Gameplay Journal Entry #8 Brewer

Dreams is a game that revolves around a central theme of encouraging players to be more creative. People have often tried to look into game design but found it to be too hard to start out, and this game seeks to help those who are interested in the subject by providing the tools necessary at a simple enough level for them to understand without being excessively limiting. The program allows users to make their own music, models, games, and movies while also sharing and remixing other user’s creations. As the game introduces new players to the various tools and possibilities of the game, it infuses the experience with themes of the joy of creativity. Many of the early tutorials incorporate themes of creativity.

In the reading, Flanagan states that “Embedding values within technological systems, and verifying that such systems actually reflect those values, is challenging in complex environments such as games.” (187) and I personally think Dreams does a good job of doing so for how broad of a game it actually is. This is because the variety of what can be done in dreams is a large part of the experience. Without a large variety of mechanical possibilities, I think that the idea of “inspiring creativity” would fall flat because there wouldn’t be a large number of possible outcomes to interact with — something inherently linked with the idea of creativity and originality.

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhotYfUGN2I

Source: Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07, 2007. Crossref, doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.