Videogames Have A Creativity Problem (and it's not the one you think) 

A dumb special prize I just came up with of getting mentioned on the next Architect Address for whoever correctly guesses the number of rickroll references in this video!: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Twitter, the place where creativity, art and originality goes to die: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

On the topic of Terraria, they recently have disincentivized making massive condos by making npcs have favorite biomes, teleport crystals that only work with a number of NPCs nearby for each biome, and negatives for overcrowding them, leading you to create biome specific towns across the world. And since the nearest available construction materials will be native to that biome - most often these towns match the theme of the area they're in! It's a truly ingenious addition that really gets your creative juices flowing.

6:30 I find that playing Minecraft with friends usually tends to encourage creativity with builds. Because you know that another human being is going to be looking at something you made. Collaborations with other people to build cool stuff is also a way to encourage it.

As a composer, I can tell DIRECTLY gameifying music is a dicey proposition. Every time I introduce it in a project it runs counter to core game loop or at best a novel toy. Highly agree with your conclusions here. I think making music a proxy to players' actions is often far more compelling for them. IE, a strong feedback interactive score. That said, you may be interested in Stray Gods coming soon. 😇 Though in fairness it's about using music to roleplay, not purely creative expression

Fundamentally creativity is about doing things of your own volition not following an assignement. People making dicks with bullet hole in fps are being creative. But a game that judges your creativity isn't about creativity, it's about figuring out the right things to do to please the underlying algorithm. I think for a game to have creative element in it you need to have the freedom to not engage with them, otherwise they're just tasks, not a creative endeavour.

There was a playstation 1 game that let you build songs from a huge sample library, with a basic music tracker, and do some rudimentary custom stuff too. You could save the songs out to a memory card. I *think* it was called Music 2000? Aol the songs you made were very much of that late-90s early 2000s era jungle, DnB style that I still love to this day.

6:00 I actually really like Valheim's building system because it averts this. Normally I also don't progress past the dirt house or cave home state in Minecraft, but Valheim has a slew of mechanics that strongly encourage it. First is the reason you might need to build a house in the first place- you need a roof over your head. Crafting stations need a roof to function, sure, but also when you get wet from the rain you get a stamina penalty. However, once you start building that roof, a bunch of other things start kicking in. All the roof pieces are slanted, so your house is going to actually have a house-like shape. Basic structural integrity is also a thing, meaning you can only build things so high with the basic materials you have. And then it comes to sleeping and beds, which require a lit fire nearby to function. Rain puts out fires, so you think you'll kill two birds and put the fire in the house. Not so fast, now you gotta think about _smoke inhalation,_ and have to actually design a part of the house around the firepit so that you can 1. Benefit from a nearby fire 2. Have the fire be properly covered as to not get extinguished by rain, and 3. Properly vent the fire's smoke so you don't get smoked out. Legit the only game I've ever seen where you're encouraged to build a functional chimney. And it doesn't stop there. Workstations are upgraded by building little expansion near them. You can have a crafting bench in the house, but a chopping block out back. As you progress throughout the game and defeat more bosses and gather stuff from harder biomes you have access to better materials to make an even bigger and better house. And not to mention the comfort and resting mechanic. You can technically rest anywhere if you're dry and sitting by a fire, but things like having a roof over your head, a bed nearby, fur rugs on the ground, chairs and tables all increase the bonus buff you get from being rested. The game encourages you to build a cozy little space to rest in when you return from a long adventure that is not only mechanically reinvigorating but also emotionally invested into. And then the game sends a wave of trolls to smash your little house down lol Sorry I really like what Valheim did with it's building system.

1:08 I know I'm early into the video so sorry if you do mention it, but... Guitar Hero: World Tour and Guitar Hero: Metallica (and maybe some others?) had a feature where you literally could make your own music. You'd choose the scale your instruments used, could set sections (verse, chorus, etc.), placed the notes, chose the effects (overdrive, distortion, clean, etc.), and so on. I used it a ton as a kid.

Just like you showed at the end, sandbox games and games with level editors are great for creativity, especially so if user generated content is the key focus. In Super Mario Maker there are all sort of levels, like music level and levels dedicated to art, and ones that exist only to display silly and funny mechanics and glitches. I think something like that, where the public judges your work, is the best way to encourage creativity. You could say mods are similar, but they require special knowledge and skills to create.

Sometimes creativity is its own reward, especially since we are hitting hard limits on what you can and can't do.

One thing on the notion of creativity is also the social component. I've seen the most creativity-features in multiplayer-centric games. What stands out the most to me are the Forza franchise, wherein you have a pretty sophisticated art designer for customizing cars, which people use for all kinds of purposes from making realistic looking sponsor decals to abstract patterns to anime art to whole dedicated portraits of people (nearly a decade ago I remember seeing a highly intricate portrait of Bruce Lee put onto a car that someone put a video of on RU-vid). Another game like this, though currently (if its still around) is not in a great state, is APB: Reloaded. It was like a kind of "GTA Online before GTA Online" kinda MMO: you make a character in either the "criminals" or "enforcers" faction, and in instanced "districts" can queue up for team-based PvP missions. However, pretty much the central important feature of the game was creativity and self-expression; it basically had Forza's art designer, but for cars, tattoos, and clothing, allowing for endless possibilities in styles and designs. And even further, it had its own music maker to create songs and also "themes" which were 5-second songs that a player heard when you killed them in the game. Further, with the in-game player market, people could sell their art, music, cars, etc. to others, which gave an incentive for players to make art and music since they could use that money to then buy better weapons, cars, or otherwise. I also remember the game ArcheAge had a music feature where you could basically input MIDI code and play that on any instrument. I remember making music in a notation software, exporting the XML (I think?), then importing that into the game and playing that in a lute, and the whole appeal is doing that for other people (there was an area with a dedicated concert hall for this very purpose basically). Its also kind of similar in Minecraft; of course building in vanilla survival or creative mode by yourself is boring; being creative with no intention to show it to other real people isn't satisfying at all. But the people who make these gigantic, life-scale cities in Minecraft, or any other number of designs? They're using a mix of modded tools and teamwork to create these massive structures, and the entire purpose of creating them is to show other people. Creativity in games, IMO, necessarily has to be centered on the social component.

Conversely: if you *don’t* tie a game to concrete, measurable outcomes, how would a player improve their performance? A game with no obvious mechanism for progression is a pretty hard sell. Unless a game can eventually simulate a really good music teacher, where you are simultaneously encouraged to improve technically while being rewarded for your creativity and effort as you go… And that’s hard enough for a human for whom that’s their chosen profession 😅

I'd just written a post on the TOTK subreddit about how the boss "roar" in Tears of the Kingdom, which deletes your zonai vehicles, is a big limiter on the creative space of that entire gameplay system. WIthout it, players would actually have incentive to create big, expensive, and powerful war machines to use against enemies that aren't just camps of bokoblins. One of the few misses in terms of design, in my opinion.

I’m glad you mentioned Jackbox. Tee-KO and Quiplash seem to be the best games I’ve seen really reward creativity because they are really all about making your friends / family laugh, and having human judges baked into the game sidesteps the issues of trying to make creativity in single-player games. Then again, I need to work at getting better at intrinsic motivation, haha.

i think one example would be in the game sky children of the light. the whole game is about socialising with your limited amount of options, and besides making funky sounds at eachothers players can alsoget a lot of musical instruments. you can sit down and play, practice and get good, but even if you re bad people will come and sit next to you to hear you play. often, after you re done, people will do a clapping emote. its all very sweet.

Littlebigplanet 2 & 3 had a really kick ass music creator system, that allowed you to make custom music for your levels. I never got the hang of it personally, but I know that some people made legitimately impressive and well made songs with it.

I always strive to make a cozy, lived-in base in Subnautica and Minecraft and other base building games. Creativity and beauty always comes first for me, performance comes second. Not everybody min-maxes.

I suppose the wand building in Noita can also be an example. It really rewards experimenting and trying out wild ideas, and creativity is rewarded because, well, good wands let you cast cool spells.

I remember how awesome Scribblenauts felt at first! But then it seemed so many levels could be solved by making a jet pack, rope, sword or laser.

My guess as a musician before watching the video: the process of making music is kinda tedious and slow, much more so than performing it. If you simplify the process, then it becomes much more like collage than composing, which takes away a lot of creativity and flexibility. Also games usually give you feedback on whether what you’re doing is good or bad and with music it would be really difficult to quantify that without rules that would also suck out the fun? Ok I’ll be quiet and watch now. :)

If you want a game that's truly about making music, I'd recommend Wandersong. In it, you play as a bard, and you're able to sing at almost any point in the game. Sure, sometimes it can annoy the NPCs, and you can't always do it during cutscenes, but other than that, you're able to run free. There are a few rhythm game segments, but you're never punished on your timing. Heck, there's even a side quest where you get the chance to compose a jingle for a shop, giving you the chance to create your own music. Music is integral to the story, and integral to the gameplay.

I'm somewhat surprised you didn't mention Dragon Quest Builders in this, especially Dragon Quest Builders 2. It gives you a ton of mechanics to be creative, and actively encourages you to do so, by having to follow recipes for the rooms you're building, but otherwise letting you make it work however you want.

A bit off-topic, but when it comes to creating music there is something like it in Warframe. There's an instrument called the Shawzin which has 3 cords (1 2 3) and 3 pitches (left, up and right arrow buttons) which allows for 9 different sounds. Besides there being different versions with each sounding unique, you can "record" and then link the songs in the general chat in-game to share with anybody. I do also want to mention that there's a whole playable character of sorts that is based on making your own beats to follow for her abilities but she usually gets min-maxed (oddly fitting the topic as well). Her songs can also be shared too.

First thing I'll say; you're completely right about the social media metagame, but in a weird way that includes creation sharing, either through a website for the game (Spore, Simpleplanes), or through Steam Workshop (From the Depths, Space Engineers, Planet Coaster), seriously helps encourage creativity when players choose to use it. Otherwise, it's very difficult to properly use it in a game, and I'll admit in stuff like Minecraft, where I don't interact with the creation sharing community, I kind of get stuck just gathering materials for structures and then either completing none or very few. I'll often dig a foundation, and then just stop. It's frankly a serious problem with it. Although art/music isn't really at a place where computers can provide any meaningful judgement yet, engineering creativity is definitely something that does pair well with gameplay systems (which is what I think you were trying to get at a bit with TotK), and this past bit over a decade has really seen an explosion in the number of games that have at least tried to do something here. Although most kind of fell flat, trending towards one of multiple problems, some of which were mentioned in the video. Starmade had Minecraft's, where there just wasn't incentive to build pretty when boxes were all you needed. Or something even cheesier (I'm remembering it's "fair and balanced" craft). It's main competitor, Space Engineers, probably did a bit better, although having similar issues with not necessarily incentivizing pretty stuff, and not having as deep of customization. But I do think Starmade disincentivized prettier stuff worse, which might partially explain why it died and Space Engineers didn't. A few more wound up having the "solve limited puzzles with your endless creativeness" problem, with Simpleplanes, NavalArt (as well as its mobile predecessors), and Sprocket being notable examples here. These games have great customization, and (outside of the navalart mobile predecessors) do incentivize actually trying to make something that'll probably look competent, they run into an issue of there just not being much to do past the customization. Kerbal Space Program and From the Depths were definitely more successful in this regard, even though both are still flawed, feeling much better than the others mentioned so far. I feel like with Kerbal that was mostly the physics engine (similar to TotK), helped by both mods and a robust creation engine; where decisions and optimizations did actually matter. However, it was usually best to try to be better at dumb community challenges, as the campaign feels a bit deprived of these decisions; until you bring mods into the mix. From the Depths just made it's functional parts, like engines and weapons, complicated to design, and got a good chunk of depth out of that. They did squander an opportunity with different resource types, and there's issues with campaign replayability, but it still just feels like it encourages creativity a bit better than others. Maybe it's just easier to build; maybe the optimal solutions are just better obscured, and there'd enough fun ideas to test. But I want to briefly hit on another point: I think why Kerbal Space Program and From the Depths avoid feeling like there's as much of a problem as the others is that they make the time requirements to design something less important to the overall objective, whilst still having enough stuff to do that involves complex decision making. I think, for example, Minecraft's problem stems from the constant need to survive; eating and sleeping to keep the night at bay, that time spent prettying things up seems somewhat wasted, whilst also being regularly interrupted; impeding one from just getting "into the zone" in terms of creativity. Starmade was server-based, so time is always of the essence even when logged out. You could always have a bunch of designs on hand, but if suddenly the political, resource, or war situation you found yourself in needed something new, then you'd be losing precious ingame time to design something, or be constantly interrupted. Or both (There was also another balance issue with time as a resource. Man, that game really messed that up). Space Engineers also wound up in a situation where multiplayer servers were significantly more fun than singleplayer, creating a similar problem, but now also introducing Minecraft's problem of "having to build the ship you designed." Although in this case it would more be your time spent at home building rather than doing other things, which would incentivize less complex stuff. Where From the Depths and Kerbal Space Program avoided these problems was by focusing more on the singleplayer (or cooperative multiplayer) experience, allowing for the game to be "paused" (or saved and quit into a designer for FTD) whilst designing, and then, in KSP's case just automatically complete the vehicle (can be turned into a timer with mods), and in From the Depth's case allowing the player to be doing other things ingame whilst the vehicle builds (which is usually a short time anyways). In short, they didn't make the player feel pressured to design things quickly (outside of one From the Depths gamemode), whilst still offering engaging designing systems and engaging utilization of player-built designs. But there is a game I want to touch on real quickly; one that, despite looking like something you could pull up at a desk job and not get caught, really succeeds even better, to the point I think that there is still much room for improvement in the "engineering" game genre as a whole. That game is the Rule the Waves series, which thankfully the 3rd is now on Steam, so you don't have to buy through a sketchy-looking website where they manually email you the game code anymore. Despite the jank and some minor issues, it feels like it got the big parts, in these aspects, right, and made some very interesting decisions to get there. First, it separates the game into month long "turns," which means because it's not running in real time you can spend as much time as you want doing stuff in the turn. That includes designing ships. Basically having the same advantage as Kerbal Space Program. Secondly, it withholds full player agency from several key aspects of the game; namely, relations with other nations and technology unlocks. Now, it's not fully random, as the player does choose overall tech budget and general technology field priorities, but techs will still unlock in a somewhat random order, and sometimes be skipped. Relations change randomly over time, with the player only having agency in choosing event outcomes and spying to potentially create more tension with a nation. But because of these 2 things, as well as other random events that affect where you are monetarily, occasional naval treaties, occasional government requirements that you build more ships of specific types without the massive budget increase needed to afford them, and the fact that all ships take multiple months (up to 3-ish years) to build, and the designer, which is functionally a complicated stat-card builder (although it doesn't feel that way) with some math behind it, some great depth. You have to be thinking about who you're likely to go to war with, when could that happen, what ships they have, what ships they're building, your budget, your fleet composition, your tech (is a better quality smaller gun or a worse quality larger gun the better choice, for example), your location, and any build requirements or restrictions, as well as your general playstyle, making your ships feel unique. Like, there are still fairly meta approaches to ship design, but even so all the other considerations and limitations will produce different ideal ships each run, and you still have to figure out what the ideal ship is each time. And once again, because you can spend as much time in the designer as you want, you can spend some time making a ship design look good, and once you understand how the 2D line editor works it only takes ~30 mins to an hour at worst to do so. So although prettying them is optional, it doesn't feel "discouraged." And yes, the utilization of your ships in combat, when that comes, is engaging, as the individual battles are... I'll say RTS-like. It's like using simultaneous turns (between you and the AI) to create what feels like an RTS if that makes sense? Which means that yes, your design choices matter, as well as how you choose to utilize your vessels, and oftentimes in situations that they aren't ideally suited for. So yeah, seems like the way to get creativity is to not make the time spent designing much of an ingame resource, unless you balance it well against the other ingame time sinks, have design decisions, even if not ones for decoration, matter for design utilization, change up the "ideal" designs, even slightly, over the course of the playthrough and preferably over multiple playthroughs (if applicable), and make sure that whatever the designs get utilized in is both something engaging and "persistent," rather than say just one-off scenarios. That's how you get a good engineering game to encourage creativity, and I'm pretty certain you could apply these concepts, in a different way, to art games as well.

This brings to mind Super Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo where we could not only draw and paint whatever we wanted, but we could compose music to go with our art. Yes, they need to make modern versions of games like these.

Im surprised ultrakill wasn't mentioned here, since that game highly encourages players to play creatively and stylishly through making their own combos and rewarding them based on the very well designed style meter. Since the only way to heal is through absorbing the blood of your enemies, it simultaneously forces you to play risky in order to restore your health while also motivating you to create more cool and efficient combos, and in the end it makes you feel like a total badass.

Actually Spore did have a good incentive for creativity in the form of its Galactic Adventures expansion. In fact I found it more engaging than the main game, as it allowed people to actually use their creations as a part of something larger that would actually be played and seen by others; essentially serving as means of storytelling. In my opinion that was also a better use of the various editors than the supposed premise of evolution and I would certainly like to see a sequel focusing on that area.

Warframe has an item that lets you compose and share songs, but it really is just a minigame. I have seen people jam out in public spaces though.

In The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, there’s a central mechanic of creating Tarot cards to use in readings. The physical placement and numeric distribution of elements you choose from different Tarot themes seems to generate unique stories depending on how you made your card. With more unique card interpretations generating more resources than stamping the same dragon or harpie ten times. It’s way cool!!

I really enjoyed playing "Fract Osc" which is a sort of surreal music puzzle game where you explore the different capabilities and sounds that different synthesizers can make. You also gradually unlock the synths themselves and allows you to compose music with the techniques you learned along the way.

It amazes me how many clips you put into those videos, and how carefully placed some of them are, sometimes a one second clip to respresent a single **word**, and it feels extra good to see what you did there when it happens. For instance when the word *fulfilling* is used, we are watching a monster hunter character eating a hearty meal :p

There’s two great games called “Pro Tools” and “Ableton” that you can try

Feels weird seeing a game I worked on in an Architect of Games video.... but yeah, as someone who's created a lot of games about things like cooking, music, drawing, and dance... this is definitely a topic I've had a lot of thoughts on as well / great discussions with other game creators about over the years. This is a really good summary of the problem.

I feel like someone could take an existing DAW and convert it into a 3D game where you have to "go to the store" to "buy" the effects. Then "go to the studio" to "record". But really it's all just stuff already available in the DAW. Removing the amount of immediate choices could spark more creativity. I know when I open up FL and am looking through the 100s of presets for things, I get a bit overwhelmed. Also it's not much of "music making" but Octavia in Warframe has a cool thing where you "record" some notes on a tracker and then that song becomes your buff when playing the game. And each instrument provides a different effect. I can't remember what the effects are but it's really neat.

Spore is a great example of this because the need to upgrade your parts forces you to adapt around the new thing. You can't just go in with one idea because it forces you to adapt and change, like actual evolution. If you want to mkae a better creature, you're encouraged to use the parts creatively.

I'd like to throw Tetris Effect into this ring. I'm not a musical person, but the way you almost compose music while playing Tetris is incredible. It's gamified but isn't scored so it's all from intrinsic motivation. Absolutely love it & think about it all the time

I’m actually working to design and build a portfolio game piece around music making! The design centers on restricting the tools the Player has at the start, expanding on them as they explore. The hope is to place the user in a hopefully different context than they normally would be, inside a typical music creation software, to spark that ironic but real creativity that comes from intentional restrictions. I think it will ultimately end up feeling like a frakenstined half-game/half-music-software, but the points in the video certainly have me considering how I might be able to better create scenarios for inspiration, one way or another!

This is a big part of why I love tabletop RPGs so much. The stories you tell there are always personal yet shared.

The first sentence of this video is so powerful that I completely understood most of the things this video was going to be about by extrapolating from that single question. Well done.

Funnily I actually had kind of the opposite experience with survival games. Terraria's village building just felt like a roadblock in front of gameplay progress that I wanted to be done with so I just made boring boxes, but in other survival games my main goal is to build a pleasing base, and so that gives me incentive to go out and gather materials.

Making a cool looking avatar in an RPG, beating Half-life with only the pistol, and creating a mega incestuous dynasty in Crusader Kings are all intrinsically rewarding and the last one is even optimal in a gameplay sense! I mean, how else are you suppose to create a line of pure-blooded super humans.

First impressions: games about making music don't exist because it requires actual talent to make it and judging music is subjective, even the objective standards that I subjectively look for in music.

I appreciate that Adam still calls them “spectacle fighters” rather than “character action games”. It’s a more descriptive and specific name that also has a nice rhythm to it

Fun fact about Ocarina of Time: your ocarina is actually a fully functional instrument. While you only get 5 buttons, you can also use the (left) analog stick to pitch shift and L/R (or the D-pad in the 3DS version iirc) to play sharp or flat. This appears to be a remnant from mechanics that didn't make the final build. In betas you can see the spiritual stones were actually in the shape of sharp, natural and flat, and you put them in the ocarina. Presumably each unlocking its respective notes, making it impossible to play the Song of Time until you have them all. But maybe they decided the additional notes made playing the songs too complicated and would discourage players. You can see the game still registers it though, as it will not accept songs as "correct" if you mess with it. The only exception is the scarecrows, which will let you make whatever beautiful masterpiece you want. One for the Scarecrow's Song limited to 8 notes long which is mildly useful for reaching certain places with the hookshot, and the other which doesn't really do anything except dance but is unlimited so at least you can make him dance to all star. This functionality is also present in Majora's Mask and with 3 additional instrument options to boot, but it's even less useful there.

A part of this video I found really interesting is the building in survival games part. You show Valheim while talking about games that handle it poorly then mention Terraria as a game that did it very well, while in my gameplay I found the exact opposite. My time building in Terraria was spent cramming as many crafting buildings in a box as I could, building a bunch of identical boxes for the NPCs to move into, and building large, flat platforms to fight bosses on. When I started in Valheim, my first goal after building my starter shack was "I want a 3-story house". Without access to core wood, it was pretty much impossible to build a large building with 3 floors and I ended up with a rather large 2-story house where I still had the basically cut the roof in half to cover the whole thing. I recently just finished my third base. Not only does it have 3 floors, it also has a large stone wall around it, as well as several other buildings like a storage house, smithy, and cooking area. The comfort system gives you benefits for engaging with decorations like chairs and rugs, while not forcing you to use them in a specific way. The building integrity system is just daring you to see how big you can make your build without it breaking. It's interesting how different mechanics can encourage different people to engage with similar systems.

I remember how much I loved pizza Tycoon as a kid. Building your restaurant and then adding the weirdest pizzas on to the menu.

20:00 at this point, tricks like that just make me smile. A reminder of a different era of the internet.

I watched the whole video thinking about the necessity to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I feel like you got to it at the end, but to me it feels like just the start of the discussion. Reminds me of a popular TED talk about how school kills creativity. I think the feeling of being creative comes from being intrinsically motivated (motivated by something for it's own sake). So the reward system comes from doing the action or having an experience rather than external reward/punishment systems. Sometimes game designers talk "juice" (or we can say beauty), so intrinsic motivation is about a player seeking out juice or beauty even though its not optimal. I see there being two goals: 1. Make it possible to interact with a form of beauty 2. Incentivize interaction with the beauty So basically extrinsic motivation is bad, but a necessary evil. The key becomes to use it efficiently in order to incentivize interaction with beauty. If you design a tool in the game to allow players to create beauty then you're in some ways adding more beauty to the game than you can ever design yourself. You then can think of human psychology and what might be some barriers to creative expression. Extrinsic motivation can provide you with a path, while providing you some beautiful distraction that encourages you to stray off that path. So the spectacle is important and ease of access is important. Let's say you have to get somewhere on a skateboard, but on the way you are neither objectively rewarded or punished for doing some tricks and interacting with the environment. Some subjective-ish points of disagreement: - tererria building = bad (doesn't have the juice that mincraft does because it's 2d) - valheim is arguably a better building game than Minecraft (because it's pretty) - Minecraft noteblocks are bad (at least for mist people, the barriers to entry is too high) A big barrier to creativity and intrinsic motivation is confidence, so you gotta make it easy to create striking beauty initially, but also it's good if to think about how the player will pursue creativity and beauty over time to greater levels of depth.

i cant believe a screen transition of all things was foreshadowing the end of the video. absolute madlad

There is a suit in the game Warframe called Octavia. This allows you to have powers by creating and playing music. The better music tends to give you better boosts. Sad this went completely unmentioned by the video maker.

The create mod for minecraft is about making big automation lines, and figuring out how to get the contraptions either nice enough to look at or out of the way enough not to look at it definitely carries a satisfying element of creativity

Maybe it has more to do with lack of creativity among players? In my experience most people aren't very creative. I might be wrong but a lot of games based around creativity seem more about giving the player the illusion of their own creativity.

A great example of creativity overload in video games is geometry dash, just comparing user-made levels vs dev-made levels is insane; I remember not being able to stop wondering what else I could make in the geometry dash level editor and what else I want to share with my friends… good times

"Why are there no games about making music?" Me, who clearly remembers playing a music making videogame on my PS1 when I was a kid: ?_? (Codemaster Music 2000 on PS1)

I'm surprised LBP or Dreams ps4 wasn't mentioned! Because of how flexible their tools are, you get to mess around with creativity in music, art/modeling, film, game design, etc.

The best prerequisite I've seen for encouraging creativity, above all, is *repetition*. Striking the right balance between discontent (that encourages small variations in your routine) and frustration (that encourages leaving) is a pain, but being forced to notice (or esp. create) the same bare house ten thousand times naturally results in a more interesting result than just allowing leaving it in place.

Mario Paint is the only game I can think of that just lets you make music. it's not a game about making music, but it does allow you to do so with complete creativity (albeit with a limited palette of sounds)

When it comes to music, 2020's DJ-em-up FUSER by Harmonix is a game that makes an attempt at fostering music creativity by cutting you loose with a library of licenced tunes each broken into essentially 4 layers, a pair of turntables, and basic and intermediate mixing effects and tools. For what it tries to do I think it's excellent.

To be fair, "Passpar2" only works in English as a pun. In my language (Italian) it would be read as "Passpardue" ("due" being 2), which has nothing to do with the French word "passpartout"

To me it is quite clear why there are so little games about creating music. Creating music is more about play, and not a game. Play with rules leads to a game. Play without rules leads to a toy. Creating music is more about play without rules (it is about trying, creativity, intrinsically rewarding, it does not need external rule based judgement to be fun), in this sense it would naturally lead to a toy; and that's basically what we got: instruments. Adding rules to it, naturally makes it a game, but then you loose the properties of freely creating music again. So i think this is probably why there are so little games about creating music, but so many toys to create music: it is hard to have rules and don't have rules at the same time.

Punk-o-matic 2 -- make your own songs (using premade loops) and play gigs One of my favorite flash games in high school

Umarangi generation is an example of a game about making art that actually let's you be creative, its a photography game that actually encourages you to be creative with your photography and experiment with diffrent filters and stuff.

I currently have this idea about a music making game I want to run by you: Basically, it's using speedrunning as an incentive. Each level is a rather simple dungeons / platforming level. you can write the music that plays during the level. different music features changes the way the level /your character behaves. For example, if you user a major key or a minor key changes what doors are open or locked, and if you use certain type of chord prorgressions it might make you run faster or jump higher or whatever. So, you edit the music of the level, and then you run it while the music plays, and then you get your time. This gets compared to others who also did this level. This way, you always want to experiment with the music, and find ways to make the music that will help you solve the level in the fastest possible way.

1:40 Knew it all along. Rishi Sunak strangling the creativity of the gaming industry.

Another genre that would fit into this essay would be builder games. IMO there are two mayor differently builder subgenres with the first one beeing the Anno-likes and the other one beeing Cities Skylines. In the Anno-likes the objective is pretty hard to reach and your cities need to be build rather efficently. Cities skylines is rather easy and therefore allows way more room for error and therefore creative freedom. It allows the player more expression towards reaching the same goal. Planet Coaster/Zoo and the RollerCoaster Tycoon are also examples of this. Sure there are some people who mainly play for the management challenge, but a lot of staying players build ridiculous parks in Sandbox mode.

In minecraft, I think mining, progressing through the tools, collecting resourses and then saying there's no insentive to create things is like spending time rooting through the attic to get a big box of lego, sitting down in front of it and then saying you don't want to build anything. Why are you playing minecraft? There's 100 games with better combat, better progression, more interesing and fun grinds and bosses, but in minecraft is the one where you can live in a giant can of baked beans that you've made and if you don't want to make cool bases then idk why you'd boot the game up.

What about the game DREAMS?, I actually started studying music production in more traditional softwares after using their music creating tools (that is pretty much an original DAW). Besides that the whole game idea is about creativity, (creating games, MUSIC, visual ART, telling stories etc.) And amazingly, it delivers.The reward is like you said, the personal accomplishment feeling and having your creations being reviewd and shared by other humans. TOTALLY UNDERRATED, and unfortunately, i think the reason is most people are not very creative, or look for this kind of thing in the first place. I find it really weird that you don't mention this this game in a video about creativity, to be honest. It's like, THE CREATIVE GAME.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Parappa yet. Even though it's a rhythm game that asks you to push certain sequences of buttons in specific rhythms, it doesn't stop you from deviating from the rhythms yourself--the voice snippets that make up the original "intended" line are freely available for the player to improvise with. You can even get points when what you play sounds nothing like what you were supposed to (although the actual scoring system has always felt really janky and inconsistent to me), and I think both games let you go into some kind of "fever state" in the middle of the level if your remixes are good enough.

Magic the Gathering, while not really a video game, is a great example of a game that breeds creativity. In commander, decks are large, and games are chaotic, so it is impossible to tell if any one card makes your deck better or worse, which opens up a whole world of self expression. Players will always try to win, but if a game is complex enough that its impossible to play perfectly, then everyone is forced to be creative. This has become so standard among magic olayers that if you play with the sole goal of winning and don't pay any attention to the aesthetics of your card choices, then you are not following the spirit of the game.

There was a mediaval warfare game i can't remember which one where you can find instruments and play them using individual notes so you could play any song you wanted with practice. It had the effect of causing both sides to stop fighting if the guy in the middle was playing good enough and they will team kill if one of they're own kills the player. I think that is just magical how random creative things in multiplayer games can effect the gameplay like that. I also think of the sprays in TF2 where you can make a spray so distracting that it allows for free kills on dumb players.

Programming "freedom" in any game genre is insanely difficult. The less linear you make an experience and less boundaries you put to it you basically expose yourself to bugs, glitches, etc and we all hate those. Abstraction is also an enemy of programming languages which need exact variables and commands. Even games famous for its "freedom" like Fallout 2 or New Vegas basically achieve that feeling by giving an overwhelming number of choices, but you can´t create new options outside of what the devs provided, unless you actually go and mod the game, AKA program more options in it ^^ On a side note, I loved Fire Emblem Three Houses for the class and customization flexibility it gave to the characters you can recruit. Rather than giving them fixed class progression paths, they start as students that you can train in whatever skills you want. Sure there are optimal builds based on the talents of your students, but you can also train the frail mage into heavy armor and axes and it will work eventually, which is great for a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the story paths. Sadly the next game of the series went back to the fixed progression paths and one story :(

I have run into this exact question myself, and so I'm actually making a game that is specifically trying to be a game about the process and joy of creating music, formatted as a zelda-like topdown puzzle game. It's called Composer's Key and it started from a gamejam demo and I'm very passionately turning into a full game and it's all very exciting woohoo maybe there will be a kickstarter who knows.

Creativity is entirely dependent on the player, you can't force it, you can't measure it, you van only provide tools for the players to work with. If you try to make a game out of "making music" and such, it stops being called a game, but a tool. Just like mario paint was not a game, it's a weird tool that was fun to use. You can't really make a game out all that stuff that you already can do on a computer because why not just actually do that instead of a dumbed limited version of it

I remember playing a flash game that I can't find anymore where you essentially composed short songs by picking from a list of musical functions and placing them on a timeline that would control when of 3 musicians played it. Then you could play back the entire composition you made, change it, save it and make new compositions. Was actually quite a brilliant game looking back on it, unfortunately I don't remember the name of it anymore. It was like metal mania or something, I think the word mania was in the title. It had a rock/metal genre to it as well which appealed to me. It was pretty simple and basic, but you were actually making music.

During the introduction, prior to you moving on to talking about creativity in games generally, I was thinking "What about Electroplankton?" Which was a DS title with about a dozen or so levels each of which was basically a musical instrument for you to play around in with, as I recall, zero game systems aside from the level's physics. And while I'd agree that TLoZ has never been _about_ music, in a lot of the ones with the magical musical instruments, you can just get the instrument out and play as you like. There are fewer notes on most of them than you have on a toy glockenspiel, mind, but you can still play them as you like. And, yeah, when I'm playing one of the ones with them, I sometimes muck around with it for 5-10 minutes of undirected play, the same way I used to with my keyboard back when I had that set up fulltime. (You can also make your own instruments in TotK which you can play if you like via the stakes if you want to do stuff that's weirdly high effort, and do your own compositions in Mario Maker leading to a bunch of musical levels, some that just play music at you and others that are auto scrollers with bespoke soundtracks. Games that aren't about music, but let you create music within them.) Though... Fundamentally, I don't understand why games 'need' a way for rewarding creativity, or the optional challenge runs you listed alongside them. As you said at the end - If you do something creative, and don't show it to anyone, it still has value. So why do we suddenly need things to have external validation when there's a video game involved? Hell, speaking for myself, I'm not more likely to do a speed optimization thing if there's a reward in it for me, unless that reward is progressing through the story, and if it is that I'm unlikely to _like_ the game. I'm far more likely to skip that sidequest/collectable. Because that sort of move optimization fundamentally doesn't interest me, no matter how much opportunity for creativity the game offers in the movement. No matter how much I'm enjoying the movement, and how playful I'm approaching it outside of that challenge, in isolation. I just don't enjoy trying to optimize my movement rather than moving in the way I'm enjoying moving because it feels good to move like that in a game. And if the entire point of a game is speed running? Well, there's a reason I haven't picked up that otherwise neat looking Neon White, I think it is? Replaying the same levels over and over until you're Fast Enough doesn't sound fun to me, it sounds tedious. And I don't typically go for more efficient solutions when I find a solution in problem-solving games, nor do I particularly find them creatively fulfilling. I enjoy them, I just don't enjoy optimizing them and it feels like they're tapping into a fundamentally different part of my brain compared to when I'm writing a story (ideally short, good lord the editing process even as soon as you get to novella length is hell, as I discovered recently when what I was expecting to be a ~10k short story turned into a ~20k novella because of how much was happening in it). Closer to the part of my brain that's firing when I'm doing a Sudoku, and while problem-solving games have more possible solutions than sudoku (...Hopefully. Something's gone wrong with one or the other of those if they don't), I don't find doing the the same problem over again typically engaging. My mind tends to wind up yelling at me "I've done this before. Why am I doing it again?" if it's anything beyond a quick tweak to my prior solution. Which likely relates to why I can't get into MH - Fighting the same monsters over and over until you've optimized the fight and/or have all the monster parts you need to get the armour sounds tedious (It doesn't help that I don't tend to enjoy boss fights even in games where I otherwise enjoy the combat of in the first place). I've tried one of them. I just completely bounced off of it as soon as I figured out what the core gameplay of the game was going to be. (And character action it's only hearing people talk about them later that I've come to realize that I'm meant to care about the words that appear in the corner of the screen that seemingly only act as a multiplier to score, in a single player game without even the figleaf of a high score table for me to not care about)

Slightly off topic since it's not a video game, but I'd like to mention something called Draw This In Your Style Challenges. I'm a digital 2d artist, I make digital paintings and drawings with a digital drawing tablet (I use a One by Wacom M), and DTIYS for me at least feels like a mostly digital 2d artist thing. It's essentially an art challenge on social media where someone makes an artwork, mostly a single original character's portrait and asks people to make the same in their own style, but it's not limited so much, so unless it's specifically given, you can use any medium like traditional art, many forms of digital art, 3d, maybe something like collage or something, etc. to essentially recreate someone's artwork your own way. For me this might be something I could call a game with limitless possibilities, and sometimes creators who start challenges offer more than just shoutouts and shares, often they offer to make something in exchange for X number of people who participate , but I've seen some instances where they turn it into a competition with prices from a sponsor or something similar.

There is such a thing as a purely creativity game: Eno's Oblique Strategies cards. I've been trying to make a musician's-game (also with cards) for some years now, and might at some point succeed… but the only way you'd 'win' at it is by being a creative musician and making something that you wouldn't otherwise make, that is more interesting than the cards themselves are. So it's got a pretty high barrier to entry :)

There ARE games about making music. Mario Paint Music Editor? Dance Dance Revolution? Guitar Hero? Rock Band? Hatsune Miku Project Diva? Rhythm Heaven series? Wii Music? Sure they may have limitations but if you really want to get down to software about making your own music, just get Pro-Tools and get a setup of hardware within a Sound Proof Studio and there you go.

Punk-O-Matic 2 was a flash game released in 2010 that was about making music in a garage punk band. You do actually make and then perform your own songs, and get judged not on the composition, but on the performance of your music.

One game that does a really good job of encouraging human creativity is Planet Coaster. You get a gameplay benefit from decorating your rides/park but it doesn't judge on HOW you decorate, just how much. So sure you could just place down a whole bunch of the same prop over and over and get a high scenery rating, but if you're having to place down a ton of stuff anyway, you might as well have fun making it look cool. Over the course of playing the game I went from plunking flowers and trees in random places all the way to building out themed facades and having the regular experience of driving and seeing a cool building and thinking "I'll bet I could make that in planet coaster" The only downside of that game is that it kinda runs out of actual gameplay challenges pretty quick. The campaign missions are fun, but short and easily cheese-able and the challenge mode becomes trivial as soon as you get you learn how to price things right. The lesson from those games in my opinion is "require creation without judging creativity and tie it to novel gameplay challenges that exist alongside the creative sections" and then people who want to be creative will go wild. Even 6 and a half years later there's still a thriving planet coaster community on youtube showing off cool creations.

Some of my fav examples of games preserving the player creativity: - Opus Magnum&Terra Nil puzzles. Puzzle games a supposed to have just one solution you work your way towards, however these two allow so much room for error and experimentation, that no matter how horribly broken or inconvenient your solution to the level was - the game allows it and will let you pass onto the next level you can butcher with your horrible decision-making. Terra Nil is a more meditative experience, but Opus Magnum very much encourages retrying your earlier levels to optimise your solutions. These games only properly start once you`ve finished the 'main quest'. - same for slasher games like Devil May Cry. By the time you complete the main story, you have just learned the basic controls and techniques for your character, now get ready for learning 30+ more moves in the training zone, and then you can have fun combining all of them together on the fly. DMC5 is especially good at this, most of the characters have extensive moveset (V sadly, more limited than others) and learning how to better combo them is the true fun of the games. - the only action-RPG I`ve played that actively forced you to change up your skills and abilities is Transistor. The game uses brilliant mechanichs where each program can be used in 3 different slots, giving different effects in each one and those can be combined with other programs (a system that was later reused in HADES). The genuis here is that the 4 skill slots for your abilities are also your health bar, so each hit will take your favourite abilities from you and makes them unavailable for some time. This means that if know there is a bossfight ahead, you can uninstall some programs to save them up to one-shot the boss, but you have to use other programs to get to it. The game has a TON of variety, and of course, while some combos are better than others numbers-wise, not all the programs are always available to mix and match. I hope this system makes a return in some form, it was truly great was to spice up your gameplay and forced you to use unusual program combinations

Minigames like Build Battle (on the Hypixel minecraft server) are an interesting case - a group of online players enter a tournament, together, and in each round they're presented with a prompt and have a time limit to build something according to that prompt. When the time is up, everyone then gets to vote yay or nay for everyone's builds, and the best score wins. The key thing, of course, being that the game is enrolling humans to do the difficult job of judging creativity. I think there's also some lessons to be learnt from multiplayer worlds that let you build your own "base" in general; there's a culture of making cool things for people to come and visit even if there's no direct in-game benefit to doing so (although games with a player currency system might let you create cool places to visit and then charge admission...)

I feel like games like Minecraft or even factory games like Satisfactory or Factorio also do a very good job at encouraging creativity, just not necessarily _artistic creativity._ Obviously Minecraft has building and stuff, but Minecraft also has making farms and there you have all the reason to get creative with figuring out the efficient ways to do things with limited mechanics. Edit: lmao should have watched further

Most real musicians only play songs written by others also, it's the rare exception where they're not playing covers (and I'm including classical music in this, there is no fundamental difference between a coverband and an orchestra playing Beethoven) or music written by specialized songwriters. Even when a band writes their own music, it's usually only a few of them that do the actual writing.

Fract OSC is a game that _actually_ got me making music (without any rewards remaining). So, it mostly involves solving puzzles and composing melodies with increasingly lenient constraints and... all of that is mostly irrelevant and basically just a tutorial for the very real synth digital audio workstation on the main menu - I think that's absolutely genius. The Signal State is going for a similar thing but I haven't actually played it so cannot comment.

Want to quickly make a note about fashion in games. Fashion is one of those things that many many people will feel intrinsically motivated to pursue (especially in multiplayer games where your character is your avatar, and therefore a reflection of you to some extent). Fashion Souls is a whole thing and it genuinely is a form of artistic expression. The ways it interacts with gameplay is really interesting too. MMOs are an even better example of this, there isn't a gameplay reward *per sey*, but there IS a social reward, which is really the creme de la creme of gameplay rewards.

At least on a philosophical level I enjoyed the idea behind Wii Music and I'm surprised it wasn't even mentioned in the video. I know it's more of a toy, but still, it doesn't score players so you can just jam to a song

I think one of the greatest incentivisors of creativity is limits. Simply counting how many times you do an action basically gives you the reward and the goal all in one feature, your goal is to get the number as low or high as possible. It allows for no jump runs, no score runs, etc. It forces you to use other options.

For me, cases like Minecraft inspire creativity just as much as say drawing or writing music on a regular program built for it. I may not be rewarded for my nice looking builds, but I am just as rewarded for drawing a nice house on a piece of paper or software (although it’s much funner in my opinion) This is not for everyone and I agree with you here, I like what things like terraria has done as you have mentioned and I think there should be more of it. But for me and select others who want to be creative, things like Minecraft can be a good tool to do so, with some adventure and fun mixed in, andddd admittedly some tedious grinding if you arent in creative mode, but I will have to argue the hard work makes it more worth it, not in all cases though. And as one other comment mentioned, Minecraft with friends helps as others see your builds, just like if you hung up your picture in your house. Anyways love the video! Keep being creative guys and hopefully soon we will have more video games to help us with that!

I weirdly run into this problem with high level games of DND. sure, you'd THINK more spells and abilities would spark creativity in players, but more often then not, they will just midmax to their best abilities and not take anything else into consideration, then complain when their ONE idea doesn't work. never trying something with an ally, or maybe using the room/environment to their advantage, just cast the fireball. 😮‍💨

Really great video, as always! Appreciate the wide variety of games you use to illustrate points in your videos!

Maybe instead of trying to reward creativity, reward nothing and just make it non punishing and so that it has some impact on the game world. Like in Minecraft sure a mud house is good enough but you don't have real objectives anyway (especially before the End was added) and people go crazy building in survival, despite it being a bit punishing to mine all of that, but it changes the game world and that is great. And accept that not everyone will take that offer.

I'd have liked a mention of the research about extrinsic rewards for artistic tasks and how it kills intrinsic motivation. Gaming as a whole is EXTREMELY extrinsic-reward oriented, I'd go so far as to say poisoned by it. Tabletop rpgs are miles ahead in this respect for obvious reasons, but they've also made concerted efforts in that direction that many software game developers haven't. Great video.

I think one example of creativity being rewarded are games with map makers and sharing features like LittleBigPlanet, Dreams or even Trackmania. Again, this reward is similar to online competitive games, where people's appreciation of your creation is the reward! Great video again! I have thought about this topic a lot and have wondered if a truly "creative" game can exist

I don’t know your creative process but you make me feel like a chump, illiterate, casual gamer. You break down complex issues and really tear games apart and reconstruct them in a easily digestible way. Hell, I don’t know how you have such a deep understanding of so many freaking games! Stop making the rest of us look lazy? But, don’t stop really, I enjoy these videos every month

I think Passpartout really strikes the right balance. The algorithmic judgment is a little mysterious, so there's not an obvious simple strategy and there's no reason not to actually make a pleasing picture. I like to imagine something like Minecraft but arbitrary mathematical functions similar to Passpartout's customers determine how good a base is for certain purposes. For example it could turn out that high surface area makes for a better chicken coop. The idea would be that building anything at all generally gets a higher score than building nothing, and experimenting is rewarded.

Years ago, I saw a video about staying motivated to build interesting things in Minecraft (it might've been this channel, actually). The creator made a point about how almost nothing you do creatively in MC matters... until you show it to someone else. Whether it's in a world shared with friends, a public server, or even a picture or video showing off what you built, simply having that interactive human experience makes all the difference in the game. Creative games provide the tools to make cool and interesting things. It's up to the players to put said things on display and make it worthwhile.

I was prototyping a game where you’d be the bard in a typical RPG party, and you’d play music in combat encounters to buff the rest of the party. A tempo would be preset to the combat encounter, and you’d make the score by selecting chords from a radial menu (before TLOU2), with the ability to change the key or otherwise alter the chords (like major/minor/dominant 7, etc). Eventually it got too complicated for my meager programming skills to handle. I’d love to revisit it though.

I'd say there's some creativity to be had with games that have lots of optional objectives. The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is an incredible example of this- there are tons of optional objectives (around 800) that reward you with extra content via new monsters to fight, different game modes, new characters, and in-run events that can drastically alter your run. Vampire survivors does the same thing!

My favorite music game is just hooking a synth up to a looper and then having sort of a meditative jam session. But if things must be limited to only video games, one of the most enjoyable creative games I've played is Tears of the Kingdom -- specifically, the part where you build or do crazy stuff and then share it online to entertain each other.