Building Virtual Worlds Is a New Form of Self-Expression

Recently, a 23-year-old college student named Nick tried out a new pastime: building 3D virtual worlds.

He got his hands on Dreams, a game by Media Molecule that gives people tools to create digital scenes—anything from a room filled with items to an entire landscape you can wander around in. There's a tool for sculpting objects and another for animating them, and a unique visual programming language to tweak things. Daunting! But soon he'd made some remarkable stuff, which he shared via the game's online interface.

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In only a few weeks, Nick became rather good at Dreams. I checked out one of his 3D worlds, in which you pilot a humanoid robot across a barren rocky planet, the whole place aglow in extraterrestrial moonlight. It gave me shivers—a tone poem of desolation. “With certain tweaks,” Nick told me, “I could get some rich lighting conditions to really wow the players.” Did he have any training in the field? Nope, “just a creative sponge,” he says.

For years, making immersive digital environments—for games or movies—was the province of pros. The tools were hard to use and expensive. But the story of media in the past 20 years has been one of creation tools becoming cheaper and easier to use, and then eventually going mass-market. Editing photos and video was once hard too, but now we do it as proficiently as we wield paper and pencil. As media scholar Katie Salen notes, “We're culturally more literate with complex tools.”

With 3D design, too, there's been a boomlet in software like Tinkercad and SketchUp, which lets hobbyists mess around with architectural and industrial design, and there's Minecraft, where ordinary people can make and share lush, albeit blocky, environments. In many ways, people have tapped into the enjoyment of “world-building,” says media scholar Mimi Ito.

It's easy to see this moving mainstream, much as image-meme culture did.

The makers of Dreams were, quite explicitly, trying to accelerate this world-building phenomenon. As Mark Healey, creative director of Media Molecule, explained, the team had included level-building tools in its first game, LittleBigPlanet, in 2008, then watched, amazed, as players created audaciously complex environments. “So with Dreams, we went the whole hog,” he says. Media Molecule's tools are so powerful there's a steep learning curve; the game comes with hours of instructional videos. It almost terrified me with its sophistication.

Players, though, aren't intimidated. Within days of the Dreams launch, they'd begun crafting hallucinogenically ambitious stuff: forests of trees that look like they're breathing, dimly lit nightmares, and even a functioning version of Super Mario Bros.

Which, really, is the most interesting part of the trend. People love world-building and see it as a new way to express themselves.