Games and creativity

There's an excellent post by games guru Raph Koster about the recent Newsweek article on the declining creativity scores of American youth, and how this might be tied up with gameplaying. Here's Newsweek's take

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.

It's no surprise that the mainstream media could not pass up another chance to dump on games. What is surprising is that Koster agrees, to an extent.

The article salutes problem-solving skills, persistence and the like which, as Koster points out, are skills cultivated by gameplay:

...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 Koster also brings up the very concept of a designed, and by association, controlled game. Even multiple paths for success are paths designed by the game designers/puppetmasters:

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?

That there is a presumed solution is incompatible with real-live problem-solving, where some riddles cannot be cracked, or the answers take years to determine. Are all of life's problems reducible to games, i.e. crack the genome!, or produce better solar panels! And who determines the problems in the first place? Who decides how this new knowledge will be implemented?

Source: http://margaretweigel.blogspot.com/2010/07/games-and-creativity.html