Games and rewarding creativity - Warning: High autism zone ahead

[Xarpho's Return]

In the last past 15, 20 years there have been a lot of games that claim to reward creativity, but they really don't.

Just to name a few examples:
- you can't build a village in Terraria with everyone because "oh yeah fox girl likes forests and desert merchants likes deserts, they'll both hate you if you build a picturesque snowy village"
- you can't get creative with city building in Workers and Resources because pathfinding is based on distance and not actual logistics
- the amount of new shit in stuff like Factorio means that your spaghetti factory will break as you discover new stuff, and planning ahead means everything will look ugly and incomplete until end game; you'll never create these wonderful and mind-boggling factories like you see in the title sequence
- your Sims house to build it how YOU would like it requires mods and mods tend to break/slow games (and there's no bonus for having something interesting in a house)

Sometimes games will reward you for exploration and creativity, like poking around in Deus Ex's map for secrets, but most games, like arcade games, still reward you on time.

Is it all a lie? If it is, should games even reward creativity?

 

[RJ MacReady]

A thought I've had on this topic is that video games at the end of the day are still just big piles of math like any software and there's a limit to how many permutations of a given scenario and solutions to a problem that any programmer can realistically create. I think ever-increasing budgets and production standards also work against this; it's drastically more expensive to enable a dozen solutions to one scenario in a game like Baldur's Gate III than it is to something like Dwarf Fortress with its simple visuals but deep world simulation.

Gaming has also heavily shifted towards live service models which pressure devs to keep things "balanced", and that means fun unintentional discoveries tend to get patched aggressively.

On the other hand, speedrunners are still discovering new (and increasingly esoteric) exploits, secrets and tech in old games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 to this day. I consider that creative. IMO, this (and my above point) do suggest that player creativity is influenced by how much the game is in a state of flux. I know League of Legends pros and streamers regularly express their exhaustion at how fast that game changes.

 

[Insuficiencia renal]

have you heard about from the depths? i guess you will claim the game doesn't reward creativity because you are forced to follow a set of rules

 

[Grub]

Sometimes games will reward you for exploration and creativity, like poking around in Deus Ex's map for secrets, but most games, like arcade games, still reward you on time.

Making a game with rewarding exploration is difficult. Even games that reward creativity and exploration have a lot meh moments in them.

Take for example Oblivion and Skyrim. I found creative exploration to be a lot more rewarding in Oblivion because the caves and dungeons you could find were relatively complex, the stuff you found in them was usually decently worthwhile and it was usually challenging because you had to make your way both in and out and survive. Skyrim on the other hand didn't really seem to reward creativity so much. Most caves or dungeons you could find were pretty short and straightforward with only one real path, the stuff you found in them was usually pretty meh and every single one had shortcut straight back to the exit from the end. Sequence breaks and creative exploration just never felt fun or worthwhile in that game.

Your examples seem a bit odd though.

you can't build a village in Terraria with everyone because "oh yeah fox girl likes forests and desert merchants likes deserts, they'll both hate you if you build a picturesque snowy village"

I haven't really played much Terraria but I've seen some of the stuff people do in the game. They seem to find the creativity the game offers rewarding.

you can't get creative with city building in Workers and Resources because pathfinding is based on distance and not actual logistics
- the amount of new shit in stuff like Factorio means that your spaghetti factory will break as you discover new stuff, and planning ahead means everything will look ugly and incomplete until end game; you'll never create these wonderful and mind-boggling factories like you see in the title sequence

These two sound more like you lack creativity than the games. In fact, all these sound like you're unable to be creative with the limitations the game gives you.

For the first one, the difference in writing pathfinding code based on distance vs some kind of logistics is massive and generally would probably be extremely slow and inefficient. That kind of shit is why Dwarf Fortress slows to a crawl as soon as you get a bunch of dwarves and your fortress becomes decently sized. It's specifically the pathfinding. All those units looping through a million different things every frame really starts to bog shit down quickly.

As far as Factorio goes, that sounds more like a you problem. If you can't figure out how to be creative with a bunch of different shit maybe you should work on your imagination.

 

[Gravemind]

OP should name more examples so we can get a better sense of what games they play and what's lead them to make this thread.

 

[Nameless One]

Before 1.4 you used to be able to be creative with Terraria villages so, you are just a casul.

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

You know, I was on a similar tangent recently about secrets in video games and how a lot of them nowadays are just shitty creepypastas hidden behind a bunch of cryptic bullshit.

I think they share same basic idea, that if I'm gonna take time to actually explore your game outside of its basic start and end points, that I should be rewarded for doing so and not just given a bunch of shitty diaries that I can't be bothered with. remember when secrets in games were levels or characters, it was awesome and not only incentivized the player to beat the game, but to admire a lot of the work put in to the environment, mechanics and design.

You had to hunt for these things and sometimes that meant being creative and doing things that the game may not outright tell you to do but are still allowed within the system. (like rocket jumping or bunny hopping)
Idk, but it just seems like devs are getting lazy about that stuff, which is fine since it's optional at the end of the day, but at that point why bother in the first place?

 

[User names must be unique]

Tbh the only time I feel rewarded for creativity is when I find things that clearly weren't intended by the devs.

I think the best example I've played was Ascension wow a custom wow server that allows you to pick spells and talents from any class and some server custom enchants to build entirely unique characters, it was a tonne of fun finding all the unintended interactions the developers overlooked in the earlier patches. As the devs got better and better at normalising the value of each individual choice and catching niche interactions the game became way less fun. There is still the same amount of freedom for player choice (or more since they keep adding new stuff) but it's now become a million creative ways to do the exact same thing and the majority of players just play a handful of cookie cutter builds.

 

[BradeRunna]

Expecting creativity in a game where you build a commie bloc city.

 

[Asian tech support]

Tbh the only time I feel rewarded for creativity is when I find things that clearly weren't intended by the devs.

Breaking a game by using "exploits" in a way that the devs might never have intended but work due to the logical framework of in game systems is peak fun, and assblasted devs who quash such efforts, especially in single player games deserve nothing but contempt. A simple and commonly known example of this would be drinking tons of fortify intelligence potions in Morrowind and using the briefly heightened attributes to create a stockpile of mega potions.

 

[Idiotron]

The games that reward creativity that I can think of is stuff like the Deus Ex games.
They give you a location and maybe some enemies and then, it's up to you what you want to do and how.
Personally, I like to kill everyone with my bare hands before anybody finds out I'm even there.

 

[Judge Dredd]

A thought I've had on this topic is that video games at the end of the day are still just big piles of math like any software and there's a limit to how many permutations of a given scenario and solutions to a problem that any programmer can realistically create. I think ever-increasing budgets and production standards also work against this; it's drastically more expensive to enable a dozen solutions to one scenario in a game like Baldur's Gate III than it is to something like Dwarf Fortress with its simple visuals but deep world simulation.

This. What's more, most people only play a game once, so every permutation can result in games being hated for being too short.

There has long been a topic of discussion in dev circles of the AAA game with tiny scope. The most famous example being an entire game set in a single street where even wires in the walls is simulated.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

should games even reward creativity?

Creative freedom in itself should be the reward. Being able to handle a problem in numerous, unorthodox, and unexpected ways is more fun than finding the one (1) way to go about a problem.

Few games do clever design well though, so few I can hardly name any. Mario 64 comes to mind, but there's still an optimal path at all times, you just might not realize it in your first run, which I guess is the best we've got.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Creative freedom in itself should be the reward. Being able to handle a problem in numerous, unorthodox, and unexpected ways is more fun than finding the one (1) way to go about a problem.

Few games do clever design well though, so few I can hardly name any. Mario 64 comes to mind, but there's still an optimal path at all times, you just might not realize it in your first run, which I guess is the best we've got.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while good game design in itself should reward creativity, most of the games that claim they have creativity really don't. Creativity and autism really aren't the same thing...