The creative experience is the experience of creating something new. This can be something you create completely from scratch in a sandbox game where the player has a lot of freedom. It can also be the player using the rules of the game to come up with a unique solution for themselves instead of following a linear path laid out by the developers. The freedom to choose your own path, your own gameplay and to allow the player to have creative freedom defines these experiences. The following examples are types of gameplay that can facilitate the creative experience.
Building
When you build something in Minecraft you are creating something new from scratch. When you create a city in a city builder you create a new city. The game provides the players tools they can use to express their creativity through building and constructing new things. The satisfaction of creating something of your own can be felt through the process of building in these games.
Creative problem solving
Games usually have a problem the player needs to solve. Sometimes the solution is just to do exactly what the game tells you to do. However, a lot of games allows the player a great deal of freedom in how they choose to interact with the game in order to solve a problem.
In shooters this can be seen in the freedom to choose what weapons and equipment you might use, alongside the path you might take to reach a point. In a stealth game you might find odd paths to a goal that is not entirely obvious.
Crafting creative strategies
In card-games you can build your own deck, and try and come up with a new way to play the game through your own creativity. In RTS games this can be seen through the player’s ability to adapt and create new strategies and tactics that is not the standard practised way of playing the game. These are just two examples of a player coming up with a new strategy based on creative thought. This also happens in games where you have patches that change the balance of the game, which allows new things to work. This experience is a specific type of creative problem solving focused on the strategy aspect.
The overarching creative experience
While you don’t need to provide the player with complete freedom in most games, you are likely going to get a much better gameplay-loop if the player has real choices in how they interact with the gameplay. Interactivity is a key part in a lot of game experiences, and that interactivity comes in the form of agency and freedom that the game gives the players in order to express themselves.
Most games want to provide the player with at least some agency and freedom to express themselves. It is hard if not impossible to create good gameplay without adding some degree of creative expression and freedom to a game. A game grows stale quickly without the ability for the players to influence how they interact with it. If you go for a route that is very strict in how the game should be played, you need to be very aware of what you are doing and what experience you are targeting.