When deciding to buy a game, one thing I've found more helpful than reviews is looking at a game's average played time.  Wii allows you to do just that, as you can see from the stats here:

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/01/05/wii-software-stats-january-update/

On January 8th, Kaz Hirai made it known that LBP had sold 1.3 million copies, and racked up 17,000 total hours of play.

That sounds impressive at first, but after doing the math, I find that equals just a couple minutes per owner, which doesn't sound right at all.  Maybe Kaz just meant multiplayer?  But if that's true - then very few LBP owners are actually going online.

Any guesses as to what Kaz meant?

He meant 17,000 hours is how long it would take to complete every level in LBP.

I believe the 17,000 hours number was in reference to the amount of user-created content made since LBP was released. The number is a little misleading to the gamer, however, since 90% of the user created content blows. Still, there are many hours of quality made levels made by users on the LBP community portion of the game. The single player portion of the game that comes with the disc out of the box gets you around 5-7 hours of gameplay.

Yea, I agree with tombi on this one.

If that's the case I think kotaku misunderstood him.

This.

If you had done the maths properly frybread, you would have realised how obviously wrong it is to assume a "total hours" of 17,000.... because that comes to mere seconds per person.

"which doesn't sound right at all." - Frybread, op

Though you're right my math was wrong, I misplaced a 0 and got minutes rather than seconds.  Still though, I didn't assume people played the game for 3 minutes then shut it off.  Stephen Fry is more entertaining than that!

http://kotaku.com/5126304/ces-09-kaz-says-littlebigplanet-has-sold-13-million-psn-accounts-at-17-million

What Kaz Harai actually noted was that there were over 300,000 user created levels, and if you wanted to play through them all it'd take you two years.

Kotaku came up with the 17,000 hours line on their own (2 * 365 * 24 = 17,520 hours).

That was the same article where Kotaku misinterpreted Kaz's quote on PSN connections over LBP as being 1.3M copies sold.

Over the past few weeks I've probably played more LBP than I have any other game this gen. Though I logged close to 100 hours into Twilight Princess, so I may not be there yet.

I agree. Didn't me, you, Jo21, and forevercloud play for like 4 or 5 hours straight hours one night. It was crazy.