Sony PS4’s ‘Dreams’ Redraws the Line Between Animation and Gaming

Dreams looks like a whole new world. Lots and lots of them in fact. Announced at E3, Media Molecule’s immersive follow-up to Tearaway and LittleBigPlanet mines user-generated animation to make boundless dream worlds.

Players use the Sony Playstation’s DualShock 4 controller like a pencil and paintbrush, drawing and sculpting personalized game characters and levels they can quickly animate and manipulate. Those new worlds can in turn be mashed, remixed, and collaged with others created by different players, who collectively collaborate to build a sprawling alternate reality out of off-the-shelf interactive technology and the power of their imaginations.

“The game looks like a moving painting,” Alex Evans of Media Molecule explained at E3 earlier this week. “We’re building a place where you go to play and explore the dreams of others, and then you can create and show your own.”

The demo below raises more questions than it answers — how intuitive is it really? draw a few lines and it’s got built-in inverse kinematics? — but it’s clear that Media Molecule has created not only a game, but a next-wave collaborative animation tool that offers a peek into the future of animation production:

Media Molecule promises more information in the months to come. It’s a fascinating evolutionary step from the British developer, whose earlier games LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway featured advances in content creation and interfacing, as well art and style. Media Molecule’s early successes with customizable, user-generated content for LittleBigPlanet paid off well since Sony acquired the developer in 2010.