Player Fun Creation

Game Informer Online (again) has posted up a little article on all the fun two players can have with Crackdown for the 360. The article can be found here. The co-op feature (with complementary videos), talks about how two players can create they're own fun in Crackdown once the game has been beaten. Free-roam and Co-op were a match made in heaven, it seems, or at least Pacific City. Two players with powers that rival Kal-El, an open world, limitless possiblities. The developers at Realtime Worlds must have known this when creating Crackdown.


Look Ma! I can fly! (From IGN.com)

Its an interesting design method. Rather than set the player on a linear path to clear through, give them a smattering of toys to blow themselves up with. The same results were found in Mercenaries and even Animal Crossing DS, multiplayer free-roam leads to inventive gameplay.
Inventive Gameplay. Its really quite fascinating: Design a game in such a way that the players create their own fun. The trick, I suppose, is designing the game well. I haven't played Crackdown, I cannot testify to its quality, but clearly others see it as succesful in offering up inventive gameplay.

Games can teach us things. Thats the point of this blog, to look at other games analytically and take note of their pitfalls and fine points, to see what methods they use to achieve certain ends. Then, after storing these lessons in our bank of knowledge, we apply them to our own games. We want to look at games from multiple angles, from a player's perspective, from an architects, an artists. We don't want to look at games in any narrow defined manner, we want to see them as whole pieces that can be disected in many different ways. Games offer so much for us to find and discover, we just need to stop and look.

What does inventive gameplay offer for players? How does it effect them (what can they learn)?
What theories, tools, themes, or aspects are necessary to create successful inventive gameplay?
Why is inventive gameplay fun (the answer is more obvious then you might think)?

Please post any thoughts you have in comments. Also, if you have played Crackdown, tell us some cool minigames you've come up with.