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Let The Creative Juices Flow!

Creativity in gaming has come a long way from my PC gaming days – which actually weren’t that long ago (four years at best). The most creative you could get back then was building your Sims’ home from the ground up, or perhaps building up a map on Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. So basically, gaming was in an early stage of creativity and such creative perks would most likely be found on a PC game.

But fast-forward a few years and we now have the ability to design levels in the likes of Farcry 2 and LittleBigPlanet. Then for the more musical types there’s composition in Guitar Hero: World Tour, enabling you to build up your own track from scratch. Character customisation appears to be making its way into more and more console games: LittleBigPlanet, Fable II and Rock Band to name a few games which use the creative factor just the right amount. How much I love dressing up my Sackboy is immeasurable. Right now, he’s equipped with a lion’s mane, crisp black tuxedo, antlers and a superhero-like red cape.

The Nintendo Wii was the first console to jump on board the creative race with their Mii avatar-like player system. Since the Miis were released, both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have spent the time developing their own representation system before scrambling on the bandwagon themselves. So there-after the New Xbox Experience was released featuring a slightly more in-depth avatar customisation compared to the Wii’s. Soon to follow up on this will be the Playstation 3’s Home, which from just looking at said representative figures, will be the most customisable of the lot.

Although all of these consoles use some form of creative system to allow its users to represent themselves while playing, I believe you can safely say that after you’ve built up your avatar to look as much like you as possible it is in the end, a novelty to us gamers.

But with said systems put to the side, I believe creativity’s future is bright and it will continue to grow in gaming. Already I’m itching to get off my laptop to create another fire-ridden level on LittleBigPlanet!

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8 responses to “Let The Creative Juices Flow!”

  1. NorfolkNChance avatar
    NorfolkNChance

    Ahh 🙂 the innocence of youth… Kick Start 2 on the good old Speccie and C64 back in 1987 had a track editor 🙂 them were the days of making a hard as a bitch level with long high jumps and fiddly little technical sections.

    There’s some other long forgotten thought telling me there was some other game back then you could create your own levels…

    As for my SackBoy, he’s running around in a Santa outfit 🙂

  2. Lorna avatar
    Lorna

    Bloody hell NorfolkNChance, that takes me back! I spent hours messing around positioning phone boxes etc to ride my motorbike over 😀

    I think it helps games appeal to folks who otherwise would not venture to dip their toes in. The htought of ebing able to get jiggy with the creativity can be a bit of a lure.

  3. avatar
    Anonymous

    not really game creation in the way of maps and such. but sim city anyone?

  4. The Rook avatar
    The Rook

    Kick STart 2 rocked. There was also creativity in creating your own text adventure games. I liked my text adventures games, but never created my own. Games with no graphics, but still fun.

  5. Solarflair avatar
    Solarflair

    Text adventure games were very effective. ‘Adventureland’ on the VIC-20 was the one that gave rise to my love of RPGs… aged seven.

  6. NorfolkNChance avatar
    NorfolkNChance

    Last year my colleagues and I designed the ultimate text adventure game!

    Go North
    “Eaten by a Troll”
    Go South
    “Eaten by a Troll”
    Go West
    “Eaten by a Troll”
    Go East
    “Eaten by a Troll”
    Do Nothing
    “Eaten by a Troll”
    Help
    “Eaten by a Troll”

    🙂

  7. Lorna avatar
    Lorna

    lol@Norfolk.

    Rook, I also used to love my text adventures 🙂 Never did complete Red Moon and it still haunts me. I always used to plan my own one but never had the know how to get around to it 🙂 Lots of fun drawing out all the maps for it though, pen and paper FTW! 😉

  8. The Rook avatar
    The Rook

    @ Lorna. The map making starting as pen and paper, but developed into pen and little white squares of paper, a wall and blu tac. I wonder if I still have my maps.

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