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On the surface, games often seem to have a difficult relationship with creativity. For every Minecraft, which makes building stuff - often gorgeous, complex, deeply improbable stuff - seem well within the reach of even the least imaginative of players (i.e me), there's a game that breaks down the process of constructing something and gets thoroughly lost in the details. I loved Little Big Planet as a proposition, but I made very little of note with its different types of screws and hinges and brackets. It seemed, in a weird way, to be reinforcing how difficult it is for a person like me to make anything at all. Look at all these complex bits and pieces, it said. Aren't they beautiful, and aren't they a little out of your grasp?For a while, this kind of creativity was the thing that almost every game had to have. Stuff like InFamous shipped with a means of making your own scenarios, while series like EverQuest got very excited about voxels. We called this stuff user-generated content, or UGC. You could see a little of the problem right there, to be honest: right there with the U in UGC. How many people, picking up a new game for the first time, approach things by picturing themselves as a user?
UGC is still with us, of course, but I'm starting to notice other things that remind me that video games have always been uniquely creative things. The moment you pick up the pad in something like Journey and run through the sand leaving a track behind you in the dune, you are making something. The moment you shatter your first block in Super Mario Bros and chuck a Koopa shell at your first Goomba, you are transforming the map, changing the state of the level itself.
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