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[increpare]

I don't think that's true, because a blank file with 0 bytes in it doesn't inspire creativity in the player as much as, say, the Spore creature editor. It's true that a blank file *allows* more creativity than the Spore editor, but it doesn't inspire more creativity.

I can imagine contexts where a blank file might be more inspirational.  Especially to people with non spore-related tools to hand.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I guess it's possible, but I doubt it happens very often. But let's see. Here's a blank line of text:



See what you all can do with it!

[policedanceclub]

I guess it's possible, but I doubt it happens very often. But let's see. Here's a blank line of text:

MONOCLE + TOPFEZ = LOVE

See what you all can do with it!

More love plz.

[increpare]

[Arne]

My mom has been a kindergarten teacher for 30+ year. She mentioned recently that she have noticed changes in how kids play. Nowadays they need to be fed entertainment and they're less likely to be creative and come up with their own games. Maybe it's because there's so much *easy juice* around them, there's no incentive to *squirt* their own *happy spices*.

I suppose a very figurative and literal game with very little player choice might encourage creativity less than other games.

[Bree]

I say we bring back text adventure games. Every child shall play the Infocom adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When they break down in tears at the babel fish section, we'll say it builds character.

[Seth]

When my grandpap was a kid during the Great Depression he taught himself to play the banjo, fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, how to whittle and work with wood, and many other things I'm sure.  What did I do with my childhood?  Mostly play video games.

I did want to make games from an early age, and I would do drawings of monsters and levels and things like that.  In that sense games did inspire creativity, but I think there is a significant difference when growing up you always have something to entertain you.  Nowadays with television and video games and the internet, it seems like there is always a steady output of entertainment (worthwhile or otherwise) for kids (and adults) that they never have to be creative about anything to get by.

I think boredom, along with stimulation, is an important component towards cultivating creativity.  I'm trying to think of times when I noticed kids were most creative while growing up.  I keep turning towards the middle of a dull class when kids would make up games to play while the teacher had his back turn or when they would doodle or make different types of paper airplanes.

If there is any reason video games hinder creativity, I think it's as Arne said, it's just so easy to be entertained these days.

[Cymon]

I say we bring back text adventure games. Every child shall play the Infocom adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When they break down in tears at the babel fish section, we'll say it builds character.

Nah, just bring back text mode games.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I don't think you can know for sure if easier entertainment and less boredom leads to less creativity -- there are a lot of factors that have changed over the years. We also have much poorer diets than we did in the 50s or 60s, soda is now the #1 source of food calories in the US (I'm not joking), there's tons more fast food and junk food now, so it's just as concievable to me that the decrease in creativity is due to poorer nutrition.

[marshmonkey]

I think there are 2 sides to this coin. On the one hand, I think all the media we have today including video games has enabled kids and our generation to have a more vivid imagination than ever before. I think there is a large gap between media that while inspiring an increased imagination, does nothing to encourage people to take that imagination and turn it into something creative, and those that do. I believe many popular chart topping console games out there at the moment are designed to inspire the imagination but don't go the extra step of having you ever DO anything with that which it has inspired.

A lot of games use your imagination to transport you into a place that is merely a guided tour along situations that have been imagined by someone else. These types of games I would argue do not do much to inspire creativity.

But there are lots of games out there, which use your imagination to understand some sort of structure and environment with rules - and then simply hand it over to you and leave it to the player to use it for themselves. The fact that there are bounds to what they can do does not negate the creativity required to create experiences larger than the sum of it's parts. Lego bricks are very restrictive. They can only snap one to the other, but it would be hard to dismiss their creative powers. Writing a novel is incredibly restrictive, you must pick out words from a pre-defined language and arrange them into something that describes what you want someone to feel, think or envision. But still a great deal of creativity arises from that. In the same manner I think any game that gives you a vocabulary to be creative, no matter how small (Nintendo Mii generation is a great example) can be effectively used as an outlet for creativity.

Also, anyone who says that games which give players some sort of creative vocabulary to work with never experience emergent situations or creations that the game developers had not envisioned must have an extremely limited experience with them.

[increpare]

(small off-topic idea: a mmog text adventure would fun sometime. each room could be filled with player-generated small texts, describing things in these rooms, telling linked stories, like in a forum somehow. words could be linked and tagged/categorized, so that each post could be understood by the game-engine as well. like with hyper-links and meta-tags. the textes could be editied like in wikipedia... -- / unexamined, no workable examples at the moment.. %) /)

Sort of like a customizable MUD?

[muku]

(small off-topic idea: a mmog text adventure would fun sometime. each room could be filled with player-generated small texts, describing things in these rooms, telling linked stories, like in a forum somehow. words could be linked and tagged/categorized, so that each post could be understood by the game-engine as well. like with hyper-links and meta-tags. the textes could be editied like in wikipedia... -- / unexamined, no workable examples at the moment.. %) /)

Sort of like a customizable MUD?

Aka a MUSH.

[Dugan]

bit late to the chat -

QUICK ANSWER
In reality some games are pretty creative and others are less so. Also in the mix, different people get inspired by different things, and some people `want to be`/`are` more creative than others - GAME EXAMPLES:

Some game stimulate a lot of creativity (in this case through construction within the game):
Fantastic Contraption - http://fantasticcontraption.com/
Bridge builder - http://www.bridgebuilder-game.com/

Some games stimulate a bit of creativity:
In R-TYPE you choose how to utilise your force pod, you choose which weapons to pickup - which then creates a certain narrative (how you play the game).
In Secret of Mana you choose which weapons you prefer, and level them up accordingly - again having a certain creative input on how the game progresses.

WAFFLEY BRAINDUMP ANSWER:

Lots of games allow creativity, and in a variety of ways. And remember that what might seem dumb and uncreative to one person may be a trigger of inspiration to another.

EG - gears of war, person X wouldn't say the game encourages creativity one bit, but  young person Y may think it so super awesome they try to draw vehicles/characters from the game, and then design new bits to levels, new monsters etc. So it becomes a seed to someone from which they can grow and find their own creativity through initially mimicking someone else's.

Of course others may just consume the game and move onto a new one with little effect. It all comes down to the individual really, and its up to them to lead a balanced life where they read books / watch some films / watch some tv / play some games / fly a kite / make a sandcastle / paint a picture etc etc etc (consume and create).

Talking about media in general - I'd say that books encourage peoples imagination (which leads to creativity) more than film might, as in a book you have to create the peoples voices/world etc. With film/tv you are fed the visual and audio, so your brain tends to have a little less work to do (Book adaptations of movies are a good example, as you are seeing someone else's interpretation of a book - they interpret it on your behalf).

Then - mainstream games could then be seen as more `creative` than mainstream films, as they also tend to have linear stories but (am having to generalise of course) but you do choice as you progress from plot point A to plot point B. But both feed you a lot of information (images/sound) meaning less work for your imagination than a book might give you.

Which makes me think again, that what's important is just personal balance. In any form of media you get highbrow examples which make people think and create debate, as well as the super simple/dumb - if you expose yourself to just the dumb stuff you won't stretch your brain as much as you could.

[increpare]

(i was only a real gamer till N64 came out, mainly on nintendo consoles. console-games after that and all the net-based MMO-stuff is still new to me. i played some FPS over network, but nothing more. just so you know. -- indie games made me to a gamer again. Doh! )

MUDs (and probably MUSHs) far predate the advent of the N64!

[Bree]

But Orel, you say that just as you wouldn't be able to improvise with other strangers in any other medium, you couldn't do the same in games. Well, whoever said you had to collaborate with total strangers? If you're wanting to make something, be it a map or a painting or a jazz piece, wouldn't you want to work with your friends? If so, then the question isn't whether or not you can successfully collaborate with total strangers; that has more to do with the individual's social skills than the mechanics of any medium. It's instead whether or not the medium can allow you to make something with your friends.

Besides, the random bouts of iScribble and Sauerbrauten are productive too, in a way. As I said before, working with total strangers is something that depends on social skills rather than the mechanics of a given program, and is often necessary in life. Even if you can't walk out of the session with the Mona Lisa, you can still say that you developed your social skills. And who knows, you could get a spark of inspiration from someone you had never met- top-fez, anyone?

[moi]

Playing videogames can't involve creativity as much as other games or activities because typically, with a software, you are bound to remaining within the limits dictated by the interface and programmed behaviours(unles it is bug-ridden). You can't "think out of the box" or "bend the rules" as you could do with say, pencils, or playing cards, or even a tabletop boardgame.

Creating videogames, on the other hand, is as creative as anything else.

That was my 2 cents, I don't know how usefule it will be, I didn't even read the rest of the thread to be honest 

[Bree]

Playing videogames can't involve creativity as much as other games or activities because typically, with a software, you are bound to remaining within the limits dictated by the interface and programmed behaviours(unles it is bug-ridden). You can't "think out of the box" or "bend the rules" as you could do with say, pencils, or playing cards, or even a tabletop boardgame.

Tell that to these guys.

[muku]

Aka a MUSH.

thanks, i'll have a look at it, cause i'm actually searching around already...

do you have some experience with this sort of games?
are they really that much like live-in-a-self-written-story-experinece?
are MUDs creative? (i really don't know anything about them)

I once, for one night in my life, played Armageddon MUD (http://www.armageddon.org/). To be precise, I had spent many days before that reading through the extremely detailed background material on the homepage, trying to understand the world this MUD is set in and writing up the backstory for my character. You see, in order to join, you don't simply roll a character, you have to write up your character's entire history, where they were born, how they grew up, what they think like, what they look like etc.

Now this world Armageddon is set in is a pretty hardcore desert planet setting, pretty unique stuff actually (well, Dark Sun is similar). In order to mask my newbishness and to make it less embarrassing when I would get my ass kicked, I created a character who wasn't some fighter brute, but a rather young boy who had been raised in seclusion by his father alone and was more the shy and cowardly type. So I typed this up and embellished it best as I could within the backstory of the Armageddon world. When your character is done, you have to send it per email to a mod of the game who will review it and tell you whether it was accepted. So I did, and this was actually a slightly scary moment: would they approve of what I had created, or would I fail to meet the lofty standards established on the homepage? Luckily, I soon got a reply from a mod who personally congratulated me on my character and said that it was one of the most original and interesting characters he had received for review recently. That felt pretty good, and to keep on the topic of the thread, I had been rewarded for my creativity already at that point.

So that night I finally joined the game server and got dropped into Armageddon. I've probably never felt this much that I actually was exploring an alien, hostile world as that night. I encountered shady types who robbed me of what little money I had in the first few minutes of playing, and I encountered slightly less shady types who took me to bars to discuss me working for some greasy noble. I also met that noble then, my character all the time buckling and stammering for nervosity of him just offing me for uttering some ill-received word. Generously, he let me live and sent me on some errand (the details of which seem to have slipped my mind since).

The whole thing was probably the most intense gaming experience I've had in my life; my pulse was rushing and my heart thumping all the time through it. It isn't even the game mechanics so much as the fact that Armageddon requires 100% roleplaying (no powergaming or OOC interaction), so it's really like playing in a non-stop improv theater play with people you've never met before. It's incredibly taxing when you're not used to it, and I guess I was experiencing some form of stage fright when I was playing.

That said, after that intense night, I never returned to the game. Perhaps I was too intimidated by it all, or perhaps I really want my gaming to be a tad less edge-of-the-seat and creatively challenging after all?

Also, after that experience, I never looked at computer RPGs the same. No matter whether it's something like Baldur's Gate, some generic MMORPG and don't even get me started on that JRPG stuff: they might be fun, but they really have no right to be calling themselves "role-playing" games.

To be fair, though, most MUDs aren't that hardcore, and many are far more lax with respect to roleplaying than this one. However, if you are looking for that "live-in-a-self-written-story experience", something like Armageddon is exactly what you're looking for; just read some of the player logs at http://www.armageddon.org/rp/logs/. I think there are some other MUDs/MUSHes which go all the way, I seem to recall some scifi MUSH which had extremely long (we're talking years) player-created story arcs which simply arose out of in-game roleplaying. I can't remember the name though. I think it's worth the experience, even if like me you only do it once in your life.

[feeblethemighty]

I think everyone is creative whether they believe it or not and if games didn't challenge that innate creativity, we'd stop playing them.  Who doesn't love finding out how to do something in Super Mario Bros that your friends can't do and showing off your new found talent?

You'll find that with rules and boundaries put on a person, they are more likely they are to do something creative to try and stretch the rules as far as they go without breaking them.  But, put too many boundaries on a person, they'll feel trapped because there's no room to flex their creativity.  Put on too little, and the options are overwhelming to a persons decision making process and thus they feel lost.  You really can apply this to much more than just games.  But, for the sake of argument, let's play a little game i made up:

   You're standing in the middle of a grassy field.

That's it.  So?  Did you like it?  When you pictured that field(which takes a little creativity ) did you do anything there?  I can't speak for everybody, but i think a lot of people would at first be waiting for further instruction or doing the text adventure game equivalent of typing "look".

See, the rules to my game were a little fuzzy at first, but now that you know the boundaries of my little game, you might picture yourself running around, singing at the top of your lungs or, i don't know, flipping off some unsuspecting blade of grass.  You might even start making up your own rules within the game.

So, for my answer, no, games do not kill creativity, they even give us a way of exercising our creativity.  But, they may also provide a too easy outlet for a person's creativity because the rules and boundaries are always so clearly and explicitly defined (edit:) as opposed to real life where the rules and boundaries are pretty much limitless and often overwhelming.