Indulgent Creativity

I consider intrinsic story to be the least understood (and therefore the most neglected) element of game design. In fact, there's so little understanding of it that I had to invent the term myself, as I've tried over and over to articulate this concept that can make the difference between a great game and a bland one. This is probably my tenth try writing this from scratch, but I think I finally got it, so here goes: What is Intrinsic Story? When we talk about video game stories, we usually talk about where the game tries to tell the story as if it were a book or a movie. Specifically, the way they progress the story is to stop being a game and either give you text (temporarily becoming a book) or cutscenes (temporarily becoming a movie). Occasionally they have meaningful dialog options (temporarily becoming a choose-your-own-adventure book). But there's another story being told that can be more important to the quality of the game than text-and-cutscene story, but i...

Indulgent creativity is best explained as it contrasts to practical creativity. Practical creativity is for solving problems that have a clear application to your life (in other words, the most practical creative thing I could do in my life right now would be to design some brilliant JavaScript framework methods that make my job easier). So on the other end of the spectrum is indulgent creativity where I direct my thoughts to something that doesn't have a clear practical use in my life. For example, writing about game design, even though all of my game design projects have been on the shelf and will have to stay there until I can finish some of my other projects. I figure a blog is as good a place as any to share these thoughts, so here I go. If people read it enough, I might even post regularly!