Claims about “creativity” anchor LEGO marketing strategies and the meanings ascribed to LEGO products.  The company pledges parent- and educator-friendly engagement “in the development of children’s creativity through play and learning.”  Countless press releases tout this support of creativity; even the embrace of media licenses like Star Wars was framed as a boon to (rather than limit upon) creative imagination.  The ideological frame of creativity also underpinned LEGO’s most recent gender-differentiated appeals to girl builders.  While the 2012 LEGO Friends theme commendably corrected the exclusive focus on boys, would-be inclusiveness manifested predictably as market segregation.  Girls and boys were not imagined as playing together, but instead as two classes of builders with different creative desires and needs.  Girls, according to LEGO, needed more role-playing and even different kinds of human representations (“minidolls” instead of minifigures).  Notions of inherent creative difference legitimated narrowly gendered marketing appeals.

Defenders of Friends nevertheless pitched the modular creativity of LEGO as a get-out-of-gender-free card.  Kids “don’t have to follow” the included instructions, this thinking went.  Gender normative bakeries and beauty salons could become pink and purple starfighters.  Though packaging and instructions offer what Ellen van Oost and Mary Kearney term “gender scripts,” the reconfigurable nature of LEGO product promised such scripts could also be “backdoors,” enticing already gendered subjects to creative experimentation.  The ideological utility of creativity for LEGO came in both demanding gender conformity and offering ways out of it.

The LEGO Movie ruminates endlessly on this idea of following instructions.  “Masterbuilders” like Vetruvius and Wyldstyle initially devalue Emmet’s interest in building and living by the instructions of mass culture.  And yet, the film does not completely disarticulate creativity from such instructions.  As Emmet takes on leadership, he explains the virtues of instructions as a platform for creative teamwork.  And while the film culminates (spoiler alert) in a live-action meta-conflict over proper use of LEGO toys between an instruction-minded father and free-building son, the compromise reached suggests the father will continue building by instructions, just with newfound support for his son’s reconfiguration of them.  The climactic action sequence in the animated world too turns on the idea of LEGO people rebuilding a prefabricated world, turning ice cream trucks into winged attack vehicles.  In line with LEGO’s marketing of instruction-based building sets as “creative,” the film locates creativity somewhere beyond the instructions, but still figures those scripts as a key first step toward creativity.  Meanwhile, the Ice Cream Machine can be sold in stores with instructions for building both on-screen configurations.

And despite the mélange of LEGO product in the film, including a visit to Cloud Cuckoo Palace that offers far more queer combinations of bricks than ever offered in prior instruction-based sets, the gender-specified creativity of LEGO Friends remains absent.  The minidoll does not exist in this world.  In the film’s concluding joke, meanwhile, the live-action father insists that a toddler sister join in the family play—a moment some take to task for suggesting that girls would disrupt the masculine creativity being celebrated.  But that critique may give LEGO too much credit.  As imagined by LEGO marketing, this toddler would be a user of larger DUPLO bricks, a product LEGO is still willing to market (in part) via gender-neutral appeals, in significant contrast to gendered segregation for older markets. The LEGO Movie does not acknowledge the possibility of girls aged four-and-up (or mothers) sharing in this creative LEGO play, more easily recognizing the creative commonality of privileged male consumers with DUPLO toddlers than with feminized Friends builders.  Rather than entertaining disruption of LEGO’s creative ideologies, this narrative extension of LEGO play to a less fully gendered toddler market affirms their boundaries.

Ultimately, this film helps positions creativity as something that unfolds in relation, but not strict opposition, to clearly defined scripts (gendered or otherwise).  Obviously, that serves the instruction-based product LEGO markets, but it also has implications for how we understand the “creativity” of those who make use of it.

Like the creatures they often contain, computer games (or “video games,” depending on your orientation) tend to be noisy little beasts, constantly calling out to players in a variety of ways. The visuals can strain gamers’ eyes with garish colors or unnervingly dark palettes, audio tracks coax a range of emotions and awarenesses, and puzzle variants taunt from players endless hours of interaction. These entreaties can be overt (e.g., ”Press START”), subtle (e.g., the sound of approaching footsteps), kinaesthetic (e.g., the throb of a force feedback game controller), and aesthetic (e.g., the elegant and futuristic design of a game console); when done well, they all seem natural to players. They also bombard the player and create a cacophonous yet somehow unified command: Pay Attention to Me!

The crass commercial explanation for the making of all this visual, auditory, and kinesthetic noise is that compelling games make money. Games that are capable of holding players’ attention tend to fair better in the market than those that do not, and constantly forcing players to respond is one way to captivate them. A less commercial explanation (though perhaps more controversial) is one my colleague Ken McAllister and I make in our forthcoming book Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium (University of Alabama Press, Spring 2011): games are fundamentally and intractably boring. Like lonely children, they call out constantly because otherwise players would leave them for something more fun and interesting.

But I would like to offer a third explanation. Computer games are noisy because computer game play is fragile; it dissipates far more readily than it coheres. In some sense, all play is fragile–as an intermezzo, to use Johan Huizinga’s famous descriptor, it is constantly under threat of intrusion from non-play, that which it interrupts and gives pause from. However, computer game play seems especially prone to breakage. Take game hardware, for example. What player has not been victimized by a wireless controller battery running down at the most inopportune moment? Sadly, complete console failure is almost as common (e.g., the Xbox 360’s “Red Ring of Death”), and network latency issues (e.g., lag pockets, high ping) far more so. Game software is even more problematical, with operating system strangeness, bugs, crashes, glitches, cheats, patches, updates, rage quits–all of which disrupt games, their spaces, and play proper (though arguably, and I think interestingly, these also help constitute computer games and their play). It is a miracle that computer games are even playable at all, let alone able to mesmerize players the way they often do.

No wonder, then, that computer games are so noisy. They need to do something to counteract the constant threat and occurrence of violation. Their ceaseless beseechments serve to remind players that games are fun, enveloping experiences, and that these experiences can have a constancy and consistency of meaning.

In the end, perhaps it is its fragility that makes computer game play so potent. Like antique glassware or a desert wildflower, much of games’ beauty and expressive power flows from the contradiction of their delicacy and surprising persistence. In other words, they mean more precisely because they are so easily broken.

• Wii Sports: Wii Sports made my mom buy the game console before me.  Effectively launching the Wii and showing us all the joys of the Wiimote, it made me feel like I was sitting in front of the NES in my Spiderman PJs trying to save the princess again.
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Debates about whether embedded or emergent narratives are better and what role carefully crafted stories will play in games will continue to be staged.  After playing Uncharted 2, most critics agreed that well-designed embedded narratives will have a place in the industry, even as social gaming and virtual worlds continue to grow.  Now, if only that Twitter gaffe had never happened.
• Guitar Hero: Amplitude and Frequency were brilliant early experiments in music game design, but GH proved that music games were going to be a cultural and economic force.
• World of Warcraft: The most recognizable MMORPG (MMOG if you prefer), WOW spawned player communities and intimate connections.  While those who doubted the potential viability of virtual communities had to eat crow, debates over gold farming signaled divides in the global gaming industry.
• Deadspace: The sound design in this survival horror game is amazing — ambient, atmospheric and more than a little unnerving.  The use of sound files to communicate information to the player and the in-game interfaces are additional stellar features of this game’s design.
• Mirror’s Edge:  Taking parkour games to the next level, Mirror’s Edge is beautiful to look at (and listen to) and vertigo-inducing for some players.  This platformer gave us one of the most interesting women characters in a long time and an alternative to the Lara Croft type of female avatar.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Okay, I’m probably going to get in trouble for selecting this GTA and not another one, but this incarnation of the franchise raised the most concerns about cultural visibility.   The music, the sandbox play, and the gritty urbanity made every GTA a success, but Carl Johnson made debates about race and games visible.
• Anything by Valve (Portal, Half Life, Half Life 2):  Where to begin?  From Ken Birdwell’s account of the cabal design process on Half Life to the modding communities that were spawned, Valve has taken an interesting approach to design and to interacting with players.
• Katamari Damacy:  A surprise hit that’s spawned more than a little cosplay and some not-so-great sequels, Katamari Damacy surprised everyone by being a transnationally successful game.  Even though your father treated you like dirt, it was still fun.
• Halo franchise: Let’s be honest.  If it wasn’t for Halo, would millions of people have Xboxes or go online to play?
• Braid/Flower/World of Goo: These independent games game us an interesting take on the time manipulation mechanic, the sheer poetry of flower petals in the wind, and the zaniness and originality of goo balls.  They also illustrated the potential diversity of games allowed by digital distribution and XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN.
• The Sims franchise: Even though Chuck Klosterman expresses ambivalent feelings about his character’s materialistic tendencies in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, The Sims drew tons of players and their avatars into plenty of awkward situations.  The franchise also illustrated the commercial potential of sandbox games, cemented Will Wright’s position as a design guru, and proved that gaming was no longer a boys’ club.