Creativity - Christmas Vacation

Creativity is the driving force behind all development. Without the ideas, there can be no final outcome. Are some ideas more creative than others? Possibly. Being the first person to have a certain idea must mean that you've worked harder to come up with something original. Or are all ideas equal in effort, and are some people just lucky to have thought about how to apply them first? Creativity tests measure the uniqueness of people's ideas rather than just the number of alternatives that they can come up.

Games manifest creativity in several different ways. All of their different components will have required creativity at some point during their creation – the idea behind them must have come from somewhere. Some people think that the most creative games are the ones with an unusual idea or concept that sets them apart from the others, the more unusual the better. Art stylisation would be an example of this, or a new style of controls. Every aspect of a game shows creativity to some level, but the parts of the game that make it different from other games are the most creative – the unique ideas.

Creativity therefore would be the job of each section of a development team as a whole. A director needs to be able to see who is best at generating ideas in which area, and then assigning jobs accordingly. Any member of a production team could be creative and have a unique idea, as every member of the team would approach it from a slightly different perspective. Its up to the director to use that to the best advantage

Technical limitations can lead people to be both more and less creative. One the one hand, the limitations create problems that need to be solved, which encourages creative solutions. On the other hand the constraints could lead people to think in a certain way, which might limit the ideas that they would have. Creativity needs new perspectives, and unique ideas. The constraints of technology mean that often there is a limit on how many unique ideas could ever be implemented. Often however this leads to the creation of new technology to solve those problems, so perhaps it is encouraging further creativity after all.

Technology encourages people to be creative in different ways. The need to think of something unique and individual where it seems that almost everything has already been done by someone else makes being creative more challenging, but the end results can often be more interesting. People are encouraged to discover a new way of thinking about or approaching an idea, which leads them to expand their understanding of something or to learn something completely new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
http://www.aventureforth.com/2006/08/21/what-is-creativity/
http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/creativity/define.htm
http://www.surestart.gov.uk/resources/childcareworkers/inspiringcreativity/whycreativity/
http://addadhd.suite101.com/article.cfm/creativity_and_adhdfe_library.php
http://seriousgamessource.com/features/feature_063006_second_life_library.php