With massive titles like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2079, and The Last Of Us II in store for gamers this year, 2020 is shaping up to be one of the biggest ever in video gaming. But while those aforementioned titles will likely take up a majority of the headlines and accolades, the most important game of the year and likely our current social media era happens to be Media Molecule’s latest PlayStation masterpiece, Dreams.
Speaking of important 2020 things, the GOAT team chat to Mardi Gras Creative Director Kat Topper about the event on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
It’s difficult to describe what exactly Dreams is as a game. On one hand, it is sandbox tool in which users can create everything and anything their imagination spits out. Video games, recreations of video games from years past, videos, pictures, you name it. In a nutshell, it is a virtual Lego set that you play on PlayStation and the only limitations is your own imagination.
On the other hand, Dreams is a vast library of user-created content which you can play and interact with. If you’re not a creative type, Media Molecule’s latest allows you to enjoy everyone else’s creations instead.
On its own merits, Dreams is an incredible work of art that actively promotes and encourages creativity while still remaining accessible to most users. Imaginative people will love the creation aspect of it while people who just want to play things will also find things to their liking.
But looking at Dreams in broader terms, it is a game that perfectly encapsulates the present gaming landscape in how it operates like social media while also being a perfect foil for social media.
Much like your tweets or Facebook posts, everything created in Dreams will forever remain inside that platform and there’s no way to properly “release” all the user-created content outside of the tool in which it was made in.
But because of the freedom afforded by the creation tools in Dreams, users can not only make things in the game, like how you would make a meme or gif on social media, other users can engage with the content. Quality content gets pushed to the forefront as more people discover and “like” it – similar to how something goes viral. When something has had its time in the spotlight, there will be something else there to take over the mantle and new creations are always waiting to be discovered.
Social media also plays a part in how Dreams and its creations can be experienced (though in a more limited form) as users can share stuff via unofficial secondary means, like screencapping using PlayStation Share and YouTube.
Not only is Media Molecule using the spirit of social media to power Dreams, it is a platform that benefits from the buzz it gets on social media as any creations shared to outside platforms basically serve as ads to hook people into the game. As a wise man once said, it’s like a donut with a hole and at its centre is a smaller donut with its own hole.
At a time where social media is a major part of our everyday lives whether we like it or not, Media Molecule have really distilled the essence of it into an easily-accessible format that you can play on a PlayStation while also using social media as a way to get more eyeballs on the game.
There’s a bigger conversation to be had about platformisation, exposure and giving due credit to content created in Dreams – which is not unlike what happens with social media incidentally – but that’s a conversation for another time. As it currently stands, Media Molecule’s latest title is not only a snapshot of our current entertainment landscape, it happens to also be a uniquely engrossing game that already ranks as one of 2020’s finest.
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