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Sweden wants to promote democracy and creativity through video games

Sweden wants to promote democracy and creativity through video games

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In an attempt to promote either democracy, creativity, personal expression, or some slightly convoluted combination of all three, Sweden has been operating a program called Democreativity that's meant to curate ideas for "the most unlikely [video] game ever." Democreativity has been crowdsourcing ideas for unlikely characters, environments, and goals, and allowing people to vote on what they like the most. It's since posted a brief breaking down the top ideas: people were largely in favor of collaborative, nonviolent games that don't involve beating an opponent; they also preferred inanimate and abstract objects to be characters and to play in an abstract environment.

"Democracy is the mother of creativity."

Only around 500 ideas were submitted, so this certainly isn't the most robust analysis of gamers' developing interests, though the results certainly meet Democreativity's goal of highlighting underrepresented ideas from across the world. Democreativity itself isn't turning any of these ideas into a game though: it's instead encouraging game developers to look through the ideas for inspiration for something to create themselves. This will apparently promote democracy because "freedom, equality, and openness" are essential to both it and creativity.

Democreativity's results seem to have come out quickly. The program appears to have launched just last month alongside a strange inspirational video heralding Sweden's creativity by pointing to famous Swedish output such as Minecraft and Robyn's intense dancing. Democreativity hopes to see several games produced based on its results, and it intends to feature them on its website whenever they launch.