王子靳

游戏开发是否鼓励创意？

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the interrelationship between the two critical components in the video game industry: production and creativity. Creativity is believed to be the key motivation and the most significant factor behind the massive value potential within the industry. However, the current industry has been blamed for intensive labour exploitation and commercialised product with stereotypical game design. There seems to be a contradiction between production systems and creativity. Thus, I come up with the research question: Are current video game production systems propitious to creativity? To answer the question, I disassemble the current video game production systems and analyse them with creativity estimation methods in previous research. In order to conclude a macro perspective on the complete picture of the current video game systems, I choose two representative and extreme sy stems as my research subjects: AAA game production and game jam. The former represents the most complicated system when thousands of game producers work on a single project. AAA game production is characterised by an intensive division of labour, high technology support, massive capital investment, and increased marketing budgets. On the one hand, creativity is enhanced by adequate resources in AAA game production. On the other, the instability brought by creativity results in commercial risk against major corporations' business strategies. As a result, maintaining the stability of projects has a higher priority on creativity. AAA game production is blamed for the exploitation of labour and financialisation. As the producers are alienated from their products, assemble-like products without personalised aesthetics and creativity can not provide the sense of creativity of playing for consumers. Game jam represents the minimalist video game production system with extremely limited production conditions. In most situations, game jams require a small game production t