Limitations on creativity

It's strange to think that sometimes having limitations can open up more ways to be creative. I started thinking about this after Gamecity. Having helped out in the Indiecade for a couple of days, I was struck by what some of the games managed to achieve by actually have less going on that most mainstream games. The Indiecade, for those of you who may have missed out, was an arcade showcasing games made by tiny development teams or students. Some had been created entirely by a single person.

The fact that many of these games could not compete with the technological achievements of mainstream games actually seemed to free up the creative aspect of many of them. One of my favourites which I've actually downloaded and have been playing at home is Endless Forest.


In Endless Forest you play as a deer with a human face. You can communicate with other players simply through gestures and occasional mooing. There isn't really much of an aim either. You can explore, there are random events triggered by the game's creators, and you can collect different items to change the appearance of other deer from around the environment. It's easy to see why this could quickly become boring, but I find it quite liberating.
There's no pressure to do anything, and the fact that no one can type means you don't think of the other players as people sitting at their keyboards, but rather just as the deer they are presented as. It's very absorbing, and the fact that there aren't really goals makes it easy to dip in and out of.


Another game that was interesting was Braid. Braid is a 2D sidescrolling platformer. The main idea of the game is that we should learn from our mistakes, but not have to suffer the consequences of them. So in the game, you can rewind time at any point, for as long as you like. This way, if you are killed by an enemy, you can rewind time and revive yourself. You have now learned something about how or why the enemy attacked you, and can change tactics accordingly. The real puzzles begin when some items are not affected by time, or behave differently when exposed to time reversal. It leads to puzzles where you are forced to fling yourself onto spikes or drop to a place you have no way of escaping from in order to grab items such as keys which you can drag backwards through time with you.

While games such as Prince of Persia have the time rewind element, the fact that Braid has no limits on its rewind system makes you play completely differently. Prince of Persia still forces you to be cautious, whereas in Braid you can fling yourself into a situation just to see what will happen, and then reverse it if it wasn't the outcome you wanted.

So that's how it applies to games, but what about art? Forcing yourself into a limited artistic situation can lead to interesting results. It seems though, that you need to push it away from the familiar to really get deeper. Everyone uses pen and pencil, limiting yourself to just one of those doesn't cause any difficulties or present you with problems you have to solve.
However, if you only allow yourself to use tin foil and glue, or paint and a piece of card with no paintbrush to draw with, you start to open up more interesting things in what you are producing. The fact that you have having to fight your choice of media in order to show what you want makes you think differently than if you had chosen something you can use with ease, and this shows in the piece.

You get unexpected outcomes, things you didn't mean to put there simply because you're not good at using the media. Rips in the paper with the craft knife that actually look really good, mistake lumps of paint that show contours. Sure, it might look terrible, but that's the risk you take. And the best part is that you can give people the same media to use and everyone will use them differently, there is still personal style even in such an unfamiliar thing.

So what's my conclusion? A selling point for most games is going to be having the latest graphics and engine technologies. But sometimes the games without those things have got something more interesting to say than those with them.
If we can just learn to take risks with the small creative things we do, maybe it will feed into everything else.