The Creative Medical Student: A Descriptive Study

Biographical study distinguished high from low creative medical students by broken homelife, greater preference for movies, modern music, serious books, bridge playing and creative hobbies. High creatives seek challenge, academic or research careers, verbal and imaginative expression. Low creatives have higher motivation, better academic grades, more economic and family interests, are often oldest children and head for general practice. Independent, original explorations characterize high creativity while traditional, authoritative explanations satisfy the less creative. Fricke's Opinion, Attitude and Interest Survey made the creativity identification. Factor analysis related OAIS Scores, Omnibus Personality Inventory and Medical College Admission Test scores to cross check with biography data. A motivational Index is suggested as a predictor of supportive value to the creativity score.     

What's My Motivation? Video Games and Interpretative Performance

The interpretation of character motivations is a crucial part of the understanding of many narratives, including those found in video games. This interpretation can be complicated in video games by the player performing the role of a player‐character within the game narrative. Such performance finds the player making choices for the character and also interpreting the resulting character actions and their effect on the game's narrative. This can lead to interpretative difficulties for game narratives and their players: if a decision to act is made by the player, is it that the player's own imaginative reasons for acting warrant some narrative interpretations and exclude others? To answer this I argue that we need to investigate (a) the interactive ontology of video game narratives, (b) the notion of game playing as interpretative performance, and (c) the player‐character, an artifact through which performance is focused in narrative games. Doing so shows there to be at least two problems with the notion of the correct interpretation of narrative games. Neither of these problems entirely negates the normativity of game narratives, however, and so players are left with the problem of how they might decide which of the possible playings are warranted. I end by making some practical suggestions for the thoughtful and narratively interested game player.