Subjects who were explicitly <em>told</em> to be creative in <em>Minecraft</em> improved the least.
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Read the whole story
Study: Playing Minecraft could boost your creativity—with some caveats
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How does this research compare to the longitudinal study of those "brain age" apps and websites that showed no long term difference?
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Lego Universe tried to make an open creation world type game before.
They were plagued by people wanting to construct penis's in game. In response lego tried to add code to prevent penis creation, and the fight began.
The players were very creative. They started to make forced perspective penises, and other methods to get around it.
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IIRC, the problem was a bit reversed. They wanted to design it so it was impossible to do so, which invited people to challenge them. I've played on many Minecraft servers (public and private) , but the problem is not as widespread as the creators of LU were made to believe. Once they said that they wanted to make it so it was impossible, people saw it as a challenge that they were all too happy to accept.
If the creators of LU ignored them, the problem would likely have been prevalent in the first few months, but would peter off (pun intended) in time once people wanted to play the game for the sake of playing it rather than just making shock value creations for the sake of attention.
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Its been a bit since ive read the story, my details could be off to that effect. Ill re-read the source to confirm.
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Does playing Minecraft make people more creative or do more creative people play Minecraft. Replace "Minecraft" with any art tool (blank canvas, paintbrush, After Effects, etc.) and I think you get the point.
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Eh, I'm likely wrong on minor details as well. One thing both our versions have correct, is that had the devs just ignored it, we would have a phenomenal alternative to Minecraft to enjoy had they not been such prudes.
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I haven't played Minecraft in nearly a decade, but way back it was certainly the latter. Survival was incredibly bare-bones, and Creative was only fun if you had a project in mind. Like most people, I spent some hours building a kickass castle and surviving the siege of zombies/spiders/creepers, but after a bit I just stopped because I didn't have the ambition for huge art projects.
By the same token, I was a huge fan of the Skate series mostly because filming trick lines was a fun creative outlet.
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Except of course that if you play lots of minecraft you have less time to create...
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Another aspect of this was that the sample size was pretty small, and limited in scope. It's not like they tapped a wide demographic of ages, it being confined to under 400 undergrads.
That's a pretty homogeneous group, especially if pulled from one university (as it seems it might have been, but I couldn't get past the paywall).
Immediate testing after an experience has always shown some effect, but whether or not it lasts is not mentioned. I'd hazard to guess that it doesn't.
Mankind is adaptive. If required to THINK to adapt (instead of being provided instructions), then creativity spikes. Absent continued incentive to continue to think to adapt, then the creativity (or whatever was stimulated to spike) drops away quickly.
I mean, how many of us have faced a problem under some kind of timeline condition, overcome it with something interesting, even innovative, and completely forgotten how one did it a few days later? And when faced with the same circumstances, if not the same problem, overcome it again, only to not remember exactly what it was that got the job done after a few days?
This is how mankind evolved. The smart ones remember the processes involved (or tend to retain that knowledge longer by paying closer attention to the process rather than focusing on the solution). MOST do not focus on the process, and therefore don't remember it. Only that they managed to deal with the problem, with some vague recollections of things along the way.
So it makes sense that those who had to think about things more were more creative for the short term. But I'd expect that was only a short-term benefit if the challenges to one's thinking weren't maintained.
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Dark Pumpkin
Ars Scholae Palatinae
"Lets try to stop people from doing something that can be done in infinity plus one different ways, that'll definitely work!"
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I made a giant "goatse" right by the spawn point on our Minecraft server back in the day.
Good times.
Good times.
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That statement appears to assume that time spent playing Minecraft is either necessarily or primarily time spent not creating; which I would disagree with. I would also say that regardless of that, Minecraft can serve as a source of inspiration, thus fueling bouts of creation in other mediums. On top of that, time spent creating mods, resource packs, music, art, videos, or stories for or about Minecraft is time spent creating that is directly caused by the game.
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Telling people to be creative doesn't do it. Letting people mess around is what does it.
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I didn't realize we were still in the early 2000s and that "PC Master Race" meme still was a thing.
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I see a bit of a problem using the paperclip/knife or whatever else test: So many people have done it so many times that it's begun to lose its ability to measure anything. It's the vicious cycle of a lot of things: Create a tool to measure a desirable trait, tool works for a time, people become exposed to the tool (or specifically train to "succeed" in the tool), and then the tool ends up only measuring how often people have been exposed to it rather than whatever it was designed to measure.
See: Every standardized test ever, paperclip tests, online IQ tests, some forms of real IQ test, etc.
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LEGO had a zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate content in the game. Chat was filtered, builds were moderated, the whole thing was supposed to be a vetted playground you as a parent didn't mind letting your kid (6-12 years old) play in. I'm not surprised people took it as a challenge.
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I play a lot of Elder Scrolls Online, which has a robust housing component. I've heard that the devs have a metric of TTP, Time To Penis, with which they estimate how long it will take players to represent a penis with any given housing item. (no citation)
Obviously this isn't a kid's game, but none of the housing items are specifically intended to be made into a penis. Of course, that doesn't stop some truly creative players from making some pretty sexual creations in their own homes.
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It looks like this paper is the same work as https://osf.io/s65rg/ , and as far as I can tell, that "least creative" claim is false. There is no statistically significant difference between "directed Minecraft" and the control groups - you can't say any of them is least creative. It sounds like they're reading too much into poor-quality data.
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I don’t know why anybody is surprised. You can’t “be creative” on demand any more than you can “choose” to love somebody.
Certainly you can set up conditions for creativity (and love).
It either happens or not.
It’s a double bind, like telling somebody “don’t ever think about x” where x is anything
Certainly you can set up conditions for creativity (and love).
It either happens or not.
It’s a double bind, like telling somebody “don’t ever think about x” where x is anything
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Reminds me of a job interview - after working for the same company for several years - and the HR person asked me to solve a logic puzzle; using a scale to find the one ball heavier than the others.
I hadn't been expecting anything like that - I expected questions related to my technical experience - and couldn't remember solving that problem before. HR rep was having a ball watching me working it out in front of them, but one of the equipment guys seemed to think there was no way I hadn't been asked that question before, so I was just wasting everyone's time by pretending I was 'solving' it for the first time.
Didn't get an offer from them, after the interview.
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I have a creative job and I couldn't count the number of times I get the vague note to "be creative" (and other suggestions to that effect)... I wonder now if that kind of direction might be self-defeating.
Of course I have the constant pressure to be creative whether I'm instructed to or not so maybe it's not that comparable, but it is interesting to think about.
Of course I have the constant pressure to be creative whether I'm instructed to or not so maybe it's not that comparable, but it is interesting to think about.
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Interesting that this study mentions that players who were explicitly told to be creative fared the worst. Perhaps those brain age apps work the same: they scream at you 'be smart' so you fail at it
Now seriously, I do play minecraft, and I've noticed that when I explicitly set out to build something planned it ends up looking worse than when I just randomly do stuff.
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What exactly constitutes "directed creativity"? Is it "build a castle" or more vague like "build something"? This is a kind of important distinction to make since whenever we play Minecraft of our own volition, we're essentially directing our own creativity. Even the things we build, we are narrowing down our creative potential by imposing limitations like what it should be, what blocks/techniques should be used.
Honestly if someone set me down with the game and just said "build something". I would do that, no idea what I would build, depends what strikes my fancy at the time. However if someone set me down and said "build a castle" it's not going to be all that creative, I find castles boring having build plenty of them in Minecraft, Autodesk and any other medium I could realistically stand a chance at completing that task. These sort of things on specificity do seem to matter and it seems like a highly subjective thing on what level of specificity produces the most creative results.
Honestly if someone set me down with the game and just said "build something". I would do that, no idea what I would build, depends what strikes my fancy at the time. However if someone set me down and said "build a castle" it's not going to be all that creative, I find castles boring having build plenty of them in Minecraft, Autodesk and any other medium I could realistically stand a chance at completing that task. These sort of things on specificity do seem to matter and it seems like a highly subjective thing on what level of specificity produces the most creative results.
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You can definitely find aggression and prosocial behavior in the same person. Both of those are a spectrum and we all possess them to some degree. If I am understanding this guy correctly, then I think this is absolutely how the world really works. MMA fighter Jose Aldo, who is a nice guy buy all accounts, has learned that his aggression in the ring is not enough: society/the market has convinced him that his public personality needs to be aggressive as well. He's a minor celebrity in that sport with fans and a public persona, so it's social on several levels.
Video games don't teach aggression, they provide a channel for the expression of aggression. On top of that, the mechanics of, say, FPS games is such that demonstrated aggression (shooting someone) is what you have to do to win.
Anyway, none of this conflicts with or supports the idea that games promote creativity in my mind. I personally believe games do promote creativity. It is creative to lead someone into a trap in a FPS game in a novel way (and then "slaughter" them); it's equally creative to make an alien in Minecraft as the author's study has done.
Interesting article, but I think the bit about there being conflicting studies deserves a better example or no comment at all.
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I've played Minecraft on several boxes. A PC with a mouse allows you precise control, to the pixel, of where you want to point. A console with a controller, not so much.
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Mungus the Unhyphenated
Ars Tribunus Militum
Muscle memory is what makes the difference, whether it's controller or keyboard.
Minecraft works within a very defined and rather coarse grid, and I've seen people whiz through Minecraft construction with an Xbox controller. Pixel precision with a mouse cursor comes into play much more with shooters than Minecraft.
Either that, or you need a better controller.
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Minecraft appeals to a younger audience than does NASCAR or watching Crocodile Hunter. I suspect that led to accidental experimental bias.
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You don't bring computer games to school, because computer games are more fun than lessons. That is all.
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Drawings dicks has been around for thousands of years. Sure, the justification given back then is supposedly different, but point is, given the opportunity in any way, it's reasonable to assume dicks will be drawn/made in any possible way in every video game where it's remotely possible.
Heck, someone even drew a dick on the ground during a match of Splatoon 2 once.
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