Creative Mode Snobbery

You can add this to the list of things I’ve had a change of heart about recently. But yeah, I admit it, I was a bit of a snob when it came to creative modes. I understood Creative Mode’s use in the context of massive projects. You only have to look at something like one of the recreations of the Mines of Moria in Minecraft to get that. So my snobbery was reserved moreso for your more typical gaming experience. Where creative mode wasn’t being used to achieve some great work, but rather to just play.

My thinking went that this was essentially the same as turning on the cheats, typing in IDDQD and playing on easy mode.

Now, everyone is entitled to play their own way. Fortunately that isn’t something I’ve had to come to any sort of epiphany on. But I just didn’t get why anyone would want to do it. It seemed to me that you would be robbing yourself of much of the potential enjoyment the game could offer by doing this.

It particularly evoked my mental-eyeroll reaction when my kids want to play creative mode nigh on exclusively. I think I’ve mentioned before, but my youngest has been all about the Minecraft lately. He’s only 8, and so my response to creative mode for him has certainly been more accepting. And perhaps this opened the door to my change of mind, I don’t know.

But if it did — it certainly didn’t achieve the feat singlehandedly.

As even recently, while watching countless YouTube videos on Cities: Skyline every time I encountered a city with the Unlimited Money mode turned on I just couldn’t help it! I thought less of their achievements.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I came around. But it dawned on me that I had only earlier today. I think the combination of seeing the frankly impressive and (as the name has suggested all along) creative efforts of my youngest son, alongside seeing and coming to realise what is possible in Cities: Skylines through seeing it in action.

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly creative person by default. It’s not something that comes naturally to me in any event. But I’ve started to come to a point with Cities: Skylines now where I’m able to progress past monkey-see monkey-do and at least come up with rudimentary designs of my own and solve traffic problems and the like without having to have a Biffa video up on the other screen to guide me.

This fact was driven home for me when I evolved my own bus-interchange solution before I saw it anywhere else.

I guess what I’m saying is: I’ve finally come to recognise there is a whole other set of skills developed and enabled by the use of creative modes.

Many of you are probably thinking, ‘Well duh‘ at me right now. Probably fair. I don’t think this realisation is as much an intellectual one as it is the removal of a more emotion driven blocker.

Does this mean I’m going to jump feet first into an unlimited money mode city? Hard to say. I don’t think so. But it isn’t a hard no now either. Where I’ve been mostly contemplating it at least, is with the concept of the blogger-city I mentioned in the last journal as a goal for this month. I was thinking in particular about how nice it might be to be able to build it as I know I want it right from the outset.

Perhaps there’s a compromise in here somewhere with an unlock-all but still keeping the money constrained?

I’ll have to think about it. Not sure when I’ll kick this city off yet, most likely after the first post for the To the Moon play-along is up and out there. :)