How Creative Games Opened a New Era of Interactive Social Media Content
When Daniel Miller wrote his paper on the dynamic between social media platforms and the media content produced on them by the users in 2015, he highlighted how social media influence our creative output. The opposite is also true, as our increasing capabilities for making different forms of content created a need for the platforms we post them on to evolve accordingly. All of this, of course, serves as an extension of Langdon Winner’s writing on the subject of technologies influencing society and vice versa all the way back from 1980.
Reading both of these studies made me reflect on the different platforms that I have observed over my lifetime, and I had a sudden epiphany. There is an entire medium (pun not intended) that is about as influential as the social platforms. What is more is that it is arguably one of the largest and most accessible creative outlets that currently exist, and it made up a large part of my life.
That medium, of course, is videogames, and I would like to cover, how Miller and Winner’s studies apply to the different user-generated content that you can find in a variety of games from different genres.
Note that for the sake of brevity, I will not be covering the entire history of videogames and their creative aspects and only focus on the games that I had personal experiences with.
Garry’s Mod: Valve’s Darling Shooter Turned Pure Sandbox
Released in 2006, Garry’s Mod seemingly took the gaming world by storm overnight. It was a simple premise: take the recently released Half-Life 2, which revolutionized the physics and graphics in mainstream videogames, and give the player the tools to do essentially whatever they wanted with the game’s assets. With the most basic package that comes with the game, you can mess around with the different characters, weapons, props, even environments from Half-Life 2.
What makes Garry’s Mod such a unique case is that it offers a true sandbox experience. At the time, the concept was quite novel, as games such as Halo offered the sandbox-y Forge Mode for map creation as additive content and not the main experience. People immediately took to creating silly scenes with the once serious characters and settings and crafting their own stories and sharing them via in-game tools, videos and screenshots. That is where the story could have ended were it to remain that way.
As you might have guessed, Garry’s Mod’s story didn’t end there. As Steam’s feature set evolved, so did the game’s, which included the Steam Workshop. It was essentially a list of user-created mods that took advantage of the Source Engine’s simplistic Hammer Editor. That alone turned the game from a Half-Life sandbox into an open canvas for anyone to use, and so, people got to work.
Models, weapons, objects, vehicles, maps, even entire gamemodes, anything that players could’ve wanted was on the Steam Workshop, a single button away from being experiences. And that is the world I want to highlight: experience. In a game, unlike in any other space, players have the ability to explore creations from all sorts of angles, and the ease of sharing mods made them quickly become a staple of the game’s identity. But this is just the start of our journey, because the game after that will take this creative aspect of the gaming community to heart.
LittleBigPlanet: Celebrating Creativity
LittleBigPlanet, released in 2008 for the Sony PlayStation console, was perhaps the second biggest game in my childhood. It was a very risky proposal from Media Molecule to Sony Computer Entertainment due to the experimental nature of the project.
Indeed, the premise of LBP was unlike anything else before it. It was a sidescroller platformer at its core, but what set it apart was its emphasis on child-like imagination in its storytelling and overall style. The game’s mantra was “Play. Create. Share,” a mindset that is felt throughout the game’s design decisions.
Let’s start with the Play part. LBP featured a story mode that serves three purposes. First of all, it entertains the player and gives them an actual game to play through before delving into the creation tools. Second, it showcased what was possible with the game’s built-in tools, giving people inspiration to create their own experiences by replicating what was done by the official team before developing their unique spins on the game mechanics. Finally, the campaign introduced collectibles that consisted of in-game elements the players can use to create their own levels. It is a genius way to encourage a cycle of gameplay where the player first goes through the story, then collects all of the prize bubbles within it, to then Create their own things, be it decorating their in-game avatar or building entire levels with the available tools.
However, without the Sharing aspect of the game, these elements would’ve hardly clicked with the audience. The multiplayer side of the game is the element that glues all of them into a cohesive and fulfilling experience. In fact, Media Molecule took a very social media-inspired approach to players sharing their creations. Each player has their own planet they can fill with levels and decorate to their liking. There are also in-game discussions of levels, the ability to upvote user levels that you enjoyed and a page dedicated exclusively to sharing screenshots players take alone or with their friends, with the cleverly designed system even pointing out the players that appeared in said photos.
All in all, LittleBigPlanet is as social as it is creative, and that is why it is such a standout case of player-made experiences that can only exist in the realm of videogames. It is such a different experience from Garry’s Mod, although the premise of giving the player everything to make their own fun with is similar. Gmod, in that sense, is a pure sandbox, while LBP’s emphasis on accessibility lowers the bar of entry for things such as modding or game design. There is no need to learn an engine editor to create in LBP — all the necessary logic tools are built in and are a few clicks away. This very idea of deconstructing the game to the most approachable basics is something that will lead to the biggest phenomenon in all of gaming to date.
Minecraft: The Sky Is The Limit
There is no real way to give Minecraft a proper introduction. There is no game quite like it, no game that managed to achieve the same level of popularity across so many fields. Almost everyone who touched the medium of videogames has played it at least once, and there is a very good reason as to why Minecraft is so successful.
The key to Minecraft’s ability to engage with creativity in such an intuitive way is the principle of creating everything with blocks. Every block, except Bedrock in Survival Mode, is breakable and placeable, and there are no real rules for the player to follow. The game is aptly compared to LEGO with its approachability and foundational simplicity, but I believe that Minecraft became so popular exactly because it has no physical limitations, unlike LEGO. You can’t really ever run out of blocks, not in creative mode at least, and the moment that realization clicked for players is when we started seeing some of the most impressive creations ever made in any videogame.
Of course, the way in which these creations are shared relies on other platforms. By extension, Minecraft’s popularity can largely be linked to the rise of YouTube as the most popular video-hosting platform on the Internet. But that is not just because it is such a fun game that it is endlessly entertaining to watch, but it is also due to the fact that there are limitless ideas that can be explored in Minecraft. As the game evolved, so did the toolkit available to the players. The userbase of the game also works hard to make the community creations easily accessible, with platforms like Planet Minecraft hosting a lifetime’s worth of player-generated content.
The player skins are another stroke of genius from Mojang, the game’s development team. They rely on the pixelated art style to impose a limitation on the players that forces them to play by the rules of the game’s art style. Said limitations, however, also made it really easy to draw your own in-game character, with only so many pixels that the average person would have to work with to convey their ideas.
What is also so interesting about Minecraft is that it creates an environment where people can experience true freedom. That led to some communities taking to developing projects that have a real-world impact due to the lack of restrictions imposed by censorship or social norms tied to different regions.
That resulted in the creation of projects like the Uncensored Library, which I will cover later in a dedicated analysis. For the sake of this coverage, though, it stands to me as the ultimate expression of player freedom and creativity in any medium.
And still, there is one more aspect of creative games that I would still like to go over.
Geometry Dash: Pushing the Human Ability
Geometry Dash’s community has had a significant shift from its humble beginnings with the game’s release in 2013. The game was designed for mobile devices, and as such, its gameplay had to be as streamlined as possible. Drawing inspiration from The Impossible Game, Geomtry Dash controls entirely with a single tap of the finger, and the goal of the game is to make it to the end of a musical gauntlet without colliding with any objects along the way. To keep the game constantly relevant in people’s eyes, RobTop, the creator of Geometry Dash, included a level editor, where every in-game asset is given to the players to make their levels with.
This approach to game design with having a set of official levels to complete and a separate level creation and sharing toolkit is quite similar to LittleBigPlanet, but while the latter would encourage a more casual approach to gameplay, Geometry Dash was and still is well-known as a game that challenges the player to push themselves in order to complete each level. At first, however, the players heavily disliked levels that were made to be extremely challenging, assuming that most of them are too demanding for anyone to experience, and as such, they were not worth the time investment compared to levels that would instead push the game’s visuals to its limits to convey an accessible audiovisual experience.
But then, something changed. The average player in the community got better at the game, and levels that were previously deemed too hard to reasonably complete if not outright impossible became one of the biggest community staples as standout players started beating them legitimately. That inspired its own arms race between the players and the level designers, with both sides outpacing each other to see, how far can the limits of the game can be really pushed. This topic is explained in an amazingly detailed and entertaining way by the YouTuber Samifying, and I encourage people to watch his video on the game to better understand this topic.
The Bottom Line
What I would like to do though is highlight the fact that such a dynamic is, yet again, only possible in videogames. There is no other form in which user-generated content can actively challenge people to earn experiencing it. There is equally no other medium that gives creativity breathing room to such an extent and in such an accessible way as videogames.
I am sure that there are other works that cover videogames just like this blogpost did, but that still does not deter me from wanting to express my appreciation for something that made up such a large part of my life. There is also the potential for evolution of in-game experiences with the introduction of mainstream Virtual Reality with recent releases of the Oculus Quest that lower to barrier of entry significantly.
That is why I believe it is so important to reflect on what videogames have achieved regarding enabling player creativity, because I hope that developers that follow these examples and innovate on these ideas will push this industry even further than it has already progressed since its humble beginnings at the tail end of the last century. And I definitely hope that I will be there to see it happen.
