Player creativity is the future of gaming

Humans possess an insatiable desire to create, to build, and to shape the world around us. Examples span from rudimentary cave paintings, to the invention of language and written word, to art and music, all the way up to today’s globally connected existence where we encounter a constant flow of information across the world from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.

As a game developer dependent on my own creativity to make a living, I feel exceedingly lucky to be alive during a time when there are so many options for creative expression. If we want to (and we often do), a new idea that sparks into existence in the morning can become a working prototype by the end of the day, thanks to powerful game engines like Unity and Unreal. What’s more, even our most ambitious, outlandish ideas — say, building an entire virtual universe capable of connecting people from all over the world in a shared metaverse — are possible to build in a matter of months using these low-cost, out-of-the-box tools.