We’re finding a new form of expression in the flying robots
and breathing forests of our own virtual worlds.
THE WEIRD
JOYS OF
WORLD-
BUILDING
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
Recently, a 23-year-old college student named Nick tried out a new pas-
time: building 3D virtual worlds. Q He got his hands on Dreams, a game
by Media Molecule that gives people tools to create digital scenes—any-
thing 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. Daunt-
ing! But soon he’d made some remarkable stuff, which he shared via the
game’s online interface. Q In only a few weeks, Nick became rather good
at Dreams. I checked out one of his 3D worlds, in which you pilot a human-
oid robot across a barren rocky planet, the whole place aglow in extrater-
restrial 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,
026 ILLUSTRATION / HOWIE WONDER
MIND GRENADES
