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created, the fact of sharing meanings will favor new representations of the world
as presented in the game.
• Social language, characterized by specifi c group activities, professional jargon,
and so on. The thinking process behind the creation of games relates to social
language that includes, for example, going in depth into concepts and words such
as story, programming, designing, rules, and enemies. All of them have specifi c
meanings for specifi c groups of people.
•
Power relationships as present in language. In that context, Bakhtin differentiates
between two kinds of discourses. The fi rst is authoritative discourse as the voice
of tradition, of the offi cial line. The second is internally persuasive discourses
that work toward a concrete verbal and ideological unifi cation when symmetrical
social relationships are preponderant.
Through discourse analysis, we will examine how language contributes to favor
certain processes of creativity.
8.2.2
Emotion, Thinking, and Creative Collaboration
Vygotsky's work on creativity complements this perspective and helps to clarify
how the subject must go out of himself to create. Let's see how creators should do
this in the real world to go beyond pure formal abstraction:
From our point of view, imagination is a transforming, creative activity directed from the
concrete toward a new concrete. The movement itself from a given concrete toward a cre-
ated concrete, the feasibility of creative construction is possible only with the help of
abstraction. Thus, the abstract enters as a requisite constituent into the activity of imagina-
tion, but is not the center of this activity. The movement from the concrete through the
abstract to the construction of a new concrete image is the path that imagination describes
during the transitional age. (Vygotsky
1998
, p. 162)
From that theoretical framework, creativity is understood as
a process in which
the abstract and the concrete merge
. Also, emotion and cognition merge and need
to be considered as involved in specifi c processes:
Specifi cally the secrecy of the fantasy indicates that it is closely connected with internal
desires, inventiveness, drives, and emotions of the personality and begins to serve this
whole aspect of the adolescent's life. In this respect, the connection between fantasy and
emotion is extremely signifi cant. (Vygotsky
1998
, p. 164)
From this point of view, Vygotsky proposes the idea of
zone of proximal develop-
ment (ZPD)
to explain the relationships between development and learning:
What we call the Zone of Proximal Development (…) is the distance between the actual
developmental level as determined by independent problem solving, and the level of poten-
tial development as determined through problem solving under guidance or in collaboration
with more capable peers. (Vygotsky
1978
/1986, p. 86)
Following these Vygotskian ideas, Holzman (
2010
) relates ZPD and creativity.
He refers not to an attribute of individuals but to social units that are present in
