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
Lego did try to make an online game but it failed because well its was so involved that people did not have the time to do anything in the game and it was not implemented properly and well forcing people to design stuff took way too much time and the system was just crap and the technology was no there back in 2002. Second Life tried but in truth that game was run by absolute piles of shit that in order to do anything in the game people made their own shit then the company took everything that people made for the game and forced everyone to buy the items and the controls so fucking garbage it was funny at first but trying to fly or walk in the game and the controls fucked up so badly that you could not do anything but nearly die by flying upside down or walking forward with 1 leg and backwards with the other leg made the game an absolute dumsterfire.
Music 2000 on the ps1 is a game about making music that was incredibly influential to the grime scene. Most of dizzee rascals first album was made on it
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.
I'd like to say also that just by virtue of these small towns being teleporters and housing merchant npcs you're likely to spend a lot of time at each of them and so people who care about building and the aesthetics of their world have small discrete areas that they can focus on making look nice. I used to be a big ugly apartment building terraria player, but since playing on the newer versions I've made a big ugly temporary building and whenever I've had a spare moment I've worked on smaller prettier buildings for 2-3 npcs. I'm really proud of all my little villages, and it's the first time a singleplayer sandbox game has actually encouraged me to build small doable projects that have a pragmatic use as well as aesthetic value. All my worlds in minecraft for example either have very utilitarian structures, or have big, quarter-finished (being generous) mega-structures with no purpose other then "I should build _something_ in this sandbox game."
Although I think it is an interesting change, I was never a big fan of building in Terraria. Especially on the mobile version, placing blocks and walls can be really clunky and annoying, and it can be a hassle to build a structure NPCs will actually move into during earlier playthroughs where you are less experienced with the mechanics. The 3rd-person 2D view also doesn’t work the best with a reach limiting system because what you can see on screen in most places you can’t actually interact with, which the building system in Minecraft is a lot better with because you actually feel far away from the reach limit in the 1st person perspective. The long distances between biomes also makes the initial building and moving in of NPCs extremely annoying until you get enough to show up at a location for the pylon system, and if you need to buy things from the NPCs in the meantime you will have to do a lot of traveling.
@@GrayMajik to be fair, it's still strictly better than before, where you had zero teleporters without placing tens of thousands of wires in hardmode. Nothing got worse - npcs still work fine in a condo - you're simply given an incentive to spread things out.
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.
This has always been my experience and I was super confused when he started talking about how minecraft doesn't encourage creativity. Every single time I've played minecraft by myself or with others its been my experience that people usually try to make, if not good, at least interesting bases.
in both Minecraft and Terraria multiplayer, there is always "the explorer", "the farmer", and "the architect". One goes all-in on progression, another goes all-in on resource production, and the last one goes all in on pouring everything everyone else have achieved down the drain just to make something (if successful) make the multiplayer world less brutalistic. Everyone knows "the architect" does nothing but spending yet "the architect" is the darling of the server.
I was impressed that he didn't talk about that minecraft minigame where they give you something to build, you build it and then lots of people rate it. I'm not able to remember the name RN but it was super creative.
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
As a painter and as an electronics hobbyist I feel the same. A game is a set of rules with some goal. If you remove the objectives of, let's say, any Zacktronics games, then it's not really a game anymore but some sort of basic simulation tool. And even if devs try to implement a judgement algorithm to a creative game, the goal of reaching a high score makes players searching for the optimal strategy. That's why I don't always consider some titles as videogames but I rather classify them as interactive media. That's also why I can't consider videogame as Art until the other older form of games like tabletop or playground ones (including sports) are firstly considered as such.
I was thinking that a rhythm game could do it, a game that incorporates unlock systems for instrumental sounds and a share system that allows you to sample the music in the game would be really fun, especially if there were a social and reading aspect to them
What about instead of creativity, gamifying practicing. I know as a student that it's the worst part of learning, but I probably would have done more scales and songs with a rhythm game like trombone champ that could also judge pitch like tuning apps.
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.
Do you think people make dicks with bullet holes in fps games when playing single player? I think they do it get a reaction out of other people in multiplayer, which is still "figuring out the right things to do to please the underlying algorithm" of people's behavior. Whether it's a human or computer evaluating your creativity, you're still being creative to get a reaction from some other entity.
Creativity is multifaceted. One part of creativity is simply the craftsmanship involved in your work, and it feels like current AI is pretty close to being able to judge that. If the price of creating a specialized AI model comes down, and becomes available to anybody who cares to purchase a license, I think we could start to see games/programs that judge your craft, and offer you guidance on how to improve. Throughout my entire adolescence, i thought i hated creating. I never practiced it, because i hated it, and i hated it because i was bad at it. It was an extreme, and emotional revalation that creating didn't have to be stupid and dumb, when the art teacher was sick, so a math teacher stepped in to teach us perspective drawing. Being given some rules and guidance allowed me to create something i didn't hate. That aspect of art is pretty crucial.
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.
"Legit the only game I've ever seen where you're encouraged to build a functional chimney." and it does that without actually giving you any chimney specific parts, so you have to figure it out yourself. I have seen some creative solutions, let me tell you that!
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 😅
Lots of games have no real progression to speak of. My current favourite is Drink More Glurps! I'd say this is actually the trap that is deadliest to creativity: By adding progression you incentivize your players to skip as much gameplay as possible, since anyway they can figure out to reduce the time it costs to complete a gameplay loop makes them progress faster. You've made a beautiful landscape and artistically crafted travel animations, and then you give them fast travel so they never use the other slower travel options. You've made a very elegant fighting move flow, and the players figure out a way to short-circuit one of the more powerful moves to maximize DPS at the cost of an ugly interrupted animation, so now they'll never see the fights as you intended them, instead they're looking at glitching characters racing through the game, enjoying it less and less.
@@bramvanduijn8086 There is a difference between what I described as progression and game-imposed goals and missions. The most freeform sandboxes can have tangible progression, as the player experiences an improved grasp of their skills or execution of the core gameplay, etc. - but when this fails to happen the experience can become hollow, or is reliant on the player imposing extrinsic objectives. Why else would people bother building things in Minecraft survival mode? It surely isn’t to skip as much of the gameplay loop as possible. Progression as I describe it simply requires the game to respond to some aspect of what you’re doing - optimally in a meaningful, tangible way. You mention ‘Drink More Glurp’, which places medals and a timer front and centre… No possible indicator of progression with mechanics like that… and that’s before you factor in mastery of a novel control scheme and the way the gameplay responds to your developing skill 🙄
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.
Providing external rewards for something intrinsically rewarding (ie creativity) is a great way to kill it. Not that this means it’s impossible to incentivize creativity in a game - just you cant do it directly, and you must be careful about it
Minecraft I would say is the peak example of this. I've yet to meet someone who was satisfied with their wooden shack and never built a thing ever and went off to 'beat' the game. While Terrarria has become a counter example. Plenty of people want to do the adventure side of things only, and even when they don't, you gotta build a dozern 'houses' with certain requirements to get your NPCs, which is suprisingly restrictive compared to just expanding your base because you want it to look cool.
Agreed 💯. Game maker garage, graffiti kingdom. I got to the point where I make heroes on graffiti kingdom to push the limits of the creative mode. The biggest limitation is that you can't create attach one part to more than one drawn part to one other drawn part. I was never able to make character riding a bike, legs moving with the pedals because of this limitation. Also you can't draw ring shapes as the shape completes when the line meets. Also I love looking for glitches and out of bounds stuff. Sonic Adventure is one of my favorites for this. Game builder I experimented with anti gravity, and a button to restore it. I like playing games, but making/ input is what I like better. I love experimenting with physics. As for music making there's a reason someone ripped Mario Paint's music maker. I spent lots of time messi g with in. I wanted to try Minecraft, but can't because first person gives me verigo.
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.
@@ratchetdnb9554 I remember having a lot of fun with it as a kid and enjoyed downloading songs other people made to play, but it's been so long and I'm sure the specific online service of it has been discontinued. Currently the closest analogue to that is probably making custom charts for Clone Hero or other Guitar Hero/Rockband revivals, but the issue there is that you have to provide an audio track (or audio stems) first, and then input notes how you feel they go with the music, as opposed to the notes themselves creating the music like in GH:WT and GH:M's music makers.
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 TH-cam). 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.
as you said with minecraft I noticed people put in ALOT more effort into their builds when on a multiplayer server, where other can see what they are making
Armored Core is similar, you can add 5 different colors for each tiny part you have on your mecha and you can create your own decals to make cool patterns or art, or add bullet holes/weathering
I think this is the most important point for most people. We like to think of creativity as a solo activity, but we are social creatures--what's the point of expressing ourselves if no one is going to see it? I think this even applies to speedrunning, where at the end of the day you get to show someone else: "Hey look what I did!" And it's genuinely cool to see!
My biggest structures in minecraft were built solo with no requirement to show other people. My daughter builds insanely complex structures for her own satisfaction. Creativity isn't a social thing for everyone - i create for me, because i enjoy it. You didn't stop to think that you have this impression because all the imprssive builds you've seen were made to share..... but if they aren't made to share, you'll never see them, so it's more confirmation bias than anything. I've got a cupboard full of paintings no one has ever seen, because i enjoyed creating them but didn't really know what to do with them after that 😅
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'd even go as far as to say creativity and art are inherently tied to social interactions for me, I think of Art as communication through a medium. An algorithm judging my creativity, no matter how sophisticated it is, will never feel as satisfying as feedback from real people.
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'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.
Well, I kind of think it is the opposite of what you think. If there was one megakiller vehicle that you can bring into any fight, the fight will become trivial
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.
🧚🏿🕯💖🎼 OMG, This the comment I was looking for. I can get lost all day playing Sky... Underrated MMO and therapy game excluding the Krill(Dark Dragons)!🙃 (Spoiler!!!) I've also seen someone in Hidden Forest playing Porter Robinson & Madeon - Shelter, someone in the Valley of Triumph playing Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up, and the (USA)National Anthem and that's not even talking about all the furniture, music store, recorded memories, ppl that can appear talk and help you out and ect!💖💖 The only downside is how much the candles, hearts and ect cost for cosmetics tho you get alot stuff for free by just playing!😔
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 find that the terrafirmacraft mod naturally does a good job of making your base feel lived in. It's a mod that aims to make the game more realistic, so things that are really simple in most games have more steps to go through and it can get incredibly grindy (although it's very much still reasonable if playing with friends) The main way it does that is simply by allowing you to put items on blocks. You can press a button to place an item on the ground, where it will look like an item that's been thrown on the ground, but it won't despawn and you right click to pick it up. you can also make log piles to store logs (which can't be put in chests) so in the early game before you can actually make chests, you end up with this little camp that has all of your items strewn about, some of which are contained in ceramic vessels, and it really gives you a good feeling of how far you've come. And I do find myself using it even after getting chests, you can place important items on tables so you don't forget where they are, or so other people can find them easily, and it's also a handy way to store items that you need for a specific process, like a knife for leather scraping or a fire starter for pit kilns, bloomeries and blast furnaces.
That's such a bad argument. The point is that players should be both incentivized to do that and it should be accessible to do. Obviously you can always choose to do it, but if it's what the games about, it needs to actually be a focus.
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 just wish I wasn't getting rewarded with blasting myself off into smithereens and ending my run here and there ... or just getting carried by the Lightning Bolt spell ...
@@_Salok Exactly. Permadeath absolutely stifles creativity in any game, as anything besides the most optimal strategies is immediately and severely punished. That is why I recommend playing Noita with a save system, either by copying the files or through a mod enabling it.
@@pulsartsai7776 funny, I've logged an embarrassing amount of hours in Noita and never felt that way (never felt permadeath was an obstacle to creativity, or that it punishes anything but the most optimal strategies). People are different. Maybe roguelike-likes just aren't for you.
@@safe-keeper1042 I know very well that roguelikes are not for me because I hate the repetition. But Noita is different enough that I still gave it a try and I actually do not regret playing it. However, if I were to come back to it I would install some mods to make creating backups of saves less of a hassle.
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.
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.
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 was hoping someone would mention Wandersong, it's a really cool game. Music is essentially THE core mechanic of the game, and the entire plot revolves around it
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
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.
Just scrolled for a bit and ctrl+f'd ultrakill. Knew someone would've posted this for me. but fr, Ultrakill is absolutely the kickassest, because the difficulty curve is such that you can start learning the game on easy, swap to normal once you're comfy with the first few guns, beat the campaign, perfect it, beat the pantheons or whatever, and then you *still* have hard mode left to do. And all the while you've been perfectly saddled in that feeling of topfragging on the same quake server for two hours. And that state is incredibly conducive to inventing fun tricks. It's like Ultrakill was designed not just to be full of fun tech, but so bursting with it that it's unavoidable, even if you never google anything.
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.
Guild Wars 2 had (though pretty limited) musical instruments; people created musical guilds, made sheets for in-game instruments, and organized in-game concerts. Sure, some people were using macros, but the experience of hearing live music in an MMO was always special, and it always gathered a crowd. MMOs are great for that kind of purely interactive, expression stuff!
@@Lishtenbird Simply giving people the ability to play their own kind of music ingame through a stylished MIDI keyboard seriously adds so... so much, ESPECIALLY for MMORPG's. Passing through Limsa Lominsa in FF14, you're close to guaranteed to hear *someone* plink away with songs and have a tiny crowd just listening. Even moreso when you catch the odd music group that comes in every once in a while to play a set.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I only figured out that the whole thing actually taught you how to play around with synthesizers way later, and I watched a whole playthrough and played the game twice myself (and bought the soundtrack). If I remember correctly, which I may not, it was around when I was watching a video of someone throwing a song together that it clicked, like "oh hey this looks familiar". So anyway if you like first-person puzzle games this one is really good, very nice visual aesthetic and is like one big music piece itself.
I literally ctrl+f searched the comments for something mentioning FRACT OSC. It was one of my formative gaming experiences, and the first thing I thought of when Adam posed the question.
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.
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’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!
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!!
"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)
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.
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.
Whenever I replace a part with one of its upgraded, stronger versions, I usually put it in the same spot as the previous version while also making slight changes to the shape of the creature's body (gradually making it larger, taller and more upright over several generations), making it look as though it's slowly evolving. I like to play around the restrictions of the game's progression system while still being creative by making a somewhat believable creature out of the parts I'm forced to use.
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
The problem with Tetris Effect (and by extent a different puzzle game by the same creator named "Lumines") is that while you are making music in the gameplay, you aren't actively composing it. Each level has a set soundscape with specific reactions to the player, and you have no control over what those sounds are or how they're timed independent of the core gameplay. That said, those games were more built on a concept that inspired Rez, the Synesthesia-style sound and light show in response to the player's gameplay.
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.
Meanwhile Warframe with Octavia letting you make your own soundtrack which plays when you use your abilities and actually somewhat affect how they work
I think that the major problem with most creative games is actually the game-part itself. Why is it that every piece of software, developed primarily for entertainment, must unequivocally be classified as a "game"? Some of my favorite "games" aren't really games at all, and would be better described as software toys. For example: Marble World, Plasma, Townscaper, Universe Sandbox, and Virtual Circuit Board, to name a few. These "games" offer very little in terms of game mechanics, but offer a great deal in terms of creativity. They exist more to be played-with than to be played, and that is the core distinction between a Toy and a Game. I know that the term "Software Toy" may be derogative to some people, but toys are important, and they are not just for children! Don't get me wrong, games are great and a lot of fun, but I feel like there ought to be more and better toys out there. There is no need to gamify everything. Just give the player a bunch of stuff to mess around with, then get out of their way!
It's not the (video game, table top rpg, movie, book)'s onus to make a creative audience. If you find the act of being creative boring, then you just shouldn't do it. If say a dungeon master gets mad at the books he got for not teaching them how to run a campaign, then they are missing the point of the book. It's one thing to not like the mechanics of games, but it's another to judge a fish on it's ability to climb trees. As an ending note, if you truly feel like you wasted your time in Hitman by looking for the wacky or sometimes thematic approaches, that doesn't make the journey of discovering these things less impactful. Like an artist who got bored of painting, you can't blame the brush or the color of paint you have. You shouldn't blame anything. That's just how it be sometimes.
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.
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
Playing a game in a self chosen "pacifistic (no violence)" restriction or "vegan (only eating plants) or "just with items X and Y" are creative ways to play a game. They are a much more approachable version of speedrunning. A game needs to be open/sandboxy enough to allow these styles. Like nethack or minecraft. Games can actively support this creativity by choosing your starting gear, and some world rules and giving this set a title (whip, +1 to luck, only tools found via archeology skills: indiana jones style).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
SimTunes and Electroplankton (by the same Japanese developer, incidentally) spring to mind for other games about making music. But I think the old Maxis "software toy" label probably sums it up best - there aren't really any goals outside ones you set for yourself, and ultimately that's fine.
The first game I thought of when it comes to making music would be My Singing Monsters. Although most of the islands in the game have a pre-made song that evolves as you obtain more monsters (thus adding more instruments), there is the Composer Island, which lets you compose your own songs out of a sort of monster soundfont, as well as browse the songs made by other players. Though from what I've seen, people try to recreate songs such as the Gravity Falls theme and Megalovania, or outright rickrolling you, as opposed to making original songs.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having intrinsic motivation to build creatively is a style of play you seem to not enjoy, but is EXACTLY why Minecraft is amazing. Also, using "precious resources that can be used on food, weapons or transports on simple cosmetic stuff. simply, you wouldn't." Hi, That's me, I simply would, have, and frequently do. The satisfaction I get from decorating a base with the "useless" items I get is what drives me to play those types of games. Having too much extrinsic reward for sandbox mechanics isn't all that great either, I've abandoned a few terraria builds because the npcs I wanted to place together didn't like each other or the biome they were in for example
Games like Minecraft and Valheim rewards creativity through multiplayer. You are motivated to build more elaborate structures in order to show it off to friends.
I also feel like if you made a game about making music you’re ow not a game you’re basically just competing against far more optimized DAWs like GarageBand ableton or fl studio
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 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.
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"
Honestly, such names would also just be annoying to talk about. Like, it's fun to go saying it should've been named that when you're online and using text, or when the game isn't actually called that. But imagine trying to talk to someone verbally about a game whose sequel is pronounced the same way as its predecessor.
@@AdmiralTails ...it's a bit funny that in this particular case, having "2" in the name might've made more people pronounce the name correctly than. Some people just do not have any idea of how French works, and aren't familiar with the term itself either.
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 suspect that the moment videogames delve into this territory, they morph into something we stop considering a 'game' traditionally. For example, want to have a game about making music... how is that functionally different from a DAW? Want to make a game about crafting stories... how is that functionally different from a Word Processor?
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 :)
Convenient but annoying answer: take up art as a hobby: (3D, painting, pixel art, photography) and let your own life story as an artist become a game of surprise, challenge, success. Maybe you need a TTRPG style rulebook to drive you to value the internal satisfaction of creation. I don't think games can create rules that speak to everyone's desire to express themselves. But in regarss to what you actually talked about 😅 factory games are a great example. The game doesn't deliberately punish ineffeciency, but if you can't efficiently navigate your factory or fix problems, it's hopeless to continue. Organizing the architecture of your factory, by making it look coherent and appealing, is a dopamine hit that drives you to improve. The creative challenge increases as your standards to improve your visuals increases. I love playing Satisfactory and Minecraft like this, taking reference images and using them to build structures for my areas. Love that stuff.
One game where you actually DO make music is Sound Shapes! Or, well, WAS Sound Shapes. They sadly shut the servers off for publishing custom levels recently, but the level creator had the ingenious idea of tying progression in a little collect-athon 2D platformer to musical notes in a song. The further right they are, the later they play, and the higher or lower they are, the higher or lower their key! It acts sort of like a simple loop-creator, where you build songs by making platforming challenges (in which every object you put in a level also makes cute musical sound bites upon touching it), with every room being another set of notes that get quieter and eventually stop playing after moving far enough away, allowing for dynamic progression in the song just by the act of moving through the level! It was like the Little Big Planet of rhythm games, and I was devastated to see it go out in a similar manner.
3:02 EXACTLY what I was gonna say. Video games are STIMULATORS. Either free form in some kind of creative mode with no resource restrictions, or a rigid scoring system. If you want to experiment with cooking recipes, go to the grocery store, buy some weird shit, through it together, and if you like it you like it. Same with music, buy a $10 harmonica or recorder, and blow to your heart's content. But if you want to build a Castle? A city? A tank? Or an army? These are a tad out of touch to the common man and as such, there's a market for selling the fantasy or simulation of doing so. There's no shortage of racing games, but an absolute lack of "traffic safety simulator" games and that's the reason. :P
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
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
Even if someone made a music composition game where the dev included every theory, every combination, and everything about music, just so the game can reward player for doing certain notes on certain beats or off beats, where the game would go, Nice Harmony or, Nice Solo, or whatever complements the game could have. Once it turns into a game, with scores and rewards, someone will exploit the system and create the "perfect" song. That's why even just as a concept, because it's a game that can be replayed and can be analyzed, Rewarding Creativity is not that great of an idea. I forgot the exact details but I heard this story from GMTK, three groups of students were divided to do a creative task. G1 is promised a reward after finishing the task, G2 is the control group so they did not receive a reward. The 1st group did better work initially compared to the 2nd, However, after a week or so, there was a visible drop in creative effort on the 1st group, maybe because there's no reward so there's no need to work for anything. The aforementioned 3rd group however, is a group that was given a reward as a surprise at the end of the task. In the proceeding weeks, they have made more effort in being creative. All I'm saying is that with how repetitive media is, if we just reward people always, they might just become expectant and become less creative. Doing more harm than good. I feel like games right now are doing a good job with just enabling people who want to experiment be able to do what they want.
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.
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.
Great video! Fun story: I'm a composer, and I recently made my first video game. Just for fun on the menu screen, I added in 5 different tones for each of the 5 menu options (pentatonic scale--all notes sound good together). I was surprised that a lot of people who played the game commented how much fun they had just messing around in the menu, making music. I think video games need more tools available to the player for sandbox creativity. More games like Little Big Planet, Soundscapes, etc.
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!
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.
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.
As far as music games go, I'd like to mention Fuser, which was basically a music mashup sandbox from Harmonix (Rock Band devs). Basically it's a rhythm game with a focus on mashing together bits of up to 4 songs at once, with tons of room for player expression and over 200 songs before the game was delisted. Yes, it had Never Gonna Give You Up. Players could record their mixes and share them to the server, where other players could listen and rate them. Harmonix hosted regular themed mix events with in-game prizes. The community around this game was super cool.
This is why I prefer playing a weird character on lower difficulty over an optimised character on a harder difficulty. If I want a real challenge, I play a weird character on a harder difficulty. I think customising your character is its own reward. A lot of appeal is playing the character you want to play, so you want to design them. It's also a feature players often want to be completely free from gameplay benefits, as that allowed customisation without regard for efficiency. Fallout games, Soul Calibur games, SF6, and many others don't _need_ character customisation, but players crave it. So it's added. Creativity needs a human to judge it. In PvP games, you have a human opponent who "judges" you. In games where you have some creative input, you're the one judging (and maybe other players).
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.
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 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 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.
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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
interesting video
Lego did try to make an online game but it failed because well its was so involved that people did not have the time to do anything in the game and it was not implemented properly and well forcing people to design stuff took way too much time and the system was just crap and the technology was no there back in 2002. Second Life tried but in truth that game was run by absolute piles of shit that in order to do anything in the game people made their own shit then the company took everything that people made for the game and forced everyone to buy the items and the controls so fucking garbage it was funny at first but trying to fly or walk in the game and the controls fucked up so badly that you could not do anything but nearly die by flying upside down or walking forward with 1 leg and backwards with the other leg made the game an absolute dumsterfire.
Music 2000 on the ps1 is a game about making music that was incredibly influential to the grime scene. Most of dizzee rascals first album was made on it
1½
Apetense "Mukke" is about making music
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.
I actually haven't played the newest patches but this is an awesome fix! Wish I included it in the video!
I'd like to say also that just by virtue of these small towns being teleporters and housing merchant npcs you're likely to spend a lot of time at each of them and so people who care about building and the aesthetics of their world have small discrete areas that they can focus on making look nice. I used to be a big ugly apartment building terraria player, but since playing on the newer versions I've made a big ugly temporary building and whenever I've had a spare moment I've worked on smaller prettier buildings for 2-3 npcs. I'm really proud of all my little villages, and it's the first time a singleplayer sandbox game has actually encouraged me to build small doable projects that have a pragmatic use as well as aesthetic value. All my worlds in minecraft for example either have very utilitarian structures, or have big, quarter-finished (being generous) mega-structures with no purpose other then "I should build _something_ in this sandbox game."
Although I think it is an interesting change, I was never a big fan of building in Terraria. Especially on the mobile version, placing blocks and walls can be really clunky and annoying, and it can be a hassle to build a structure NPCs will actually move into during earlier playthroughs where you are less experienced with the mechanics. The 3rd-person 2D view also doesn’t work the best with a reach limiting system because what you can see on screen in most places you can’t actually interact with, which the building system in Minecraft is a lot better with because you actually feel far away from the reach limit in the 1st person perspective. The long distances between biomes also makes the initial building and moving in of NPCs extremely annoying until you get enough to show up at a location for the pylon system, and if you need to buy things from the NPCs in the meantime you will have to do a lot of traveling.
@@GrayMajik to be fair, it's still strictly better than before, where you had zero teleporters without placing tens of thousands of wires in hardmode. Nothing got worse - npcs still work fine in a condo - you're simply given an incentive to spread things out.
It's not TOO late, you could record new terraria segments, and live edit replace?
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.
Very true but we don't friends 😞
@@autronic9306 Ain't that relatable. I still do build random stuff that I find cool so I can appreciate it :P.
This has always been my experience and I was super confused when he started talking about how minecraft doesn't encourage creativity. Every single time I've played minecraft by myself or with others its been my experience that people usually try to make, if not good, at least interesting bases.
in both Minecraft and Terraria multiplayer, there is always "the explorer", "the farmer", and "the architect". One goes all-in on progression, another goes all-in on resource production, and the last one goes all in on pouring everything everyone else have achieved down the drain just to make something (if successful) make the multiplayer world less brutalistic. Everyone knows "the architect" does nothing but spending yet "the architect" is the darling of the server.
I was impressed that he didn't talk about that minecraft minigame where they give you something to build, you build it and then lots of people rate it. I'm not able to remember the name RN but it was super creative.
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
Holy heck I didn’t expect to see you here. Hyped for Stray Gods for sure!
love your music mate
As a painter and as an electronics hobbyist I feel the same.
A game is a set of rules with some goal. If you remove the objectives of, let's say, any Zacktronics games, then it's not really a game anymore but some sort of basic simulation tool.
And even if devs try to implement a judgement algorithm to a creative game, the goal of reaching a high score makes players searching for the optimal strategy.
That's why I don't always consider some titles as videogames but I rather classify them as interactive media. That's also why I can't consider videogame as Art until the other older form of games like tabletop or playground ones (including sports) are firstly considered as such.
I was thinking that a rhythm game could do it, a game that incorporates unlock systems for instrumental sounds and a share system that allows you to sample the music in the game would be really fun, especially if there were a social and reading aspect to them
What about instead of creativity, gamifying practicing. I know as a student that it's the worst part of learning, but I probably would have done more scales and songs with a rhythm game like trombone champ that could also judge pitch like tuning apps.
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.
Do you think people make dicks with bullet holes in fps games when playing single player? I think they do it get a reaction out of other people in multiplayer, which is still "figuring out the right things to do to please the underlying algorithm" of people's behavior. Whether it's a human or computer evaluating your creativity, you're still being creative to get a reaction from some other entity.
and at that point, you're better off just actually just doing your own creative thing in real life without any restrictions
@@tylerhanson3156 Yes. I make bullet hole dicks in singleplayer fps
Creativity is multifaceted. One part of creativity is simply the craftsmanship involved in your work, and it feels like current AI is pretty close to being able to judge that. If the price of creating a specialized AI model comes down, and becomes available to anybody who cares to purchase a license, I think we could start to see games/programs that judge your craft, and offer you guidance on how to improve.
Throughout my entire adolescence, i thought i hated creating. I never practiced it, because i hated it, and i hated it because i was bad at it.
It was an extreme, and emotional revalation that creating didn't have to be stupid and dumb, when the art teacher was sick, so a math teacher stepped in to teach us perspective drawing. Being given some rules and guidance allowed me to create something i didn't hate. That aspect of art is pretty crucial.
@@GameFuMaster What do you mean by "in real life"? You need tools to create art, and video game mechanics can be these tools.
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.
Yeah the 90s and 2000s style jungle/dnb was crazy in every Media
MTV music generator was a good one. Well, good enough for me when I was a kid.
@@walterroux291 I remember that one too! It was a tonne of fun.
I directly thought about this game when I read the video's title!
There was similar stuff on PC too (not counting *actual* music programs) like Beat 2000 or EJAY.
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.
"Legit the only game I've ever seen where you're encouraged to build a functional chimney." and it does that without actually giving you any chimney specific parts, so you have to figure it out yourself. I have seen some creative solutions, let me tell you that!
I always just put my fire outside a window next to the bed with a small roof over it. Oops.
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 😅
Lots of games have no real progression to speak of. My current favourite is Drink More Glurps!
I'd say this is actually the trap that is deadliest to creativity: By adding progression you incentivize your players to skip as much gameplay as possible, since anyway they can figure out to reduce the time it costs to complete a gameplay loop makes them progress faster. You've made a beautiful landscape and artistically crafted travel animations, and then you give them fast travel so they never use the other slower travel options. You've made a very elegant fighting move flow, and the players figure out a way to short-circuit one of the more powerful moves to maximize DPS at the cost of an ugly interrupted animation, so now they'll never see the fights as you intended them, instead they're looking at glitching characters racing through the game, enjoying it less and less.
@@bramvanduijn8086 There is a difference between what I described as progression and game-imposed goals and missions.
The most freeform sandboxes can have tangible progression, as the player experiences an improved grasp of their skills or execution of the core gameplay, etc. - but when this fails to happen the experience can become hollow, or is reliant on the player imposing extrinsic objectives.
Why else would people bother building things in Minecraft survival mode? It surely isn’t to skip as much of the gameplay loop as possible.
Progression as I describe it simply requires the game to respond to some aspect of what you’re doing - optimally in a meaningful, tangible way.
You mention ‘Drink More Glurp’, which places medals and a timer front and centre… No possible indicator of progression with mechanics like that… and that’s before you factor in mastery of a novel control scheme and the way the gameplay responds to your developing skill 🙄
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.
Providing external rewards for something intrinsically rewarding (ie creativity) is a great way to kill it. Not that this means it’s impossible to incentivize creativity in a game - just you cant do it directly, and you must be careful about it
Minecraft I would say is the peak example of this. I've yet to meet someone who was satisfied with their wooden shack and never built a thing ever and went off to 'beat' the game.
While Terrarria has become a counter example. Plenty of people want to do the adventure side of things only, and even when they don't, you gotta build a dozern 'houses' with certain requirements to get your NPCs, which is suprisingly restrictive compared to just expanding your base because you want it to look cool.
Agreed 💯. Game maker garage, graffiti kingdom. I got to the point where I make heroes on graffiti kingdom to push the limits of the creative mode. The biggest limitation is that you can't create attach one part to more than one drawn part to one other drawn part. I was never able to make character riding a bike, legs moving with the pedals because of this limitation. Also you can't draw ring shapes as the shape completes when the line meets.
Also I love looking for glitches and out of bounds stuff. Sonic Adventure is one of my favorites for this.
Game builder I experimented with anti gravity, and a button to restore it. I like playing games, but making/ input is what I like better. I love experimenting with physics.
As for music making there's a reason someone ripped Mario Paint's music maker. I spent lots of time messi g with in.
I wanted to try Minecraft, but can't because first person gives me verigo.
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.
Was it good?
I remember it but i never really got behind it
@@ratchetdnb9554 I remember having a lot of fun with it as a kid and enjoyed downloading songs other people made to play, but it's been so long and I'm sure the specific online service of it has been discontinued.
Currently the closest analogue to that is probably making custom charts for Clone Hero or other Guitar Hero/Rockband revivals, but the issue there is that you have to provide an audio track (or audio stems) first, and then input notes how you feel they go with the music, as opposed to the notes themselves creating the music like in GH:WT and GH:M's music makers.
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 TH-cam).
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.
as you said with minecraft
I noticed people put in ALOT more effort into their builds when on a multiplayer server, where other can see what they are making
Armored Core is similar, you can add 5 different colors for each tiny part you have on your mecha and you can create your own decals to make cool patterns or art, or add bullet holes/weathering
I think this is the most important point for most people. We like to think of creativity as a solo activity, but we are social creatures--what's the point of expressing ourselves if no one is going to see it? I think this even applies to speedrunning, where at the end of the day you get to show someone else: "Hey look what I did!" And it's genuinely cool to see!
My biggest structures in minecraft were built solo with no requirement to show other people. My daughter builds insanely complex structures for her own satisfaction. Creativity isn't a social thing for everyone - i create for me, because i enjoy it.
You didn't stop to think that you have this impression because all the imprssive builds you've seen were made to share..... but if they aren't made to share, you'll never see them, so it's more confirmation bias than anything. I've got a cupboard full of paintings no one has ever seen, because i enjoyed creating them but didn't really know what to do with them after that 😅
@@milliannek I like the creation part too but get annoyed by the grind that comes beforehand
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'd even go as far as to say creativity and art are inherently tied to social interactions for me, I think of Art as communication through a medium. An algorithm judging my creativity, no matter how sophisticated it is, will never feel as satisfying as feedback from real people.
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.
Dreams has an even more powerful music creating system, that is almost like a DAW.
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.
Well, I kind of think it is the opposite of what you think. If there was one megakiller vehicle that you can bring into any fight, the fight will become trivial
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.
🧚🏿🕯💖🎼
OMG, This the comment I was looking for.
I can get lost all day playing Sky...
Underrated MMO and therapy game excluding the Krill(Dark Dragons)!🙃
(Spoiler!!!)
I've also seen someone in Hidden Forest playing Porter Robinson & Madeon - Shelter, someone in the Valley of Triumph playing Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up, and the (USA)National Anthem and that's not even talking about all the furniture, music store, recorded memories, ppl that can appear talk and help you out and ect!💖💖
The only downside is how much the candles, hearts and ect cost for cosmetics tho you get alot stuff for free by just playing!😔
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.
Having a pretty base means you're going to enjoy playing the game more. Especially if you designed it yourself.
I find that the terrafirmacraft mod naturally does a good job of making your base feel lived in. It's a mod that aims to make the game more realistic, so things that are really simple in most games have more steps to go through and it can get incredibly grindy (although it's very much still reasonable if playing with friends)
The main way it does that is simply by allowing you to put items on blocks. You can press a button to place an item on the ground, where it will look like an item that's been thrown on the ground, but it won't despawn and you right click to pick it up. you can also make log piles to store logs (which can't be put in chests) so in the early game before you can actually make chests, you end up with this little camp that has all of your items strewn about, some of which are contained in ceramic vessels, and it really gives you a good feeling of how far you've come.
And I do find myself using it even after getting chests, you can place important items on tables so you don't forget where they are, or so other people can find them easily, and it's also a handy way to store items that you need for a specific process, like a knife for leather scraping or a fire starter for pit kilns, bloomeries and blast furnaces.
That's such a bad argument. The point is that players should be both incentivized to do that and it should be accessible to do. Obviously you can always choose to do it, but if it's what the games about, it needs to actually be a focus.
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 just wish I wasn't getting rewarded with blasting myself off into smithereens and ending my run here and there ... or just getting carried by the Lightning Bolt spell ...
@@_Salok Exactly. Permadeath absolutely stifles creativity in any game, as anything besides the most optimal strategies is immediately and severely punished. That is why I recommend playing Noita with a save system, either by copying the files or through a mod enabling it.
@@pulsartsai7776 funny, I've logged an embarrassing amount of hours in Noita and never felt that way (never felt permadeath was an obstacle to creativity, or that it punishes anything but the most optimal strategies). People are different. Maybe roguelike-likes just aren't for you.
@@safe-keeper1042 I know very well that roguelikes are not for me because I hate the repetition. But Noita is different enough that I still gave it a try and I actually do not regret playing it. However, if I were to come back to it I would install some mods to make creating backups of saves less of a hassle.
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.
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 little sis had that game on her DS! I remember playing it with her several times and making some kind of shark lawyer 😂
@@emilyrln That's hilarious!
Granted most can also be solved with a dead lion as well
And therein lies the rub. In a game with infinite options, why would you not just make a win button
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.
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 was hoping someone would mention Wandersong, it's a really cool game. Music is essentially THE core mechanic of the game, and the entire plot revolves around it
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
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.
Just scrolled for a bit and ctrl+f'd ultrakill. Knew someone would've posted this for me.
but fr, Ultrakill is absolutely the kickassest, because the difficulty curve is such that you can start learning the game on easy, swap to normal once you're comfy with the first few guns, beat the campaign, perfect it, beat the pantheons or whatever, and then you *still* have hard mode left to do. And all the while you've been perfectly saddled in that feeling of topfragging on the same quake server for two hours. And that state is incredibly conducive to inventing fun tricks. It's like Ultrakill was designed not just to be full of fun tech, but so bursting with it that it's unavoidable, even if you never google anything.
@@DuckPerc well said, ultrakill def deserved a spot in the vid
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.
Guild Wars 2 had (though pretty limited) musical instruments; people created musical guilds, made sheets for in-game instruments, and organized in-game concerts. Sure, some people were using macros, but the experience of hearing live music in an MMO was always special, and it always gathered a crowd. MMOs are great for that kind of purely interactive, expression stuff!
@@Lishtenbird Simply giving people the ability to play their own kind of music ingame through a stylished MIDI keyboard seriously adds so... so much, ESPECIALLY for MMORPG's.
Passing through Limsa Lominsa in FF14, you're close to guaranteed to hear *someone* plink away with songs and have a tiny crowd just listening. Even moreso when you catch the odd music group that comes in every once in a while to play a set.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I only figured out that the whole thing actually taught you how to play around with synthesizers way later, and I watched a whole playthrough and played the game twice myself (and bought the soundtrack). If I remember correctly, which I may not, it was around when I was watching a video of someone throwing a song together that it clicked, like "oh hey this looks familiar". So anyway if you like first-person puzzle games this one is really good, very nice visual aesthetic and is like one big music piece itself.
I literally ctrl+f searched the comments for something mentioning FRACT OSC. It was one of my formative gaming experiences, and the first thing I thought of when Adam posed the question.
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.
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
There’s two great games called “Pro Tools” and “Ableton” that you can try
Would recommend, the replay value in those games is insane
I've heard of them, but the entry price is... steep, to say the least just to make sure the UX is actually tolerable.
@@Ch4pp13 piracy, however, is very cheap
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!
Sounds interesting. Have any prototypes yet?
Just a basic standalone audio programming prototype! Unreal is not very kind with trying to work with audio at that kind of level, I’ve found so far.
This is a big part of why I love tabletop RPGs so much. The stories you tell there are always personal yet shared.
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!!
"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)
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.
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.
Whenever I replace a part with one of its upgraded, stronger versions, I usually put it in the same spot as the previous version while also making slight changes to the shape of the creature's body (gradually making it larger, taller and more upright over several generations), making it look as though it's slowly evolving. I like to play around the restrictions of the game's progression system while still being creative by making a somewhat believable creature out of the parts I'm forced to use.
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
The problem with Tetris Effect (and by extent a different puzzle game by the same creator named "Lumines") is that while you are making music in the gameplay, you aren't actively composing it. Each level has a set soundscape with specific reactions to the player, and you have no control over what those sounds are or how they're timed independent of the core gameplay. That said, those games were more built on a concept that inspired Rez, the Synesthesia-style sound and light show in response to the player's gameplay.
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.
Meanwhile Warframe with Octavia letting you make your own soundtrack which plays when you use your abilities and actually somewhat affect how they work
I think that the major problem with most creative games is actually the game-part itself. Why is it that every piece of software, developed primarily for entertainment, must unequivocally be classified as a "game"? Some of my favorite "games" aren't really games at all, and would be better described as software toys. For example: Marble World, Plasma, Townscaper, Universe Sandbox, and Virtual Circuit Board, to name a few. These "games" offer very little in terms of game mechanics, but offer a great deal in terms of creativity. They exist more to be played-with than to be played, and that is the core distinction between a Toy and a Game. I know that the term "Software Toy" may be derogative to some people, but toys are important, and they are not just for children! Don't get me wrong, games are great and a lot of fun, but I feel like there ought to be more and better toys out there. There is no need to gamify everything. Just give the player a bunch of stuff to mess around with, then get out of their way!
I remember how much I loved pizza Tycoon as a kid. Building your restaurant and then adding the weirdest pizzas on to the menu.
It's not the (video game, table top rpg, movie, book)'s onus to make a creative audience. If you find the act of being creative boring, then you just shouldn't do it. If say a dungeon master gets mad at the books he got for not teaching them how to run a campaign, then they are missing the point of the book. It's one thing to not like the mechanics of games, but it's another to judge a fish on it's ability to climb trees.
As an ending note, if you truly feel like you wasted your time in Hitman by looking for the wacky or sometimes thematic approaches, that doesn't make the journey of discovering these things less impactful. Like an artist who got bored of painting, you can't blame the brush or the color of paint you have. You shouldn't blame anything. That's just how it be sometimes.
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.
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
the moment fighting games were mentioned I was simply waiting for bigband but he just didn't appear :(
Playing a game in a self chosen "pacifistic (no violence)" restriction or "vegan (only eating plants) or "just with items X and Y" are creative ways to play a game. They are a much more approachable version of speedrunning. A game needs to be open/sandboxy enough to allow these styles. Like nethack or minecraft. Games can actively support this creativity by choosing your starting gear, and some world rules and giving this set a title (whip, +1 to luck, only tools found via archeology skills: indiana jones style).
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.
20:00 at this point, tricks like that just make me smile. A reminder of a different era of the internet.
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.
Really great video, as always! Appreciate the wide variety of games you use to illustrate points in your videos!
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.
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.
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
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)
SimTunes and Electroplankton (by the same Japanese developer, incidentally) spring to mind for other games about making music. But I think the old Maxis "software toy" label probably sums it up best - there aren't really any goals outside ones you set for yourself, and ultimately that's fine.
The first game I thought of when it comes to making music would be My Singing Monsters. Although most of the islands in the game have a pre-made song that evolves as you obtain more monsters (thus adding more instruments), there is the Composer Island, which lets you compose your own songs out of a sort of monster soundfont, as well as browse the songs made by other players. Though from what I've seen, people try to recreate songs such as the Gravity Falls theme and Megalovania, or outright rickrolling you, as opposed to making original songs.
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.
1:40
Knew it all along. Rishi Sunak strangling the creativity of the gaming industry.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having intrinsic motivation to build creatively is a style of play you seem to not enjoy, but is EXACTLY why Minecraft is amazing.
Also, using "precious resources that can be used on food, weapons or transports on simple cosmetic stuff. simply, you wouldn't." Hi, That's me, I simply would, have, and frequently do. The satisfaction I get from decorating a base with the "useless" items I get is what drives me to play those types of games. Having too much extrinsic reward for sandbox mechanics isn't all that great either, I've abandoned a few terraria builds because the npcs I wanted to place together didn't like each other or the biome they were in for example
Games like Minecraft and Valheim rewards creativity through multiplayer. You are motivated to build more elaborate structures in order to show it off to friends.
I also feel like if you made a game about making music you’re ow not a game you’re basically just competing against far more optimized DAWs like GarageBand ableton or fl studio
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 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.
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"
and in french it'd be "Passe-pardeux" which is even worse =p
Honestly, such names would also just be annoying to talk about. Like, it's fun to go saying it should've been named that when you're online and using text, or when the game isn't actually called that. But imagine trying to talk to someone verbally about a game whose sequel is pronounced the same way as its predecessor.
@@AdmiralTails ...it's a bit funny that in this particular case, having "2" in the name might've made more people pronounce the name correctly than. Some people just do not have any idea of how French works, and aren't familiar with the term itself either.
i cant believe a screen transition of all things was foreshadowing the end of the video. absolute madlad
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.
Punk-o-matic 2 -- make your own songs (using premade loops) and play gigs
One of my favorite flash games in high school
Definitely. When I hear "games about making music", this is the one I think of
I suspect that the moment videogames delve into this territory, they morph into something we stop considering a 'game' traditionally. For example, want to have a game about making music... how is that functionally different from a DAW?
Want to make a game about crafting stories... how is that functionally different from a Word Processor?
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 :)
Convenient but annoying answer: take up art as a hobby: (3D, painting, pixel art, photography) and let your own life story as an artist become a game of surprise, challenge, success. Maybe you need a TTRPG style rulebook to drive you to value the internal satisfaction of creation. I don't think games can create rules that speak to everyone's desire to express themselves.
But in regarss to what you actually talked about 😅 factory games are a great example. The game doesn't deliberately punish ineffeciency, but if you can't efficiently navigate your factory or fix problems, it's hopeless to continue. Organizing the architecture of your factory, by making it look coherent and appealing, is a dopamine hit that drives you to improve. The creative challenge increases as your standards to improve your visuals increases. I love playing Satisfactory and Minecraft like this, taking reference images and using them to build structures for my areas. Love that stuff.
One game where you actually DO make music is Sound Shapes! Or, well, WAS Sound Shapes. They sadly shut the servers off for publishing custom levels recently, but the level creator had the ingenious idea of tying progression in a little collect-athon 2D platformer to musical notes in a song. The further right they are, the later they play, and the higher or lower they are, the higher or lower their key! It acts sort of like a simple loop-creator, where you build songs by making platforming challenges (in which every object you put in a level also makes cute musical sound bites upon touching it), with every room being another set of notes that get quieter and eventually stop playing after moving far enough away, allowing for dynamic progression in the song just by the act of moving through the level! It was like the Little Big Planet of rhythm games, and I was devastated to see it go out in a similar manner.
3:02
EXACTLY what I was gonna say. Video games are STIMULATORS. Either free form in some kind of creative mode with no resource restrictions, or a rigid scoring system.
If you want to experiment with cooking recipes, go to the grocery store, buy some weird shit, through it together, and if you like it you like it.
Same with music, buy a $10 harmonica or recorder, and blow to your heart's content.
But if you want to build a Castle? A city? A tank? Or an army? These are a tad out of touch to the common man and as such, there's a market for selling the fantasy or simulation of doing so. There's no shortage of racing games, but an absolute lack of "traffic safety simulator" games and that's the reason. :P
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
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
Even if someone made a music composition game where the dev included every theory, every combination, and everything about music, just so the game can reward player for doing certain notes on certain beats or off beats, where the game would go, Nice Harmony or, Nice Solo, or whatever complements the game could have.
Once it turns into a game, with scores and rewards, someone will exploit the system and create the "perfect" song. That's why even just as a concept, because it's a game that can be replayed and can be analyzed, Rewarding Creativity is not that great of an idea.
I forgot the exact details but I heard this story from GMTK, three groups of students were divided to do a creative task. G1 is promised a reward after finishing the task, G2 is the control group so they did not receive a reward. The 1st group did better work initially compared to the 2nd, However, after a week or so, there was a visible drop in creative effort on the 1st group, maybe because there's no reward so there's no need to work for anything. The aforementioned 3rd group however, is a group that was given a reward as a surprise at the end of the task. In the proceeding weeks, they have made more effort in being creative.
All I'm saying is that with how repetitive media is, if we just reward people always, they might just become expectant and become less creative. Doing more harm than good. I feel like games right now are doing a good job with just enabling people who want to experiment be able to do what they want.
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.
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.
Great video! Fun story: I'm a composer, and I recently made my first video game. Just for fun on the menu screen, I added in 5 different tones for each of the 5 menu options (pentatonic scale--all notes sound good together). I was surprised that a lot of people who played the game commented how much fun they had just messing around in the menu, making music. I think video games need more tools available to the player for sandbox creativity. More games like Little Big Planet, Soundscapes, etc.
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!
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.
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.
As far as music games go, I'd like to mention Fuser, which was basically a music mashup sandbox from Harmonix (Rock Band devs). Basically it's a rhythm game with a focus on mashing together bits of up to 4 songs at once, with tons of room for player expression and over 200 songs before the game was delisted. Yes, it had Never Gonna Give You Up.
Players could record their mixes and share them to the server, where other players could listen and rate them. Harmonix hosted regular themed mix events with in-game prizes. The community around this game was super cool.
This is why I prefer playing a weird character on lower difficulty over an optimised character on a harder difficulty. If I want a real challenge, I play a weird character on a harder difficulty.
I think customising your character is its own reward. A lot of appeal is playing the character you want to play, so you want to design them. It's also a feature players often want to be completely free from gameplay benefits, as that allowed customisation without regard for efficiency. Fallout games, Soul Calibur games, SF6, and many others don't _need_ character customisation, but players crave it. So it's added.
Creativity needs a human to judge it. In PvP games, you have a human opponent who "judges" you. In games where you have some creative input, you're the one judging (and maybe other players).
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.
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 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 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.