Interactive Media
topic
Interactive media as creative inputs — video games, interactive narratives, simulation environments, augmented and virtual reality experiences — provide the specific cognitive input of learning through doing, of understanding systems by operating within them, of encountering designed rule-sets and their emergent consequences, and of navigating virtual environments that encode specific spatial, economic, or social logics.
Role
Interactive media — particularly video games — are the most consistently underrated creative input for non-game creative practitioners, despite being the medium that most directly teaches systemic thinking, emergent complexity, and the relationship between constraint structures and behavioral possibility. The game designer's specific intelligence (how do the rules of this system shape the experiences and choices that players encounter?) is directly applicable to every creative domain that involves designing systems and environments within which other people will operate.