“just a creative sponge,” he says.
For years, making immersive digital envi-
ronments—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. Edit-
ing 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 boom-
let 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.
The makers of Dreams were, quite
to be comfortable thinking and creating in
x-y-z dimensions. It was social too, as Ito
says: In Minecraft, kids often built collabo-
ratively because, of course, ambitious things
are hard, many hands make light work, and
you could hang with your friends remotely
to boot. “World-building became part of
everyday creativity and communication,” Ito
adds. Let me express my friendship by mak-
ing you a brutal parkour field in Minecraft!
This same deeply social vibe persists
in Dreams, where any part of a creation
can be reused and remixed. Codi Hickish,
a 26-year-old illustrator, used Dreams to
make adorable 3D versions of her fuzzy 2D
hand-drawn characters; they’ve now been
reused in hundreds of other game scenes.
One 19-year-old I interviewed, who is sav-
ing for college by working at McDonald’s,
built a terrific Western-gunslinger Dreams
game by repurposing objects and logic oth-
ers had designed. It’s an open source scene,
filled with courtly cooperation.explicitly, trying to accelerate this world-
building phenomenon. As Mark Healey, cre-
ative 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 power-
ful 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.
Maybe we could have predicted this.
Today’s young adults grew up with 3D
environments as a core element of pop cul-
ture. Minecraft’s breakout success nearly
a decade ago trained a generation of kids
As more people become literate in 3D
world-building, what will it mean for soci-
ety? It’s easy to see this moving main-
stream, much as image-meme culture
did. What began as a bunch of teenag-
ers using Microsoft Paint to mess around
with cat photos in the early aughts had by
2016 become a powerful form of political
rhetoric—Bernie Sanders with the Beat-
les (“DID SOMEONE SAY THEY WANT A
REVOLUTION?”), Hillary Clinton as the
Joker, Pepe the Frog as a fungible symbol
for white supremacists.
Right now, world-building is limited by
its walled-garden nature; you can only
interact with someone’s creation inside the
games themselves. But I could imagine
these new forms becoming more easily
shared outside those confines, at which
point they’d metamorphose into a true pub-
lic discourse—making virtual worlds a way
to impact the real one.It’s easy to see this moving mainstream,
much as image-meme culture did.
ANGRY NERD
BY ARIELLE PARDES
CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a
wired contributing editor. Write to him at
[email protected].LET’S CRUSH
‘SECRET CRUSH’
Ain’t no shame in the algorithmically
optimized love life. If you and snookums
matched on OkCupid, I already like
you better than those obnoxious, self-
satisfied couples who met “the real way.”
(Good luck, IRLers—some number
crunchers at the University of Vienna
suspect your marriages aren’t as joyous.)
The internet excels at matchmaking,
widening my circle of potentials and forc-
ing the articulation of specific desires.
Then there’s Facebook’s contribution
to the game of romance: its new Secret
Crush feature. Hold my hair back while I
retch. Continuing its conquest of moder-
nity, Facebook now assumes I want to
find my soul mate within its janky corri-
dors. The new dating tool, which Zuck
is threatening to roll out in the US this
year, will let me select up to nine of my
friends—a preposterously large number
that encourages unhealthy mass crush-
ing—I’d like to bang. If one of them picks
me too, bim bam boom, it’s fate. Feh! Do
you think I’m some trembling, lovesick
dweeb incapable of asking out somebody
I’m already friends with? Adam didn’t
need social media to make googly eyes
at Eve—she was right there, all nakey
and available. Let’s also acknowledge
the squick factor of giving FB even more
intimate data than I already do, not only
about who I’m interested in but also about
who’s (not) interested in me. They’ll pro-
cess my triumphs and rejections, then
inevitably repackage them for targeted
advertising. Will the models in ads I see
feature men who look like my crushes?
Will I get discounts on wine when none
of my nine fantasies reciprocate? Worse
still, imagine if I did meet someone on
Facebook—Facebook, the uncoolest
mall in America, full of parents and junk.
Ithink I’d rather go it alone.