Applying creativity techniques according to the type of challenge The workshops were essentially practical and each had a total duration of four hours and involves 20 students. A generic method for the Introduction of Creativity in Games’ Design was tested and validated in the creation of new games project. The execution of final validation tests resorts on the acquired knowledge of these workshops and the application of methodological development work. As envisioned in the method designed prior to the experiments, the workshops were divided into four parts, namely: a) Identifying the teams, b) Focus on the problem, c) Finding the Solution and d) Plan an Implementation. In each workshop the method has been corrected and adjusted in order to achieve better versions, in fact. the application of this method was itself a case study which also leads to new learning and adjustments of the method itself. It had as main goal the identification of innovative games that might help the MSc Students to define their final projects. As a secondary goal, there was the validation and improvement of the methodology by trying to tune the convergence of the creative processes in the Games’ design. The application of the techniques in two different editions of this course resulted in the creation of 16 games. Table 1 highlights 4 of these games: Apart from these workshops, helping through the practical experience acquired on the ground, and the elaboration of methodological design and its progressive adjustment and refinement, they also helped to outline the validation process and the applicability analysis. 

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... the 1970s was on approaches related to creativity based on personality studies in order to identify the creativity features in different domains. From then on the main focus of research changed to the components of creative thought and the resolution of problems (Candeias, 2008). Creativity study in neuro-biology has had - in the last few years - a reasonable success with, for example, the appearance of works that try to link individual creativity to communication between areas of the brain that are not normally linked together (Heilman, 2003). Also in epistemology and theology there are research activities that approach creativity. Philosophy tries to answer questions such as “What is creativity? How does it come to be? How does creativity manifest itself in findings, inventions, science and art? What is the role that creativity has in the construction of “me”? Theologians debate the connection between creativity and holy and divine inspiration, e.g. “Human beings will have the ability to create something new that is none other than an expression of God’s work?” In the fields of sociology and education from the current understanding of the relevance of creativity in social and educational contexts it is possible to verify intense and rich investigative activities. Recently, several investigators have turned their attention to the introduction of strategies in the classroom that allow for the stimulation and development of creativity in school students, of creative teaching as a way to promote communication between teacher and student and of creativity as a way of stimulating self-learning (Moraes, 2008). In the fields of management, innovation, entrepreneurship, economics and technologies the importance of creativity, as a first step for the birth of inventions and innovative support, has had a strong and diversified focus in virtually all areas including - in particular - the field of information systems and technology, where this work is located. The conception and study of computer games is complex in itself. Its complexity has its origin in the fact that computer games combine human and technological resources and - in a transversal way - they involve and challenge a lot of different human psychology aspects like physical skills, intelligence, ludic, and most of the cases they also require the use of many distinct technologies. Games’ design, as a creative activity, adds to the di fficulty of trying to reach the player’s aims and also the market opportunities that may occur in the future. The introduction of creative processes and techniques in different Games’ design approaches, could stimulate the production of ideas, resulting in new combinations that in turn obtain original and useful ideas for games. The consequence is the generation of innovation in Computers Games and in the way that they are used. The search for a solution to this problem determined the main motivation and purpose of this research work focused on creativity in games’ design. The main hypothesis is the possibility of conceiving an actual strategy for the introduction of systematic creative processes able to produce original Computer Games. Some authors classify the more than two hundred existing techniques into problem definition techniques in order to explore the attributes of one particular problem, to generate alternatives or for the visual exploration of metaphors, analogies, assessment and implementation of ideas (Cave, 2013; Mycoted, 2013). This big diversity of creativity techniques is promising for our goals, since games’ design has a vast context, since it covers the whole organization and its involvements, as well as the most varied branches of activities and technologies. This virtually means multiple tools and the possibility of choosing the most adequate for each specific situation. Among the several creativity techniques of the “Randomizers” category and “Focalization Techniques” according to the classification of Zusman (1998), six techniques were selected, namely: Brain storming (Osborn, 1963), Brute thinking (Michalko, 2006), Whiteboard (from “Randomizers”), IdeaBox (Zwicky, 1969), Reversal and SCAMPER (from “Focalization Techniques”). The criteria for the selection was based on three factors: a) the ease of use of each technique, b) its creative power and c) the predicted adaption to the different types of game design problems, markets and people, which we want to target in the game design process. However, it is important to mention that several other techniques could have been used in this category instead or as a complement to the ones selected, without a significant loss for the research results presented in this article. As a result of this experiment, throughout the two years of practical application of these techniques in several workshops, as well as in the case of application and validation, general recommendation were produced for application purposes in the context of game design creative problems. Figure 1 presents general recommendations for the applicability of the selected techniques, as an outcome of this two year fieldwork experiment of the techniques used depending on the problem in focus. In some cases, there existed an overlapping, which meant that it was possible to apply any of the indicated techniques and end up with a strong probability of success or in an ideal situation to apply all the techniques and obtain the widest number of possible solutions. In this stage it is important to keep an open mind, so that it remains possible to obtain the greatest number of alternative solutions before selecting the best. In the face of a possible high number of possible alternative solutions, one must consider a formal evaluation method in order to choose the better solution. In order to apply those creativity techniques to create computer games and with the goal of identifying new ideas for games some workshops were organized in the context of the course “Digital Game Technology” from the Electrical and Computer Engineering MSc of the New University of Lisbon, both in the 2013/14 and 2012/13 editions. As an example of the method application, the description of one workshop using the creativity techniques follows. The application of the method was carried out according to the following process: 1 - The teams were constructed by the course professors, before the workshop took place. A careful selection was made towards resulting heterogeneous groups, built up by elements with distinct profiles, allowing “out of the box” thinking. 2- The following challenge was presented to the students: In order to achieve this goal the primary creative working questions were:  Find a new idea - What we want to build?  Have an original narrative - Which history?  Deal with innovative rules - Who is the player and who the characters roles in the game context?  Play in a different way – Which interaction and perspective?  Plan a different gameplay - How will we have FUN, FUN, FUN? The market needs and themes were also consider in the attempt to reach these goal. These primary creative working questions were tackled jointly by filling in a support document and deciding what the ideal solution would be (objective). 3. After this step, a discussion took place within each team and it was created a causal relationships diagram in order to identify and list the primary sources of the challenges. An example case of a game causal relationships diagram is presented in Figure 2. The primary creative working question was “how to use a game to teach Portuguese Sign Language?” 4. Based on the different challenges (example: the objective shown in the center of the Diagram of Relationships) the following task was the identification and listing of the key points that would sustain a different proposal for each challenge. The resulting primary (root) causes for this case are:  Each char corresponds to a different gesture  Most of the people prefers fast things  Learn gestures is boring  People have other priorities  Formal education does not address Portuguese Sign Language  Not too much people that can teach Portuguese Sign Language do exist 5. In order to approach the problem in relation to the types of primary causes identified, two different strategies were chosen (representative of the different categories) Both techniques were applied by all the participants groups. The first strategy was to apply a randomizer creativity technique to get innovative ways to look to the root causes. The chosen randomizer technique was Brute thinking. Brute thinking by Michael Michalko (2006) is a technique that aids lateral thinking, as well as creativity. It can be used to conceive alternative solutions but may also be useful for identifying the causes of problems. This technique is based on a very simple process that is developed in four steps: 1 - choosing a random word, 2 choosing associated elements for that word, 3 -forcing links between the word and the problem on one hand side and the associations and the problem, on the other hand side, and finally 4 - listing and analyzing the resulting ideas. In the example case the Brute thinking technique was applied one time. The word randomly obtained was: “elastic” and the selected things/elements associated to the word “elastic” were: “flexible”, “ rubber”, “extensible”, “variable size”, “moldable”,” useful”, and “soft”. As prescribed by the Brute Thinking technique the next step was to try to force links between these things/elements and the problem’s primary' causes and to write phrases with new perspectives. The most promising associations were: “Make each char correspond to flexible gestures”, “Have a system that allows gestures with variable size” and “Build a system where the user could learn Portuguese Sign Language in small but extensible steps”. These ideas w ere interesting but not extraordinary as expected. The second strategy was to apply an attributive creativity ...