Games and the Creativity Crisis
Newsweek has an article on the fact that “CQ” is falling for American students. CQ is a measure developed by E. P. Torrance that seems to be a pretty good predictor for creative success in basically any field. In other words, since around 1990, American kids have been getting measurably less creative.
Alas, early in the article, we see games getting blamed:
It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children. [emphasis mine]
Is this in fact the case? After all, the rest of the article (and the rest of the research in the field) seems to suggest that handing students problems and obliging them to think about possible solutions, is a much better way to go than rote memorization. And that is what the best games do.
But it is also definitely true that many games these days “come with the answers” — there’s only one way to solve the puzzles they present — a “through line” that was created by the designers. Could games like this, as opposed to ones that provide truly emergent answers, be an issue in terms of creative development?
One interesting point that is mentioned in the article is that the creation of paracosms during childhood; apparently the creation of detailed imaginary worlds when you’re 10 has a high correlation with eventually winning a MacArthur “Genius” grant! This of course is a common activity for anyone who got into roleplaying at that age. But does immersing yourself in someone else’s paracosm provide the same, or lesser, or no benefits in terms of developing your own creative juices? Should I be less concerned with my daughter’s seemingly endless sessions of what she terms “LARPing” with her friends (not really formal LARPing as such, more like collaborative unstructured roleplay sessions), and more concerned with my son’s total immersion in the Pokemon universe?
Personally, I have always found creativity to be all about juxtaposing concepts and ideas from different fields and places, making unexpected connections. But many of the markers that are described in the article certainly fit my childhood. I also played a lot of games — and I used them as an outlet for creativity. Games have changed a lot since then, though.
It does seem like it behooves us as game developers to at least attempt to make games that encourage creative thinking, if not out of some sense of civic or moral obligation, then as a way of “paying it forward” — something made us creative enough to make the games in the first place, so we shouldn’t hog all the fun. 🙂
59 Responses to “Games and the Creativity Crisis”
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Agreed re: creativity … i’ve always been called a creative person, and i’ve long felt like a fraud, because all i ever did was to combine interesting ideas from many different sources into something fresh. i was less a creative person, and more a mash-up artist. Is that what creativity is? Because try as i might, i doubt i’ll ever cook up a story idea that hasn’t been covered in at least three different episodes of The Simpsons.
As far as playing video games goes, i’ve always found them to be incredibly inspiring. But i’m becoming acutely aware that the world is made up of consumers and creators, and what benefits one person is a poison to another. When i play a game for an entire weekend, i’m learning, and imagining all the ways i can pay homage to or improve the experience. But i’m a creator. Perhaps when a consumer plays the same game, he’s just keeping the couch warm?
– Ryan
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster. Raph Koster said: New blog post: Games and the Creativity Crisis https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/07/12/games-and-the-creativity-crisis/ […]
I constructed many independent paracosms when I was a kid, some of which I played with and within for years. How do I claim my grant?
Richard
I think the trend can also be linked to the almost complete abolishment of creative subjects in schools as they focus on tests and grades rather than actual education.
See this talk for why: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Personally I would more tend to blame parents who swaddle their kids from birth to graduation. Risk-taking and experimentation are the heart of creativity — by that measure, the only risk taking many kids get to exercise is *in* games.
Kids don’t get to play with strange kids, or outside playdates. They don’t get to play in their own back yard without an adult hovering. They don’t make mud pies. They are kept from doing “inappropriate play” that falls outside of PC boundaries (oh, no dear, don’t point your finger like a gun! Oh, no, you can’t play [protagonist] and [antagonist] — that’s not nice!”)
They aren’t allowed to stub their toes without a parent making it into a medical emergency. They learn to color inside the lines, and be careful of their Permanent Record, not only from teachers but from parents. They are so meticulously molded, that they can’t see the box to be able to think out of it, because they’ve never seen the light of day break through the lid.
At an entrepreneur meeting here in the Boston area, someone speculated that we’ll be getting our best inventors, engineeers, scientists, and entrepreneurs in this coming generation from “at-risk” kids, because those are the only kids who have to learn to think for themselves before they enter the workforce.
I think a lot of it has to do with the decline of reading. When you read a story you fill in the blanks. You are not shown what Gandalf looks like, you have to imagine him. When you read complex and difficult material you can slow down to absorb the ideas at a pace that suits you. I read a rather difficult philosophy book not long ago and it took me as long as half an hour per page. Most of that half an hour was spent gazing out of the window thinking my way through the concepts and logic and trying to relate abstract philosophy to real life situations I could imagine.
I actually think games are rather healthier than TV or film. Games like reading require you to do something, they don’t lay it all out for you.
I do think that the rather flip “spending time in front of the TV or playing video games” as if they were the same thing is not a solid or scientific logical contruct.
Some games encourage creativity, and others don’t. UO has art, both planned for (blank books) and emergent (backpack mosaics). City of Heroes has an adventure designer. Both games (along with Champions Online and others) have free or readily-available costume elements that allow and encourage you to create a unique look (as opposed to pushing you into collecting and wearing the latest uber-armor from the latest expansion). Second Life is perhaps the epitome: almost everything in the world is created by players (although the byzantine scripting language, archaic system architecture, and prim limitations mitigate against its use as a gaming platform).
It’s unfortunately rare to find an MMO that encourages creative problem solving. You have to defeat the boss monster to rescue the Princess. You can’t outsmart, bribe, bluff, or otherwise circumvent the fight. The best you can do is find a tactic to defeat the boss at minimum risk, but odds are when the developers learn of your tactic they’ll nerf it as ‘unbalanced’ or ‘an exploit’.
Games have the potential to harness the creativity of the players to drive the narrative and help shape the world. When that potential is realized, it becomes very difficult for critics to claim that videogames harm creativity.
Creatives push rules, play with rules, break rules and make new rules. My experience with some heavy game players is they get emotional when the work environment rules begin to shift or are abandoned and they become combative in response, not creative. Just an n of one, but I believe it has a lot to do with the specific game genre. Watching my son, when he was playing straight up Mario Brothers kinds of games, his grades fell and his creativity fell off. When he began to build levels, that trend reversed.
My daughter is a reader. Her writing skills went from sub par to excellent. I doubt games is solely responsible for the overall claims in the article, but I don’t doubt that lack of unstructured play time and play that involves a healthy amount of imagination stunts creativity. A blank space is the second requirement for creative action.
Think about the difference in creativity between UO and WoW. WoW has something close to none, while UO has always been alive with creativity.
Custom housing, roof top art, backpack art, and take a look at this.
I don’t know the age or region this player is from. But the first question that comes to mind is, is it that kids are less creative, or is it that they simply haven’t had the outlets and opportunities?
Is this a good place to add my constant request for “worldly” games?
Hmm, anyone know if Farmvilles offers the ability and has people designing garden like fields that are appealing to the eye? Garden art?
Agree, Raph, it is not the games per se, but rather that they are so structured and linear. I was a huge Lego fan as a child, but the whole “kitting” that Lego has done with Bionicles, Star Wars, and such has totally left me cold.
How many of our games allow any meaningful creativity by the players? How many of our toys?
(at least with Pokemon, there is some play and collecting strategy, so your son is PROBABLY OK 🙂 ).!
The Newsweek article is written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of NurtureShock. For authors of a New York Times Best Seller, defining watching TV and playing video games as uncreative activities seems like a rather significant blunder. By that logic, shouldn’t reading a book and listening to music also be uncreative activities? I doubt these authors would recommend that children read less…
Amaranthar, many of the farming games have significant decoration/world building components.
Interesting. If we take the Flynn effect seriously, kids are smarter today than they’ve ever been, yet less creative?
Take a look at this: http://jontaplin.com/2010/07/12/explain-this/
The article cited studies claiming computers did not positively affect the education of the poor. The commenters debate why that might be. There isn’t enough there to draw a conclusion except that the trends seem to indicate the gaps are growing. I wonder what the creativity distribution would look like.
Back in about 1980 I found myself trying to explain to a TV producer why programming video games was creative and not violent, unlike playing them. (Yes, I know, but consider the state of games at the time.)
He actually thought that programming computers must be in the same class of simulated violence as playing the games.
By the same token, presumably filmmaking is violent and non-creative, too… think of all those violent movies.
WoW has arguably become less creative over its lifetime – when I started raiding Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, each of the guilds on our server had their own tactics for a number of the boss fights, all of which were variants on a theme but all of which worked. Later dungeons became a lot more prescriptive in their design with such things as use of enrage timers to prevent ‘slow and steady’ approaches.
WoW also lacks any real encouragement for roleplay in its mechanics (no player housing, very limited cosmetic outfits, you can’t even add a surname to your character for crying out loud). I’ve seen some quite creative players in WoW in terms of RP or organising live events, but they’ve pretty much had to fight the game design to do so.
Is there a “crisis” or is there merely a declining score on an old test of dubious validity? There is actually a good deal of debate about the predictive validity of TTCT (which I guess is what the magazine article authors are referring to when they write “CQ”, perhaps a signal that this article is more creative than scientific).
[…] playing videogames are considered here as a similar activity, or so it seems. The game developer Raph Koster reacts against this, not in order to defend videogames as such, but explaining that there is a whole […]
Hi,
I wasn’t sure if I should – so please forgive me for barging in on your conversation. But I just had to reply.
I think, Raph, that you are dead-on in talking about how creativity is about pulling string together in unexpected connections. On the days I dare to say I was being creative, that’s what I am doing as well.
Regarding TV and gaming, as we said, we do not know why Kim’s analysis of creativity scores finds them dropping. However, as to why gaming and TV are suspects we had to mention. . . .
Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas has studied children’s media use, finding that for every 1 hour a kid spends in front of the television, his time spent in creative activities drops by about 10%. Every single creativity scholar we spoke to was critical of children’s heavy media use. They are, as a couple commenters observed, kids who simply never have to work through boredom.
As for computer games, I had a long conversation about them with Michele Root-Bernstein, lead scholar on the study of paracosms (those imaginary worlds). And I specifically asked if kids’ building imaginary play spun off of movies, books, games, counted. Yes, she said: if they add new characters, new events to playing Luke Skywalker or Nancy Drew, that might still count as a paracosm. So, I continued, what about time spent in role-playing games, whether they were online games or D&D in a kid’s room with friends? No, she replied. The professor was adamant that time actually playing the games themselves would not count as a creative activity.
The reason is that as long as you are playing by somebody else’s rules – that’s not considered creative play. Even games that say “Decorate your house,” “Make an avatar,” don’t pass this hurdle because they decide what you get to be “creative” about; it’s the creator of the game who decides when and if you get to be creative, and exactly what constraints can be put on your creativity.
I even specifically asked about things like Second Life and SimCity – where the whole premise of the game was to build out things yourself – and she still said no – that came closer, but as long as the reference point of the game (e.g., build a house, get money, etc) was defined, it wasn’t going to be truly creative.
It’s important to remember the scientific definition of creativity is something must be original and useful. The creator of the game is certainly very creative. But the scholars’ view is that it takes much more than playing a game to be creative as well.
As for having lots of paracosms and not yet winning a genius grant, I’m right there with you, Richard.
Oh, I also did want to thank you very much for hosting such a thoughtful conversation about the piece – and that goes to those who’ve commented as well.
Best,
Ashley
it’s really so simple
use machines…. become machines.. and PS. machines arent creative.
maybe oneday.. but wholl be creative enough to design them the way we’re going;)
this is a media issue, one is what they eat…
we eat electric/money media, have as a culture for 50 years…those who will start the games/tv/ comics blah blahs just dont quite get it.
we have become our mediated machines…on loop/repeat.
“But it is also definitely true that many games these days “come with the answers” — there’s only one way to solve the puzzles they present — a “through line” that was created by the designers. Could games like this, as opposed to ones that provide truly emergent answers, be an issue in terms of creative development?”
YES!!! THIS!!!!
Every encounter/experience put together should elicit some kind of response…that’s the whole art discussion, right? Physical/physiological/emotional/cognitive response of some kind is desired, that makes it interesting, it gets attention. Every artist has to get past that point where they want to beat it into everyone’s head “how to interpret it” and let them discover what they want.
When it comes to games, especially on the subject of enforced linear sequences, you can’t demand every player be in the mood for what these encounters entail in that exact order. This is why I get more and more frustrated when the linearity is also a vertical progression scheme.
That’s without even getting into exclusively servicing the playerbase with the highest non-aptitude related barriers to entry.
It must be games because it sure isn’t the fact that the first thing to go when a school budget gets cut is the liberal arts teachers and extracurricular activities. And it sure isn’t the oppression of public school that practically beats the creativity out of you by punishing deviation from the so-called norm. Uh, you solved the problem a different way? Well, idiot, that’s not how the book says you should do it. Now, do it again, and do it the way the book says this time!
Oops! I was ranting. (Public “education” is a pet peeve of mine. My mom was a teacher for almost 3 decades.)
Maybe the Internet will save us. http://www.khanacademy.org/
Ashley, thanks so much for stopping by!
I am not one to grant automatic infallibility to researchers… 🙂 to be honest, the comment about roleplaying in your room not counting because there is too much structure provided to be a bit of a facile construction. Would the complex rules that governed the fictional world of the Bronte sisters mean that they were somehow less creative the longer they engaged in it and trapped themselves in previous constructs?
I note especially that working within constraints is a common trick to spur creativity!
My suspicion is that we may be speaking past each other when using games as examples. The roleplay my daughter is doing is overtly freeform, for example. And yet, a LOT of the D&D that i did as a kid was equally freeform even though it existed within the same campaign as the more structured dice rolling parts. Similarly, while many treat Second Life as having a goal, many treat WoW as NOT having one. Is the environment truly that prescriptive? And if so, at what point do real world strictures (you can role-play, but be done by dinner!) impinge upon the definition?
Ashley:
Unbridled creativity is not useful. Talk to any entrepreneur. Constraints encourage creative solutions. The criticism that some games do not provide for problem solving is legitimate, but not all games are so linear. Constraints are not the problem. I think a more reasonable argument would be that players who overextend their stay in any environment, whose limited or unchanging constraints they have mastered, do not provide themselves sufficient time to apply their KSAs elsewhere. Of course, the underlying assumption is that a game can be so addictive that players will not move on even after they have achieved mastery.
How many game developers started out as gamers? Pretty much all of them. I am sure you are familiar with the various models of the creative process. As interactive experiences and as a medium, games can serve as inspiration for music, machinima, fan art, fan fiction, fan sites, mods, guides, etc. For other players, games can serve as inspiration for economic activities. And that’s just video games. Games play a significant role in shaping human society and have played that same role for a very, very long time. Perhaps your professor should be reminded that the actual playing of a game happens outside the game world?
Ashley:
Unbridled creativity is not useful. Talk to any entrepreneur. Constraints encourage creative solutions. The criticism that some games do not provide for problem solving is legitimate, but not all games are so linear. Constraints are not the problem. I think a more reasonable argument would be that players who overextend their stay in any environment, whose limited or unchanging constraints they have mastered, do not provide themselves sufficient time to apply their KSAs elsewhere. Of course, the underlying assumption is that a game can be so addictive that players will not move on even after they have achieved mastery.
How many game developers started out as gamers? Pretty much all of them. I am sure you are familiar with the various models of the creative process. As interactive experiences and as a medium, games can serve as inspiration for music, machinima, fan art, fan fiction, fan sites, mods, guides, etc. For other players, games can serve as inspiration for economic activities. And that’s just video games. Games play a significant role in shaping human society and have played that same role for a very, very long time. Perhaps your professor should be reminded that the actual playing of a game happens outside the game world?
I’ve been an avid gamer since the mid-1970s, so you can count me among the staunch defenders of this entertainment medium. My only concern for kids (my own included) is that I do agree that videogames and television (and other such visual media) DO provide such low-effort, near-immediate gratification that high-effort, delayed-reward activities gradually become unappealing. Obviously balance and moderation are key here, but having seen how fast the effect can take over a child, I can’t help but side with the camp that cautions us to severely restrict these types of stimuli for our children.
If offering constructive comments and feedback is considered “barging in”, I submit that we’re no longer having a conversation. Welcome 🙂
One things I did with SimCity, when I discovered the land editor, was to create a valentine for my wife from islands.
As for Second Life, it has all the defined reference points of a shipping crate in an empty field. There are a handful of rules (haphazardly enforced) to keep residents off each other’s toes, but that’s true in any play environment.
Every expressive medium, including freeform improvisational play, has limitations enforced by the medium itself, and sometimes by the audience and other artists. The difference between a good artist and a brilliant artist is the ability to know the medium so intimately as to be able to transcend its limits in such a way that you expand the boundries of the art form.
Over a decade ago, my friends and I created a theatre company in Ultima Online, the Golden Brew Players. I write and compose music that my wife performs in Second Life. There is a growing interest in SL and other virtual worlds as places to create and display art installations that are impossible or impractical to construct in real life.
I’ll grant that none of this is child’s play. But to state that game play can’t be creative, even by the strictest scientific definition, is demonstrably false. I think your contact is more limited by her preconceptions than players are by the restrictions of the virtual environment.
But if you swap out “can’t be” for “usually isn’t”, then we have an unmet need and a useful direction for further exploration.
And please forgive me if I’m only repeating what Raph just said, in my typical longwinded fashion, but my experiences bear out his observations on this subject.
Hi, Raph,
I completely agree that working in a constraints can be a catalyst to creativity. I say that having done writing exercises, but also knowing that even the Torrance Tests sort of use that construct – here’s a figure – now let’s see what you’ve done with it.
But here, one of the main points of scholars’ research is that kids need to develop creative self-efficacy. And Dr Root-Bernstein’s point is that the value of fantasy play for kids – the paracosm specifically – is in making up your own rules. And that “I am in charge of my destiny – no one else” teaches that creative self-efficacy. And that more it’s someone else’s worlds you are playing with, the less you are learning creative self-efficacy. So Root-Bernstein’s research also finds that the real pop of paracosms usually happens in solitary or perhaps one or two other people. She has seen classroom size versions of paracosms, which may help teach other things – empathy, social skills – but it’s not the same.
As for the Brontes – their group paracosm is probably the most famous there is. But they themselves decided what they were doing, and setting up the rules, and then deciding how to respond. That’s exactly the point. They did it.
I’m not saying that all gaming is bad or that kids should never play them. I’m not saying that gaming can’t be enjoyable. But there is always a cost and benefit to every activity. It’s always a choice; if you do one thing, you aren’t doing another. I’m emailing you now instead of exercising or having breakfast with a friend. There’s value in our having a dialogue – which I’m happy to do – but I’m not going also argue that it does anything about my flab. Indeed, I recognize that the exercise might have more long term benefits, but oh well.
And right now, there isn’t any research that says that time spent gaming is increasing kids’ creativity. As we said in our article, that doesn’t mean that we know it is to blame, either. We don’t yet have the causes identified.
We just know that developing kids’ creative self-efficacy is really important. And that the scientists would rather have kids spend time developing that on their own. They’d rather have you had a kid a plain old block or sofa cushion than realistic fancy toys or videogame. Because the more blank the slate, the more kids will be forced to come up on their own with something that is interesting to them.
I think Yukon Sam nails the issue when he says,
Games aren’t creative, people are creative. People can find avenues for creativity in the most arid and restrictive of environments. The question is, how does a game encourage them?
For example, many puzzle games essentially take the form of a challenge between the designer and the player, where the player has to match the creativity of the designer in solving the puzzle. “I’ll be creative in making it, and you have to be as creative as I was in order to find the solution.” It’s encouraging – it’s a challenge.
Even if the puzzle eventually only has one answer, it can spur a great amount of creative thought, if the solution is deep.
Does a game force creativity?
Does a game reward creativity?
(When I say a game, this also means the culture of the game and the social interactions with others while playing. If you happen to play as mechanical a game as tiddlywinks with creative people, you will able to find new ways of tiddlywinking.)
@Ashley
Having an externally fixed reference point doesn’t preclude creativity – it only directs it. As Raph has said, constraints can serve to focus creativity and make it easier to be creative – in doing something specific.
If you play an RPG the way everyone else does, of course that’s not being creative. The question is, does the game encourage you to play it any other way?
And I specifically asked if kids’ building imaginary play spun off of movies, books, games, counted. Yes, she said: if they add new characters, new events to playing Luke Skywalker or Nancy Drew, that might still count as a paracosm. So, I continued, what about time spent in role-playing games, whether they were online games or D&D in a kid’s room with friends? No, she replied. The professor was adamant that time actually playing the games themselves would not count as a creative activity.
…hold up. Adding “new characters, new events” counts, but playing RPGs where you.. add new characters and act out new events doesn’t?
What?
I mean, sure. I’m the first to say that a lot of RPGs are just stories with a veneer of chaos injected by a D-Pad and the occasional branching mechanism. But classic D&D should count, even if you throw out all video games. Could someone take this professor to their local Borders and flip through the second chapter of every core rulebook in the RPG stack? It’s the one labelled “Character Creation”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tg55pdNMxw&feature=player_embedded
Another viewpoint.
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@Morgan, @Scott –
Just a brief point. In my five+ years as a reporter on the beat of the science of child development, we simply can’t use adult experiences and understandings and presume they are accurate reference points for kids.
Please keep in mind: we are talking about children’s development of the creative process, from a zero starting point and moving on down the line. Your point, and Raph’s early point, about creative constraints maybe completely true for a 26 year old, or even a 16 year old – and I did agree with him – but that doesn’t mean that it will work for a 4 year old or an 6 year old or an 8 year old. They’ll each have completely different developmental needs.
A four year old might do well with a creative constraint – but on the other hand “draw in the lines” may frustrate him so entirely that he refuses to draw. I’m not saying that’s a definite – I’m just saying that you are taking something as a given that I haven’t seen evidence in support for across developmental periods.
The D&D example is interesting because the real question isn’t whether there are rules, but whether those rules are visible. It’s often said that a good GM is one who lets you improvise and make you think you’ve changed his scenario, while in fact he’s just hoodwinking you into getting back in his rails in another way.
The person who comes up with that decision in D&D can be as creative as a child imagining an entire new world. The GM can accept anything he/she says, and there’s complete creative freedom for the player even if it usually doesn’t make as much of an impact as he assumes.
A video game where you know what the creative choices are might indeed limit your creativity (even if it develops other skills such as creative problem-solving within constraints, which is very valuable – someone who has none of that but plenty of creativity would be rightly seen as naive by others), but I can imagine cases where the rails are sufficiently hidden that it’s actually pretty close.
More importantly… consider also that a good RPG won’t let you know in advance what choices will be opened up by another, so you need to engage in creative thinking. You need to create a paracosm by imagining future events and characters for every possible decision – the act of speculative thinking here is essentially creative. Ideally you’d have to do it one level removed (what would the developers do VS what would I imagine the world to be like if it was real) which has advantages and disadvantages. In practice that is very valuable in itself, and nobody always thinks about it one level removed so you develop both skill-sets.
I sincerely believe the world would be a better place if more games forced you to make tough choices where the consequences *aren’t obvious* so you’re forced to think about it yourself (creating a speculative paracosm), and if they encouraged players to be explorers, versus simple achievers, killers, or socializers (while still pleasing those to give them a chance to discover the former). Oh well.
From an evolutionary perspective, creativity and imagination are nothing more or less sublime than the ability to extrapolate from past experience and project “what ifs”. If you can imagine that there might be a monster behind that rock, you’ve got a competitive advantage to the tribemate that mocks your wild imaginings… and then stumbles into the den of a hungry predator.
Games are practice for applying creativity. You can play chess by understanding the rules of the game and how each piece moves. You win chess by imagining what the board might look like five or ten moves into the future. The game teaches you how to apply your creativity to problem-solving.
Art is communicating your “what ifs” to other people, so they (hopefully) can make use of them. Alternatively, art is a form of game (the inverse of a standing premise on this blog); your meaning may be obscured or abstract, and the challenge to the viewer is to harness his/her own creativity to find meaning.
I propose that all three are necessary to healthy development. The issue is that our current crop of videogames are (with a scant handful of notable and wonderful exceptions) not holding up their end of the bargain. They don’t provide sufficient opportunity for the player to exercise creativity in the course of regular play.
But I still reject the assertion that the rules and constraints of a formal game are INHERENTLY detrimental to creativity. We just need more games that encourage the exercise of creativity, and I see the gaming industry trending (slowly) in that direction.
If one concedes that evolutionary processes are resource consumers and we tend to evolve along lines that either restrain and replenish resources or discover/find/filch new resources, one expects evolution to create new patterns of behavior and new cognitive patterns. I think there is a case to be made that at the extremes, rails actively restrict creativity in such a way as no evolution is occurring (no new features or functions); instead what we see is crabwalk change (play enough and the reflexes improve, some cognitive functions are sharpened, but again there is no feature emergence. It is even possible that habituation of game play inhibits evolution by increasing resistance to change and increasging brutal response when change is forced (gestalt popping).
I’ve been having a separate conversation about the notion that game play could replace religion if the requirement that a supernatural being is part of the activity (the single discriminating characteristic of religion). A whole different topic but related to notions of directed evolution over culture. We used to replace gods comparatively often until the emergence of monotheism which seems to act as a stabilizing domain attractor.
“if the requirement that a supernatural being is part of the activity” is dropped (not substitutes like the Dungeon Master, but real belief in a deity).
len:
A religion is “a set of beliefs concerned with explaining the origins and purposes of the universe, usu. involving belief in a supernatural creator and offering guidance in ethics and morals” (Wordsmyth). Both belief in a supernatural creator and offering guidance in ethics and morals are optional.
I don’t think so, Morgan. I assert that the belief in a supernatural being of some form (may not be a triple omni god; religions vary on that) is the sine qua non of a religion as all of the other aspects are shared by other activities. By the way, a religion is more than a set of beliefs; it includes practices, rituals, sacraments, etc. for which paralels are found in game play and development.
One can speculate that the same cognitive patterns applied in paracosm building are found in religious evolution.
There is a book you may want to look into: Mind and God discussing the cognitive science of religion.
Evolution can create new patterns of behavior, but as a general rule, evolution is sloooooooow. Evolution produced a primate brain capable of creative thought, but the amount of time that has passed since the first truly creative thought and now has been, in evolutionary terms, a heartbeat. The Information Age doesn’t even register yet.
I invoke evolution to get to a brain capable of imagination, but I wouldn’t expect any genetic shift since the advent of video games.
Now if we’re talking about Richard Dawkin’s “memes” (discrete elements of information that behave in a fashion similar to genes) the time scale accelerates drastically, and what len is saying holds true.
On the other hand, if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, perhaps childhood development is just a continuation of the process…. oh damn, I’ve gone off the geek end again. Where are my pills?
@len, morgan, not to keep pushing things too far off topic, but trying to define what religion means is kind of like trying to define what art means. I’ve got family that’s gone the religious studies track, and if you ask them to try to define what religion is in any objective sense they’ll tell you it can’t be done. There are plenty of counter-examples and contradictions. Any definition you can come up with will exclude something typically viewed as a religion, or include things typically not seen as religions.
So it’s best not to assume there’s any specific defining characteristics at all, but to treat everything on a case by case basis. Nothing is required, but you’ll know it when you see it.
len, I would also warn against an overestimation of the benefits of evolution. It only optimizes to local maxima, not global maxima. New patterns of behavior and new cognitive patterns cannot be expected. Evolutionary processes do not imply them, only that if they happen to occur, for some *other* reason, that they will be selected for on the basis of their ability to survive.
@Ashley – you make a good point that children are not adults, and that games designed to foster creativity may not be effective across all age ranges.
But constraints still apply to all age ranges. When we give a child a piece of paper and a crayon, we are constraining them by dictating a medium. Are we stifling their creativity, or encouraging it? But the paper focuses them by suggesting a viable avenue for expressing what’s going on within.
When we say, “Can you draw a picture?” we’re constraining them further, by implying that they should *draw* something. Saying, ‘draw’ might actually be detrimental – A precocious child might use the crayon to punch holes in the paper and make a picture via cut-out.
@Yukon Sam
If the current games are falling down so badly at encouraging creativity, why are people still playing them? (This is an honest question – the fact that people play games in an uncreative fashion implies that there’s another aspect to gaming that is not creative practice. Maybe this means that what’s going on is not true gaming and is closer to watching a movie.)
@eorlin and yukon: This will go afield fast, but I’m referring to directed evolution where it isn’t a matter of accidents but planning and so is not nearly as slow as evolution in the wild. The book I’m citing takes the position that belief in a supernatural being as the one characteristic required of a religion to considered such. Otherwise it’s just another cult or… game. In a directed evolution, the problems of local minima and optimizations are not as dramatic. One could consider memes and Dawkins as other voices in that debate although Dawkins gets far too much credit for the idea.
While reading on that topic and responding to people who realize some changes imply cultural shifts as well as economic movements, I was struck by the parallels in paracosm building and religious movements as constructions that possibly rely on the same cognitive structures that evolve in the timeframe of about 60 to 11k years ago. The author of “Minds and Gods” a book dealing with a cognitive science of religion makes points on that topic. A question I’ve been considering is does the same creative processes that enable one to develop a game operate similarly or are the same, what is the impact of non-local virtual movements with paracosms as their means to mingle and hybridize on cultural processes such as religion and education.
It’s a good question. I’m certainly not refraining from playing games with linear quest lines and predestined conclusions.
A cynical answer is that most modern computer games are little more than Skinner boxes. You run the maze, you push the lever, you get the food pellet. It’s less a game than a conditioning experiment. The fact that you know you’re a lab rat doesn’t mean you want the pellet any less.
I’m not quite that cynical. I certainly don’t think most designers intend to build a Skinner box, Zynga notwithstanding. So perhaps the goal should be to make sure the designers have the right toolkit to break the players out of the box.
To relax? Have fun? Hang out?
Some of us are obsessively creative. Other’s just want a song with a good beat they can dance to.
Now where is my cheese, dagnabbit?!?
End Creativity Crisis- TEACHING FOR CREATIVE OUTCOMES: WHY WE DON’T, HOW WE ALL CAN
Manzo, Anthony V.
Clearing House; May/Jun98, Vol. 71 Issue 5, p287, 4p
[email protected]
It is ironic that the act of passing on prior inventions and discoveries, or acquired knowledge, seems to diminish the inclination to think creatively. Clearly, the mind is empowered by acquiring the experiences and knowledge accumulated by our predecessors; however, it also can be powerfully constrained by the way in which knowledge is transmitted. In point of fact, there appears to be a host of subtle but pervasive factors woven through the fabric of traditional schooling that tend actually to discourage the type of critical analysis–the thoughtful articulation and decomposition of a problem–that leads to constructive thinking. I take constructive thinking to be the composition and assembly of possible solutions, including some that may need to be invented. Constructive thinking, then, includes both “critical” and “creative” intellectual processes.
Factors That Discourage Constructive Thinking
Think, if you will, of these realities of traditional schooling:
The problems that are most in need of creative solutions often are socially “off limits,” and hence difficult even to define and articulate. (President Clinton’s call for a national dialogue on race and racism, for example, has become a national nonevent.)
Schools are set up to transmit existing knowledge; this goal tends to conflict with any real attempt to generate new knowledge.
Students, by definition, are quasi-ignorant, and hence, it doesn’t seem logical to invite them to think critically, let alone creatively, about what they don’t yet fully know about or presumably understand.
As teachers, we have not been educated in a climate conducive to creative thinking ourselves, and so we are understandably unsure of how to encourage or even to allow it.
Most current academic tests reward convergent, or “within the box,” thinking, often to the exclusion of divergent, or “outside the box,” thinking.
The addition of constructive thinking to the equation defining academic success changes the system of ranking students (Ratanakarn 1992) and, hence, the current academic power structure.
Key Ingredient to Promoting the Constructive Process
It is possible, however, to raise expectations and teach for creative outcomes. The key that most often opens the door to constructive thinking simply is to reach up and ask for it. This simple suggestion may not seem to be a very satisfying solution, but it is a reasonable place to start. A cursory look at schooling, most anywhere on the globe, reveals that there is hardly lip service paid to this constructive, or knowledge building, process. The closest that even the professional literature in education comes to valuing this process is to praise the importance of some related higher-order mental processes such as “transfer of training” (application), critical thinking, or the evaluation of the ideas of others. Even discovery learning approaches, so popular for a while, have tended to fade in importance, perhaps because there was no constructive thinking context to support them. It is very rare to find a school curriculum guide or a professional organization’s accreditation standards or a blue-ribbon commission’s call for educational reform that makes constructive thinking–especially creativity–a major objective, let alone something to be practiced, with commensurate methodologies and assessment protocols. That is especially unfortunate because there is considerable reason to believe that the simple gesture of establishing creative thinking as a target can bring quick and impressive results, even from the self-declared “uncreative.”
Here now are some largely nonintegrative, though sound, suggestions for promoting creative thinking. Note how easily many of these suggestions could be integrated into the curriculum if there were a collective will to do so.
Creative Thinking Activities
These stand-alone activities can establish a climate and a schema for creative thinking in most classrooms. Initially, they might be done on a fixed basis, say for the first twenty minutes of class on “Thinking Thursdays.” It is especially useful to explain to youngsters why such activities are being undertaken. To do so tends to ignite pupil interest in and contributions to the overall process as well as to the given activity. (For a regular bulletin with creative thinking activities, subscribe to The Tin Man Times, Box 219, Stanwood, Washington 98292.)
Word creation. Language is constantly changing. To help students to be participants in our living language, provide occasional exercises such as the following:
Define the made-up word squallizmotex; explain how your definition fits the word.
If dried grapes are called raisins, and dried beef is called jerky, what would you call these items if they were dried: lemons, pineapple, watermelon, chicken? (Provided by a favorite teacher, Maria Manzo Wiesner.)
Unusual uses. Have students try to think of as many unusual uses as they can for common objects. Objects may vary from a “red brick” to “used toys.” Ask students to identify objects that challenge inventive thinking. Objects that students have suggested or brought to class have included old tennis balls, handballs, and racquetballs; soda water bottles; and old eight-track cassette tapes.
This activity could be easily tied to units on recycling and current events. Newspapers and magazines often carry stories of the clever ways in which some things are being recycled. One such article told the fascinating story of how the tons of rubber from old tires was being used in a mix to make the very asphalt roadbeds that ate them up in the first place. Another, more recent story noted that this solution had created another problem. It appears that as the rubberized roadbeds deteriorate from use, they put more floating rubber molecules into the air, which is already overloaded with such molecules from normal tire wear.
The “what ifs”–or, Circumstances and consequences. “What if” statements build what could be called extant comprehension, or abstracted understandings of the physical world and the social order. This activity and several that follow essentially tap into a key cognitive factor on the widely used Weschler IQ tests. Insights and understanding are gained merely by asking, What if
school was on weekends and not during the week?
people were allowed to tell one lie a day?
all babies looked alike at birth?
there was no perception of color?
This type of activity can be made more academically sophisticated and integrative by upping the caliber of the “what ifs” to situations such as the following:
What if we all had identical genetic make-up?
What if everyone would vote on every issue that now is decided by representatives to Congress?
Rational problem solving. These are questions and problems to which youngsters often can deduce positions, though not necessarily answers, using current levels of knowledge and experience. Similar questions can be raised to urge further study and exploration via Internet chat groups and specialized Web sites. Examples of starter problems or questions that can be considered by rational thinking and exploration are as follows:
Is it possible for someone to fly the way Superman does?
Why do scientists say that it probably isn’t possible to go faster than the speed of light?
Why is it unlikely that there are aliens on Earth right now?
Currently, Matt Thomas, a research assistant, and I are experimenting with a related teaching technique based on the use of an algebraic metaphor. The method encourages multifactor, and hence interdisciplinary, thinking on targeted concepts and issues. It is proving to be very evocative from middle to graduate school levels. (For details and updates, contact Matt at: [email protected].)
Product improvements. Teachers can design questions that basically ask, “What is broken?,” the theme of several of the exercises that follow. (Generating these questions requires considerable imagination in itself!) Here are some sample product-improvement-oriented questions:
How might school desks be improved?
How might living room furniture be improved to provide better storage and even a way to exercise while watching television?
How might we take further advantage of all the unused space between walls, above ceilings, and in attics and basements?
How can book-carrying bags be better equipped to handle lunches and other personal needs?
Problem identification. What’s the problem? What doesn’t work? What’s needed? These questions almost always lead to creative thinking. When asked to generate these challenging questions, students have identified problems that included the following:
Some way to deal with the loss of water pressure when the faucet is turned on and someone is in the shower
A place to quickly and easily put toys and stuff in your house
A quick way to check a spelling when you’re writing (or shouldn’t you bother just yet?)
A way to dry and store wet washcloths and mops
A way parents can get kids to help around the house
Systems and social improvements. Breakthroughs in world order, peace, and sanity often are the result of the creative vision of a few individuals who have pictured innovative social and systems changes (e.g., bicameral government, legally binding marriage, democracy, the post office). To encourage such social inventing, teachers can pose problems and reward plausible solutions to questions such as the following:
What might be a way for every student and parent to know what homework is due?
How can we get ourselves to be courteous to everyone, including those we may tend to ignore?
How can we help people who are not very bright, or are less able due to aging or infirmity, to meet the complex obligations of modern life? (Provide some examples by category, such as owning a car, which requires renewing a driver’s license, getting the proper insurance coverage, getting license plates, safety inspections, etc.)
How can school be made more fun without hurting expected learning outcomes?
What are some of your “pet peeves”? What are other social problems that might need attention?
What’s good about. . .? This activity is especially useful for establishing a constructive orientation and for helping students to build a mental menu of ideas that are workable:
What’s good about bureaucracies?
What’s so good about compulsory education?
If language usage pretty much defines how language is used, why do we need books on and study in grammar and standard usage?
Making the Thinking-Curriculum Connection a Habit
Haggard (1976) has suggested four steps to further integrate constructive thinking into the standard school curriculum. Consider this a more detailed way to just “ask for it.”
1. Pose a stimulating question. In other words, ask for constructive thought.
2. Brainstorm. Initial responses can be generated in small groups, following standard brainstorming ground rules: All responses are permitted, without criticism; as many ideas as possible are listed; unusual, even “wild,” ideas are not discouraged; and new ideas can and should be formed by combining ideas already mentioned.
3. Compare ideas. After brainstorming, each small group should share their ideas with the class for review and evaluation. Students may wish to choose the “funniest” or the “wildest” response generated by each small group. At this point also, ideas are assessed for “reasonableness,” or practicality. It is important to point out that all creative solutions are at best just “possibles” until tried and proved.
4. Fuse to curriculum. The whole point of a thinking curriculum is to transfer new knowledge and power to personal problem solving. That process is more likely to occur when real problems are allowed to surface and are the forces behind reading, learning, and thinking. Here are some examples for grade levels 4-12.
Maggie Magpie was determined never to write in cursive. We know that she eventually came to like it, but what might the teacher have done to help her sooner?
Before we find out how Huck saved Jim, think of some possible ways for him to do so.
What new invention (or system) could you come up with that would change the end of this story?
After reading Liange and the Magic Paintbrush: What would you paint if you had a magic paintbrush and whatever you painted would then come to life? (Gross 1990).
What might not work properly today if pi had not been properly calculated?
Describe a problem you are having in reading or studying, and try to create a personal reading-study technique to solve it. (For further guidance with this activity, see “PASS: A Problem-Solving Approach to Study Skills,” Manzo and Casale 1980; and “Strategy Families,” Dana 1989. Both can be found in Manzo and Manzo 1993, 1997.)
There are several other transfer activities that are especially suitable for typical reading or viewing assignments. Collins-Block (1991) offers seven questions to guide such fusion:
1. Could you give me an example?
2. What do you mean by —–?
3. What is not an example, but similar to the idea that you are describing?
4. Is this what you mean: —–?
5. Would you say more about —–?
6. Why do you believe (feel or think) that —–?
7. What is the main point?
Collins-Block provided a context for these questions by asking students to report times in their lives when they had benefited from asking clarifying questions. Good discussion is also provoked when students are asked to tell about times they got into difficulty for failing to ask clarifying questions. It is best to urge students to practice using these fusion-type questions with one another, such as in cooperative learning groups.
Where to from Here?
There are several possible “next” steps. Here is one that we are taking. Our recent research, looking at possible deficiencies in proficient readers, is suggesting that there are apparently academically strong individuals who have some well-masked weaknesses in the way they are able to think about, or apprehend, what they otherwise seem to adequately comprehend (Manzo et al. 1997). These findings now are causing us to try to better understand an inverse condition, that of the naturally fertile mind. We have begun a project to study the thinking characteristics of such minds, including those creative individuals who may not otherwise be academically talented. If you are or know someone, any age/grade level, who has a particularly fertile-inventive mind, please forward his or her name, address, and phone number to us, and we will take it from there (e-mail: [email protected]; or [email protected]). One of the objectives of the Fertile Minds Project is to assemble a cadre of idea makers to advise us on possible ways to make schooling and the workplace more friendly to creative-inventive thinkers. We also can’t help getting a bit excited wondering about what synergies might occur as we bring together people who otherwise must feel isolated by a relatively inhospitable environment.
REFERENCES
Collins, C. 1991. Reading instruction that increases thinking abilities. Journal of Reading 35:510-16.
Collins-Block, C. 1993. Teaching the language arts: Expanding thinking through student-centered instruction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Dana, C. 1989. Strategy families for disabled readers. Journal of Reading 33(1): 30-35.
Drake, S. 1982. Creative writing skills, grades 2-3. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Instruction Fair.
Gross, D. 1990. Unlocking and guiding creative potential in writing and problem solving. Unpublished manuscript. Kansas City: University of Missouri-Kansas City, Educational Specialist Project.
Haggard, M. R. 1976. Creative Thinking-Reading Activities (CT-RA) as a means for improving comprehension. Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Manzo, A. V., A. E. Barnhill, A. Lang, U. Manzo, and M. M. Thomas. 1997. Subtypes of proficient readers. Paper delivered at the College Reading Association Conference, Boston, Mass.
Manzo, A. V., and U. P. Casale. 1980. The five c’s: A problem-solving approach to study skills. Reading Horizons 20:281-84.
Manzo, A. V., and U. Manzo. 1993. Literacy disorders: Holistic diagnosis and remediation. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
—–. 1995. Teaching children to be literate: A reflective approach. Harcourt, Brace.
—–. 1997. Content area literacy: Interactive teaching for active learning. 2nd ed. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill.
Ratanakarn, S. 1992. A comparison of reader classification by traditional text-dependent measures and by addition of text-independent measures. Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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len, as a counter example; certain sects of Buddhism don’t have any supernatural beings, but they’re still considered religions. It’s not accurate to call that a requirement.
As one who studied in a Buddhist temple that is so with the exceptions that I was taught Buddhism as a practice not a religion and specifically because although the Buddha is venerated, he is not worshipped. Also to an outside perspective, some consider the intensity, the offering of incense, celebration and so on to be worship. The Buddhist perspective was there was no way to gain knowledge of an afterlife and no proof of the supernatural so it was not to be considered. The author of Minds and Gods takes up this topic.
It’s a bit of a side topic to the notion that paracosm building and religious practice have a lot in common. The cognitive structures involved are speculatively the same.
I doubt gaming has anything to do with a change in creativity. Something that likely does is the increase in social interactions. I’ve heard the current generation of kids described more like a hive mind, all connected together by their facebooks and text messages … they all do everything together, and often have problems functioning outside of the pack.
Kids today also have a lot more structure in their lives then previous generations. That’s a good thing IMO, but perhaps not so great for creativity. Boredom is powerful motivation to go out and do something – unfortunately there are more negative things kids can waste their time doing than positive.
It can’t be underestimated how we’ve constructed walls around creativity. Games which make it easy to build custom content are a great step in the right direction, but the days are gone when you could write a game in a few weeks, copy it to a floppy, xerox up a short manual, and go sell it down at the computer store. Most people learn to use computers, but when I grew up computers didn’t do much of anything unless you programmed them. There weren’t pre-existing libraries that solved every problem either, you had to come up with your own solutions and you had to make them work on a limited CPU, with limited memory, storage, etc.
Doing anything significant in a well established medium is hard and discouraging.
Anyway, if the ’50’s and ’60’s are any sort of guide, the best way to encourage creativity might be to attempt to completely stifle it, perhaps re-instate the military draft, make certain types of gaming and music illegal, discriminate against a a few races or religions, etc, etc.
That’d get the kids away from their Wii’s … just toss them a softball over the plate, and they’ll hit it out of the park.
The problem with revolutions is they always come to and end …
I wonder if perhaps we’re not overdue for a renaissance. The 1920’s were a period of great social upheaval, but they were accompanied by a flourishing of artistic creativity. Forty years later, they were echoed by the 1960’s. If we’re on a roughly half-century cycle, it’s about time for riots in the street, along with a burst of creative energy. I’m seeing the potential for social upheaval… but dismayingly, the epicenters of it are decidedly anti-arts.
I think part of it is the world we live in now. As it becomes more and more complex it is harder and costlier to develop new things. As a result it becomes safer not to experiment but to go with what is already known to work.
The old saying “nobody every got fired for going with IBM” is becoming more and more true.
I do believe Sir Ken Robinson is right in his belief that schools nowadays are killing creativity but it can be changed around. The site http://creativitygames.net shows simple ways in which anyone can become more creative. In particular the Generator is a useful tool.
Hmmm, you suggest making a game that encourages creativity… Good idea.
Wait a minute, didn’t I already do that back in the 90s? I forget. 😀
Don’t be dismayed. Someone asked Arlo Guthrie if there are still protest songs being written and did he like them. He replied yes and yes, that the music industry has no use for them but if you look on YouTube they are there. And they are quite creative.
Don’t rely on the mainstream media. They are too heavily self-selecting, self-filtering and controlled by a dismayingly ever smaller elite country by country. On the other hand, if you look at transnational media and the transnational elite emerging into power, you see a very creative and revolutionary movement. Two anecdotal points I’ve mentioned before: when the musical academics looked for the next great composer and movement of the 20th century, they didn’t find one in the academies and they neglected to look in the New Orleans and St Louis bars where Louis Armstrong was warming up. Then there is Felicia who doesn’t have to care if the MSM adopts her because she has a transnational audience and complete control. Her Achilles Heel is still wanting the recognition of the very elites she and her elite must inevitably replace.
Elites emerge organically. They are the way humans in dense populations manage resource allocation, discovery, foraging and most importantly, spending of the surplus for the inessentials among them, art. Creatives are selected by and promoted by these people. If you find an elite that is not doing that, they are dieing off.
Creativity needs stimuli like any behavior.
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