Digital Games for Creativity Assessment: Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities

ABSTRACT

Creativity assessments should be valid, reliable, and scalable to support various stakeholders (e.g., policy-makers, educators, corporations, and the general public) in their decision-making processes. Established initiatives toward scalable creativity assessments have relied on well-studied standardized tests. Although robust in many ways, most of these tests adopt unnatural and unmotivating environments for expression of creativity, mainly observe coarse-grained snippets of the creative process, and rely on subjective, resource-intensive, human-expert evaluations. This article presents a literature review of game-based creativity assessment and discusses how digital games can potentially address the limitations of traditional testing. Based on an original sample of 127 papers, this article contributes an in-depth review of 16 papers on 11 digital creativity assessment games. Despite the relatively small sample, a wide variety of design decisions are covered. Major findings and recommendations include identifying (1) a disconnect between the potential of scaling up assessment of creativity with the use of digital games, and the actual reach achieved in the examined studies (2) the need for complementary methods such as stealth assessment, algorithmic support and crowdsourcing when designing creativity assessment games, and (3) a need for interdisciplinary dialogs to produce, validate and implement creativity assessment games at scale.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Ecological validity refers to the extent to which data collected from an experiment reflects real-life behavior, and the extent to which findings are generalizable to real-life settings. This is dependent on the testing environment (Andrade, 2018).

2. Construct validity refers to the extent to which an instrument is able to capture the phenomenon/ability it is trying to measure (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955).

3. Convergent validity is a type of construct validity, which refers to the extent to which two tests that theoretically should be related, are in fact correlated (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955).

4. Internal validity refers to the extent to which the study is able to answer the research question, without any bias, given the study design, the conduct, and analysis (Andrade, 2018).

5. Game variants have specialized prompts for the academic study but the game itself has not been altered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carlsbergfondet; Synakos Foundation; Novo Nordisk Fonden.