent is tricky, as the theme and hook differs between them. With Mirror’s Edge the creator has carefully chosen a game with an instantly recognizable visual palette and core gameplay that lends itself well to 2D interpretation. It helps that he/ she was so quick to get their level out there, catching the slipstream of the original title’s zeitgeist.

Conversely, for the marriage proposal, there’s the aw-cute-but-how’s-she-going-to react? element that gives it viral frisson, while for the 9/11 piece we have dumb shock and awe. If there is an overarching characteristic then it’s best exemplified by the Calculator, Gradius and Automatic Reversi levels, through which there’s a consistent sense of ‘how the…?’ astonishment at what the creators have achieved with an ostensibly rudimentary toolset.

What’s interesting is that, outside of the Little Big Planet context, all three of these ideas are unremarkable. Digital calculators and Reversi apps are included on even the most basic PCs and mobile phones, the kind of things that first year coders cut their teeth on for end-of-year projects. And, of course, Gradius clones have been ubiquitous since the late eighties, with even the most advanced and cutting edge examples of the genre struggling to gain any attention whatsoever these days.

But what makes the mundane and familiar fascinating here is the unusual context, that twisting of expectation of how a 2D platform game tool set has been used to create something you wouldn’t think possible within the game’s bounds.

In fact, it is the UGC tool set’s inherent boundaries and limitations that make these creations so interesting. Had players been given a playground in which they could hard code anything they wanted to, an electronic calculator would be the most boring and uninspiring creation imaginable. It’s the limits of the software that make the calculator’s cogs and pulley execution notable, to the point that nearly a million YouTube goers would sit agog watching simple sums being solved.

This feeling is something gamers experienced frequently in the early days of consoles. Witnessing what Treasure achieved with the Megadrive’s processor in Gunstar Heroes or, even more impressively, with Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn induced a heady sense of wonder.

Developers who pushed a console’s limitations beyond our expectations were heroes. Now, with the current crop of consoles, those technological limitations are so wide as to be almost irrelevant. As such creative ingenuity is harder for players to find, or at least to recognise. For all UGC’s pitfalls and problems, we can be thankful it’s giving us cause to wonder once again.