 Standing on an island of someone else's creation, you enter the House of Beavis. As surreal Rubin-esque statues cast fire to commemorate your entrance, apprehension gives way to curiosity as you search the insides of this glistening structure. Statue after statue greets you with accompanying dialogue, punctuating the sublime with the vulgar, but things are stranger than they seem. A monolith dances to the seance of an ethereal voice, the structures of sentience, as you press towards the end of the dock. The strange turns into the psychedelic, the surreal, as Pegasus tears across the sky. However, joy quickly turns into abject horror as it seems the House of Beavis was alive all along. Walking through the building once more, windows, doors, any point of exit, shut themselves, trapping us inside this House of Horrors. The previously inanimate comes to life, we have transgressed surely, entering this place was a mistake. What started as a pleasing stroll through paradise has turned into the gates of hell, but who's hell exactly? The meaning here is unclear, like any dream, the symbols are vague, distributed, and deeply personal. As you leave the remnants of the house that once was, burning in your wake, you can't help but feel you were complicit in perpetuating some injustice. You crossed a line of some kind. This haunting but beautiful experience is called House of Beavis, and was created by Beavis too. Amazingly, it was made using the creation tools available in the game Dreams, and as such is only available to play in that game. For those still confused, Dreams is a recently released game that functions like a game engine off its own. Developed by the creators of LittleBigPlanet, MediaMolecule, Dreams is the combination of years of development to extend the play-create-share model they pioneered with that game. It has extremely robust sculpting tools, empowering you to craft objects and worlds, ways to animate characters to bring them to life, a fully featured musical suite that allows you to import and create music, and a relatively easy to use visual programming interface. It also has features that allow you to share and remix other people's assets, to engage in collaborative creation, and its interface functions something like a YouTube for games. In essence, it is a user-friendly game engine with social media features. Creating whatever you want might be an understatement as well. Anything from music to visual art to animated shorts are present, but it also features fully functional games. There are whimsical platformers with cute characters, horror games inspired by Outlast and Resident Evil, and shooters that scarcely seem anything like Dreams anymore. There is a level-called slide-out that could be mistaken for the next wipeout, showing the technical proficiency of the engine, a puzzle game called Cuberth, where you manipulate cubes to allow for your character to progress, showing genuine design ingenuity, and a level called The Last Constellation that is a surreal blend of Death Stranding and Rez, as you travel through a desolate landscape and livening it with music. Dreams is an absolutely fascinating experiment in game design, decentralizing the very act of creation by bringing all the community into the fold. However, this actually just brings us back to the origin of game design. One of the lead designers, Mark Healy, explained how the vision for Dreams was inspired by the Commodore 64, and how it came built in with the ability to make games. Somewhere along the line, the idea of handing creative control to players was lost, but with their games, media molecules set themselves the impossible task of enlivening the creative spirit once more. On its surface, it might seem strange. What sets the game apart from other game engines? It allows you to sculpt and animate and create logic, things you can do elsewhere, but here, it is all built into a singular service that is more accessible than most. Also, in omitting the need for any programming literacy, it lowers the barrier to entry substantially, allowing artists to participate in the act of creation more directly. However, how this relates to the history of design highlights some interesting things about the future of our medium. In his book Handmade Pixels, Jasper Ewell traces the origin of independent game design in our media, and outlines how there have been many competing narratives for their inception. There is the traditional narrative that most of you are familiar with, that says indie games started with games like Braid and Super Meat Boy, a counter narrative by people like Bennett Fadi, who say game design has always been indie from its inception, but also competing philosophies for how games have inherited the traditions of other independent media. One strand, best exemplified by Jonathan Blow, conceives of indie games as a financially and aesthetically independent form, one that stresses the aesthetic aspects of games and how they are a viable medium for exploring artistic ideas. Another strand, though, views games as a community of alternative creators, who are all expressing their authentic voice. In an interview Ewell conducted with Blow, Blow articulated how he perceived design as still being a difficult, technical field, whereas a contrasting interview with Anna Entropy reveals how she thinks of indie as a collaborative community of creators. In his talk Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, Blow expands this idea and expresses how we need to have a better grasp of the fundamentals of programming, computation and design if we want to move forward with creativity, and more broadly to solve the deeper problems that pervade our reality. This is perhaps why he is now developing a new programming language through which to make games. Conversely, in her book Rise of the Video Game Zenesters, Anna Entropy argues that the tactically advanced nature of games has excluded many voices from expressing themselves and how more accessible tools like twine are enabling people from more disciplinary and cultural backgrounds to participate in creation. Each presents a compelling case and perhaps represent two sides of a dichotomy that is somewhat false. In democratizing design, more people have access to tools and this eases the barrier to entry. However, perhaps Blow is right in suggesting that design is and will remain a difficult, technically laden feel and easing the use of tools may only lead to more creative stagnation. The inspiration to become a game designer though has not only come from technical proficiency. Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky, explained how it was the simple game editors he played around with when he was young that inspired him to design. And Will Wright, one of the most vaunted developers in our medium, explains how he started with games like Pinball Construction Set. For many even technically driven designers, creative inspiration can come from giving people the ability to play around with tools. The idea of sharing community assets also aligns with what many have argued as the precondition for creativity. In his book, Common as Air, Lewis Hyde argues for the necessity of a creative commons to inspire people to create once more and claims that the commodification and monetization of creativity has stifled all of our creative spirits. In Dreams, we are encouraged to share our assets, incentivized by experience points, gamifying the very act of creation and sharing without letting money get in the way. It represents a model of creativity which many are now arguing for, which is the pooling of ideas, knowledge and techniques. It's a beautiful dream, but many still express concerns with concessions to accessibility. In her book, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle argues that our loss of direct interfacing with computers leaves us in a position where we are no longer capable of actually communicating with them, mirroring some of Jonathan Blow's insights. She worries that as we deal with more abstraction with non-programming elements, we lose a sense of how machines operate. Effectively, as tools become more user-friendly, perhaps the literacy we need to truly push machines might be lost. The answer to this conundrum though seems to exist in the book itself, where she outlines how different children play in different ways with computers. Some children show proficiency with systemic thinking, capable of grasping programming in pure abstract terms, but others have a different, more relational style where they see objects in more aesthetic terms. The dichotomy between technicality and artistry doesn't need to exist if we acknowledge that people learn in different ways and relate to systems using distinct methods. Teaching people technical proficiency with computers is important, but so too is cultivating an artistic spirit that allows people to come at technical questions from a more aesthetic perspective, from emotions, ideas, themes and relationships. Dreams, or something like it, is exciting because it provides a bridge for us to reconcile that divide, to invite more people to create using computers. When LittleBigPlanet came out in 2008, it was a revolution, a revolution that reignited our dormant impulse to create. However, it was another game in this lineage that rose to mainstream popularity. Minecraft shares the same DNA of Play, Create, Share, and is effectively a digital Lego world that allows players to act out stories, create anything they want, and find a community to play with. Minecraft captured the imagination of an entire generation of kids, kids who are now becoming players and designers of games, perhaps endowing them with a deeper understanding of systemic elements, abstract constructions, and dynamic, playful narratives. It is a blank canvas for creativity that the real world seldom provides that accommodates all kinds of players. With Dreams, though, the ambition is much broader and perhaps more inaccessible as a result. It is about blending mediums together and accommodating different styles of creativity itself. In his book, Avangard Video Games, Brian Schrank argues how art games, games of an experimental bent, are instrumental in pushing game design forward. Games like Rod Humble's The Marriage, Jason Rohrer's Passage, and The Tale of Tales Games are all part of an Avangard tradition that blurs the line between art and games, something Dreams is equally as adamant in doing. He argues that games can challenge games on two dimensions, either on a political or formal axis, or on a radical or complicit axis. What this means is that Avangard games critique games politically in terms of their formalism, or in terms of the medium they exist in. Dreams, in its blending of techniques, media formats, and creators, seems to be the Avangardist dream, a collaborative art installation that is constantly evolving and organically enmeshing the ideas of a diverse array of people. We already see some bizarre experiments in musical creation and interactivity, and these all live alongside other conventionally gamey games. Dreams is also being showcased to more than just game creators, including more educational contexts and art schools, and so this vision of a multimedia creative format is already being recognized by the creators. By placing the high next to the low, Dreams makes the Avangard project more manifest. It reveals the permeability of creativity to all. Creative inspiration can come from anywhere. It is an interdisciplinary phenomenon, and it is also subversive in how it places games next to other media. So it is not just Avangard, but also postmodern, blurring the lines between elitism and commercial entertainment, artistic ambition, and fun. House of Beavis is a stunningly crafted art experience, but it can live alongside a game called Art Therapy, where you are tasked with scoring points by smashing the venerated objects of the museum. This is the famous Fontaine moment of Marcel Duchamp in interactive form, as fun and destruction take precedence over artistry and creation. However, the subversion exists in how both games can exist side by side, both expressions of art in different ways. Media Molecule crafted a dream of their own, Art's Dream, that speaks more clearly to their vision. We follow the story of Art, a musician who feels as if his creative will is being stifled and his voice unheard, as he dives into his subconscious to enliven his creative spirit. It's a beautiful little tale that holds a clear microcosm of Dreams' ambitions. In Hegel's lectures on fine art, he argues that art is not just a reflexive aesthetic enterprise, but an endeavor that can allow us to transform the world around us. He states, only through making a leap of faith into a new historical form, a new consciousness for utopia, a new setup for play, could the limits of each era be known. Art is an integral part of the history through which humans have had to remake the world. In essence, every era has had an art form which speaks at that time. Art's Dream, as it were, is to facilitate transformation of the self and the world. Dreams is a strange blend of the classic and the contemporary, melding social media features with sculpting tools, computers with free form design. By blending art forms' disciplines in the line between art and play, Dreams gives us a glimpse of a new vision for the future, one that tries to speak the language of our present day. Recently, the community of Dreams participated in an event where they outlined what Dreams meant to them. There are fascinating and beautiful stories of how people have been inspired to pursue their ambition, of being pulled out of depression, and of finding an output for the tragedy that life inevitably thrust upon us. In characteristic fashion, media molecule responded with a video of their own, stating what their community meant to them, but we see it in the love and passion they show for their games. There is an electrifying sense of positivity that exudes from the studio, the studio that somehow convinced Sony to fund this audacious project for the best part of a decade. In keeping with the spirit of sharing, I will express my own view of what Dreams means to me. Some view Dreams as a form of memory consolidation, whereas others see it as an insight into our very subconscious. However, what happens when our collective unconscious is allowed to turn into reality? By attempting to provide a platform to answer that question, media molecule is giving us a glimpse into a future I would like to see made real, one where people are encouraged to create, to become the best version of themselves and enliven the world with positivity. I dream of a future where the artist is free to express themselves and is rewarded for doing so, and they live alongside the scientists in creative harmony. I have no idea if Dreams will be successful, but at the very least, it gives me hope that there can be a more playful future.