Creativity and Talent, what's the deal?

Creativity is a very difficult thing to define. I guess ultimately it is your ability to conceive ideas in a useful way, where you can challenge existing problems and expand to concepts that others might not have considered. It is, in its purest form, idea generation. It is a big part of everything we do and the way we look at the world as a whole. It is also one of the only things that we as humans can do that machines cannot do better, and that makes it very important in an age where computers run banks and manage economies and international systems.

Being creative is sometimes viewed as something that you are either capable of or are not. This, in a sense, makes it a “talent”, but I do not think “talents” really exist. Creativity is an intelligent process which can be tried and tested, there are ways of encouraging creativity and there are ways of stopping it. I believe that everyone is capable of creativity, just as anyone can learn to draw when they understand the rules and concepts well enough. Creativity has to be more than just the ability to create these ideas. Firstly, they have to be good ideas. Anyone can think of something random which has no real world purpose or function, and whilst that is kind of creative, it is ultimately useless and its not the sort of thing that people will seek you out for. You have to make sure that your ideas are useful for the current situation and that you can apply them realistically. This is where skill comes in, where in art you can successfully communicate your ideas and have them meet their full potential as concepts. A good concept artist has to be both creative and very skilled to meet these two criteria and prove their worth. I think that, in answer to one of the questions in the task brief, that skill and talent are indeed interchangeable.

With new technology we are able to spend less time on the less creative aspects of game production, and more time actually communicating those ideas effectively. The easier it is to get an idea out, the more time you can spend analysing it and working out if it will do the job you need it to. A little over a decade ago, every vert in a 3D model had to be programmed in as a numerical coordinate, and this meant that people had to spend more time wrestling with the software than  actually thinking of good ideas or challenging their existing ideas. With technology changing and becoming easier to use, creativity can become a larger part of the design process. If you wanted a certain colour for example, all you need to do is find it on an art software package and use it however you need. A few hundred years ago, you had to mix that colour yourself, giving you less time to actually work on your ideas. It is certainly easier to test your ideas today than it ever has been before.