Creativity in Games

     I have already talked about one of the suggestions that I received from my previous job interview. Today I would like to talk about another thing they suggested.

     During the interview they asked me questions about the kinds of video games that I had played and what I liked about them. I had some trouble coming up with reasons because I had not given it much serious thought. I believe that understanding why one likes something is important to think about, not only with respect to games but also, even more generally, with any kind of software. To help me understand why I like the things that I like, I will try to explain some of the aspects of games I like using specific examples of games that demonstrate this aspect well.

     I have liked playing video games all my life and have many reasons I prefer some games over others. Its very difficult to identify a single common element that I like in games but some themes that I like to see in games are creativity, exploration, simulation, expansion and progression. I wont address all of these in this blog but instead will focus on the first and then continue with the others in a future post.

     Unfortunately, since I began university I have played fewer and fewer games. The biggest reason for this is that I have been spending much more of my time working on university projects. Even still I do occasionally play games but I feel that I do not enjoy them as much as I did when I was younger. Maybe I have different interests now then I used to? I think part of the reason I have not played many games lately is that I enjoy making my own games. Making games is a much more creative activity and it is hard to find games that allow one to be creative.

   A perfect exception to this is Minecraft which gives players complete freedom to be creative. Minecraft has no objective and simply encourages the player to gather resources and use those resources to build things. Other games that I have really enjoyed are simulation games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and The Sims. Both of these games require the player to design a virtual world.

    One aspect I like about of these games that promotes creativity is the lack of a well defined objective. All three of these games have no end condition, the player just keeps creating until they decide to stop. In games with a clearly defined objective, game developers would design the features of a game as tools that the player can use to get them to the goal. In games where there is no goal it is often unclear what kinds of features the player will require. Game developers often find designing these kinds of games particularly difficult because they must create features that have many possible uses.

    A good example of a feature with many uses is the piston blocks in Minecraft. The piston block is a block the player can activate remotely and when activated will extend causing any block in its path to be moved. The piston can also be modified so that when it is deactivated it retracts and pulls the block back to its original position. Using this people have created elevators, automatic doors and even giant moving faces in the sides of mountains.

    While a lack of objective has in someway helped these games I often feel like there needs to be some kind of goal in order to validate the quality of the players design. Business simulation games like Rollercoaster Tycoon allow the player to gauge their skill based on how much money they make and how happy the people are that ride their roller coasters. However, Minecraft and The Sims seem to be lacking a validating goal and occasionally I wish there was some kind of goal that I could optionally try to achieve. For example, in Minecraft I built a castle but then realized that there was nothing worth defending the castle against and no way to prove that my castle was designed well.

     Creativity is not only limited to simulation games. I believe that players want to be creative in whatever game they are playing. There are countless examples on the internet of players finding situations where they can be creative in almost any game. Therefore, my suggestion to game developers is to always keep players creativity in mind.

     Well those are my thoughts on creativity. I find this kind of subject very hard to write about because I have many ideas but it is very hard to boil them down into a single argument. I had to rewrite this post several times because I kept going off on a tangent. I plan to think about these ideas over the next couple weeks and hopefully by writing and thinking about them I will further understand and solidify them in my mind.