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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 😅

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.

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 KZfaq). 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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'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.

Part of the problem with "traditional" creativity in games is that gaming really isn't the right medium for it. Asking someone to create visual art or music in a game is like asking someone to pick up a paintbrush and a canvas and write a novel. There's a certain amount of ability to do that (a graphic novel with no dialogue or written words told entirely through visual art, for example), but most people would, if they wanted to write a novel, open Microsoft Word or pick up a pen and a paper notebook. I think gaming allows for great creativity within the medium of gaming. You allude to it in the video. As people gain mastery over games to a point where they can use the game's systems and mechanics to extend a game's life by going off the rails and creating (the desktop background on my computer at work is a screenshot of my village in Medieval Dynasty, for example), that becomes its own form of fun that exists entirely because it's fun to create when you know what you're working with and how to work with it to create something that's interesting to you (and, per your mention of social media, potential others.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!!

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.

scribblenauts did a good job of this

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!

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.

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

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. :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Amazing video, was about to comment about not knowing the names of all the games a saw their in the description. That's really helpful

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.

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)

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

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.

Great video! You really hit everything I could think of

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

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.

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.

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.

I really enjoyed playing Prey on the Nightmare difficulty, made me think on my toes a lot more and I've been trying to do something similar with other games so I have to use a variety of mechanics that I normally wouldn't

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

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.

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"

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'm very glad you eventually got to OWW - I spent the whole video wondering if you were going to talk at all about social creativity games. It doesn't really work for everything, but that kind of "make a thing, share the thing, see other peoples' things" loop is rather nice A similar thing happens in games that allow user-generated content (like vrchat) but in that case the actual social / reward element happens outside of the game itself

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.

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

"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)

Brilliant video as usual. Love your work

This was a wonderful video which gave me a new lense to see video-games from!

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

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.

One of your best videos yet!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had been thinking about scoring systems and multiplayer stuff the entire time, so I'm glad that's the angle you took on it. It's the human element that drives this stuff. Builds in Minecraft, overcoming an opponent in fighting or strategy games, mastering scoring systems. Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, Magic: The Gathering, and countless others. Even when metas form, they can often still be worked around, so long as it's not too absurdly strong in comparison to everything else, and sometimes how you apply it can still require actual critical thinking, especially in weirder scenarios.

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.

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 like how your outro implies that fans skip the outro

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.

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

That was really interesting! Thanks for making this

5:53 Thank you! Sometimes I kinda feel like I'm a bit defective since I don't indulge in creative aspect of survival/engineering games (and as a kid, I only played with lego by building stuff from instructions). I know that's super silly but I feel relieved knowing that it's normal.

Dude you give me all the answers i needed to explain. Thank you.

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’ve been working on a ttrpg that (kinda but not quite) lets your group write a song by using music theory as mechanics as you play a session. I’ll go in depth for anyone curious.

the moment fighting games were mentioned I was simply waiting for bigband but he just didn't appear :(

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.

I remember Mabinogi letting the bard class make MIDI sheets music and play it on their choice of dozens of instruments.

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'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.

This is a game idea I've had for a while. It's a jazz style hack n' slash where your actions directly correspond to the notes you can play as you try to improv some sweet tunes. I'm not really completely sure how it would work though, but I don't think it's completely necessary for there to be super strict criteria for measuring how well you play. It would be cool if it had some training levels where you can learn about improv basics. But it would ultimately be a cool avenue for musical expression rather than a competitive game.

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)

I absolutely loved Stunt Driver. An MSDOS game from 1990. You drive and flew and created action scenes. But you also placed cameras, maybe on moving objects like a plane. Then you also had to edit the resulting video. Though it was too long ago for me to remember how it judged and rewarded your final product.

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 :)

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...)

The indie puzzle Viewfinder (by Sad Owl Studios) does a good job with this. You are still limited in some ways (how much film you have and the layout of each area) but you're free to take and place whatever pictures you'd like to complete the puzzle which does encourage more creativity than many other puzzle games. (Note: The game isn't out yet so my experiences come from trying the demo during Steam Next).

... there are. I mean we're not drowning in them but there's a few of them.

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.

Just in time for dinner! Thanks Mr Architect

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.

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

You make really great points in this video, I have to say that for me Little Big Planet 2 was the best in terms of creativity, you can make your own levels not just platforming it could be a top down shooter, rpg, survival, a movie even it was really cool. Plus you could build levels with friends which certainly helped me want to create. Playing other peoples levels were also great for inspiration. Plus there was a feature where you could make your own music / song, which answers your first point. I do miss the days of LBP2 I hope something like it comes again in the future, I didn't pick up Dreams (made by same developers) which was pretty much a 3D version of Little Big Planet.