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Serious games and game-based learning (GBL) are increasingly used to teach school subjects like history and arithmetic. They can convey curriculum knowledge, or motivate students to learn the subject, or encourage them to practice their skills. As well as specific subject knowledge, however, students also need to develop more general cognitive skills. One example of this is creativity, which is recognised as increasingly important in the modern economy. It would be very beneficial to students, and society at large, if we could find reliable ways to encourage and develop creativity in the education system.
Video games might be one way to do this. There is already a connection between games and creativity, in the concept of flow. This concept was originally derived by Csikszentmihalyi (1996) from his study of highly creative people; but it is now routinely used by game designers to describe the mental state they aim to achieve in their players. While many types or genres of games may induce a state of flow, however, it might not be the case that they all have the same effects on creativity.
Apart from the discovery that flow is often associated with it, creativity is generally characterised as or defined to be the cognitive capacity to generate novel ideas that are valuable in some domain, but that are not obvious to most people (Amabile, & Csikszentmihalyi, both 1996). It can take on an exploratory character, such as when jazz musicians improvise for example; or creativity may be evident in solving problems, such as in scientific or engineering domains.
In the following, we report an experiment to see if different kinds of game, including one with exploratory gameplay (a sandbox game), and another with problem solving (a puzzle game), would have a measurable effect on players' creativity. As a control, we had a third game also, which was an FPS game (first-person shooter), and which was not expected to have much effect, if at all.
The aim was not to see if there would be any long-term or permanent changes wrought. That would be good to achieve, but presumably would be more difficult to establish. In this initial work, then, we aimed only to see if a short-term or temporary effect might be induced. That could already be useful in a classroom situation, such as at the start of an art or music lesson perhaps. In a temporarily heightened state of creativity, the students might do better work; and that could help them to be more confident of their creative powers in future. Such a change in attitude might well outlast the temporary mental change that caused it.