Creativity

Hoo hum, hello again; you diverse unspecific topic.

Last Autumn/Winter, I visited the wood’s near my house. I became utterly inspired by the Autumnal leaves, playing around in the piles made me feel like a child again. I scrambled around, fussily choosing my favourite leaves from the fallen. When I took them back home I got all messy making a collage. The whole process of that adventure felt spontaneous and creative, but in the end I was left with a picture much like the ones I used to bring back from nursery.

(I realised whilst typing the last paragraph that rolling around in leaves is pretty childish and probably shouldn’t be mentioned, but bare with me… I have a point)

I recognise that creative routine in a lot of games. The whole process of creating a game must involve a huge amount of ambition and creativity, but often the end result is disappointing. In my previous, I moaned about the lack of creativity in modern games. But I take that back. I now think they just lack individuality… or at least a decent dose of fairy dust.

I have a little bee under my bonnet. Why are we creative? Why are others uncreative? Is there such a thing as being uncreative? These questions create a rather large temptation to peer into the depths of our past; and then to point the finger at our education.

I have heard others question why we are taught science and maths in school. Often these people have a more creative flare then most… and at a wild guess may not be too hot on their sciences. I can see where this is all coming from. We need something/someone to blame for trouble we had learning in school. But in terms of that altering our creativity… well I couldn’t disagree more.

Science opens up the world. Without maths we would have no science. If we are only taught artistic subjects from day dot, how overwhelmed would our tiny brains be by a simple phenomenon. To be educated in only art would be ridiculous. Think how limited our imagination would be if we knew nothing about the world we lived in, had no understanding about how something works. I feel thankful for all of the little snippets of information I learnt from school. I just wish I had paid more attention at the time.

As Einstein once said “The true purpose of education is to train  the mind to think.” And game artist’s will always need to think.