When I was a kid, I was obsessed with LittleBIGPlanet 3. I had always been interested in games that featured creating tools, and still am, and I was sadly first introduced to the LBP series after the PS3 era had ended and couldn’t easily experience the original two games which are arguably better in many ways.

As a fan of the LBP series and the tools originally introduced by the team at Media Molecule (yes, I know they did not develop the 3rd entry) I had been looking forward to Dreams for years. It felt like a natural progression of the idea Media Molecule had first introduced to the world with the LBP games. I ended up buying it launch day, and only up until recently did it manage to keep me occupied with the constant stream of impressive material the community was making.

Dreams has a very dense creation mode, but one that’s still pretty simple to use. Anyone can make a character, song, model, etc. and if they allow it, anyone can use that element in their game, animation, etc. It’s a simple system, and one that allowed for some genuinely fantastic experiences on the game.

Though Dreams was flooded with memes and very low-quality creations from the get-go, Media Molecules’ heavy engagement with what was being made on Dreams in its early years allowed actual quality creations to not get overshadowed by these things. There are a number of very impressive creations on here, that I still return to even despite my inactivity on the game most of the time now. The Opposite Day adventure games which were crammed with meta jokes, the Pig Detective point-and-click series that starred Troy fucking Baker in such an obscure role it’s not even on his Wikipedia (it is really him, he’s had in-game interviews and the like), entire movies and RPGs. Some very passionate stuff came out of this game and it’s clear Media Molecule got what they wanted- people who wanted to make things, well, made things! And it was lovely. People formed communities, events were frequently hosted by users, even Media Molecule occasionally did stuff like collaborations, games, and several annual things. But eventually, for a multitude of reasons, the well of creativity in Dreams started to dry up.

Like many creations platforms, users eventually lost motivation to use Dreams as frequently, which resulted in less engagement on both the creation and viewing sides of the community. However UNLIKE other platforms that experienced this which then got NEW waves of players like its predecessor LBP, barely any people entered Dreams to fill in the shoes of those who came before. This is very likely the fault of Sony, who did almost nothing to advertise the game despite how revolutionary the LBP series was and still is, with its main character even being a major mascot for the PlayStation to this day.

And eventually, after hundreds of hours of playing and creating and chatting with friends I had made in the game, like many others I too faded away. And eventually so did Media Molecule, who put limitations on the servers in late 2023, giving users a cap to how many saves they can make in their creations. The Dream had died.

Today, for the first time in several months, I logged on to Dreams. The few friends that had remained in my last visit were either also gone or barely active, and I feel they were likely in the same situation as me. On the browsing (or “Dreamsurfing”) section of the game I noticed several things right away. The featured things were almost entirely old creations being re-featured from a lack of new quality content. Actual quality content had barely any views, sometimes barely scratching the hundred as opposed to previous tens of thousands. And the most striking thing to me is that the only really popular new thing on the platform anymore, was an animation series featuring the LBP protagonist Sackboy in low-quality, meme-filled, random-humor situations. You can probably take something poetic out of the fact that Dreams, a natural successor to LittleBIGPlanet and one that unfortunately died far earlier than its predecessor, only hangs onto life by a shitpost series starring the protagonist of those previous games. But I’m not a poet, and I don’t want to analyze an animation series where actual shit noises play whenever people move. It is painful to see how far it has fallen.

And yet then I tried making something. The creation tools, all those things made by users many of whom are long gone, still hold up just as well (if not better thanks to updates) as they did on launch day. Making things was still such a thrill. And that’s the tragedy of Dreams- a community that faded away with no new generation to step in. Like real dreams, it is an adventure, a portal to new, infinite worlds from the deepest fixtures of the mind, but can be forgotten just as easily as it was conceived.

Eu sonhava em jogar esse game, principalmente na época que queria ser game design e é engraçado como eu não consegui desenvolver um joguinho porque anos atrás percebi que eu não gostava de fazer jogo kkkkk mas ainda assim eu queria muito ver as criações dos outros e é muito legal ver a criatividade da comunidade em fazer algo bom, ambicioso ou só um jogo do Shrek ou Waluigi bem meme, é um game meio difícil de recomendar mas na Plus vale a pena dar uma testada, fico triste que um game tão criativo não teve reconhecimento, sua campanha Sonho de Art é bem dahora, tem outras campanhas da MM bem legais como a Ancient Dangers e várias outras.

So I (372,383,102,383m) and my (372,383,102,383m) dream (372,383,102,383m) were playing Dreams and came across a hilarious dream that parodies Among Us, where Black is always the impostor. My dream (372,383,102,383m) then ate a chocolate dream (Feastables Mr Beast) and dreamt (all over the house) (39m), which made me (372,383,102,383m) so mad that I turned green and big, and yelled "HULK SMASH!!!!" and killed my dream (-28m). So Reddit, am I the ass hole!??!?!!?!?

Edit (1): Thanks for the (upvotes) (20). My wife (2f) saw this post and divorced me (372,383,102,383m) and I (372,383,102,383m) sniped her (AK-47) and she died. So am I (372,383,102,383m) the ass hole for that!? Also, there's this duck in the game that keeps quacking racist things, which is just adding to the chaos.

Score: 8/10

I imagine Dreams is kind of similar to Mario Maker in a way, but less popular. Dreams however has a lot more variety when it comes to creation. With Mario Maker, you are limited to just level design, but with Dreams, you have a lot more options. You can create entire games from scratch with level design, sound design, custom elements/models. It also isn't just games, you can make animations too and some of it is really impressive. It's still user created content so a sizeable amount of stuff will be kind of trash, but I would say a good chunk is quality content. I played a Kaiju destruction sim, watched a really cool animation about like a bird robot thing, and played a bit of the Dream dev teams fully blown game they made in the editor. Games like this and Mario Maker are the things that end up inspiring young people and others to become creators like level designers, artists, game devs, etc. It's kind of cool actually.

I have a lasting interest in game creation platforms like this, but also in games as smaller scale experiences. I grew up spending a lot of time with Roblox and the Little Big Planet series, but also with flash games. The possibility of making things yourself, and of other people seeing those things is really cool! Playing other people's little projects, flaws and all, has always felt more intimate to me. I would argue that smaller games make a better case for "games as art" than any big budget M rated drama made to mimic prestige television.

The home of those kinds of games has really shifted over time, though. I don't want to get too negative here, but it's really sad to me to see platforms like have Flash died or how the mobile game market has shifted to prioritize games that are engineered to be addictive and profitable.

To me Dreams represents that long gone world from my adolescence. A place to share what you've made, and to be entertained and inspired by what other people have made. It's incredible the things people have made in it! Some of them are really good and stand separate from the Dreams platform, and others are pretty terrible! Both categories have their place here. It isn't perfect as a platform, and it retains some of the social media type elements that also affected the Little Big Planet series. "Remakes" and fandom content tend to be popular and get perpetuated since they inherently have a wider audience. I might be in the minority here but I find it really interesting to see how the structure of a platform like this can affect the sorts of things people make. I like playing all sorts of things here for that reason alone, regardless of quality! It's a little ecosystem and I find that just as engaging as the actual games. I could talk forever about aspects of the community and the game itself that I find interesting, or even just about specific games, but I'm not very good at writing and there's just too much to cover!

If you're interested in video games as a medium and as a vehicle for self expression, I would highly recommend giving Dreams a shot. It's not doing something new, but it's easily the best of its kind.

I think if I was a kid I just wouldn't need other video games. I love to just boot this up and search something random and see what comes up. One time I played a Call of Duty: Zombies-style horde FPS where all the enemies were Sonic.exe. The very first time I got to the homepage the first thing I saw was a Captain Toad fangame. My only complaint is that even though there's a lot of creativity and effort on display in a lot of the games made in Dreams, I don't think I've played a single one that actually felt good to control.