How to Get Creative

How to "Get Creative"

You can facilitate this process in a number of ways. The best strategy is to stuff your head full of concepts and all their associations. After all, the bigger the web of associations at your disposal, the greater the chance that you'll find some odd parallel between two ideas. Wouldn't it be great if you noticed a creatively useful connection between, say, dinosaur paleontology and Polynesian language structures? Of course, if you don't know much about dinosaur paleontology or Polynesian language structures, you'll never notice the connection, will you? You want to populate your mind with a wondrous and colorful diversity of ideas, a grand carnival of conceptual heterogeneity.

And how might you go about this task? Simple: You read. Herein lies the greatest failure of the younger game designers: They don't much believe in reading. "Hey, we're the video generation," they tell me. "We were brought up on a steady diet of video. We won't put up with all those boring books. We need some sensory stimulation." Some also claim that they can find anything they need to know on the Internet, so there's no need for books, they smugly assert.

Brace yourself: I'm putting on my "Crotchedy Old Fart" hat and I'm going to give you a lecture.

Now see here! If you think that you can learn enough about the world to design games without doing a substantial amount of reading, you're never going to amount to anything! Video is designed for the lowest-common-denominator audience people who couldn't stumble their way through a multi-clause sentence if their lives depended on it. And the Internet contains very little of intellectual substance. The grand total of all the information that I can find on the Internet about any given topic of real intellectual interest is less that what I can get in a single good book. You try looking up Erasmus on the Internet I guarantee you won't find anything matching what you'll get in a single good biography. Or dinosaur paleontology, or Polynesian language structures, for that matter. Sure, maybe someday you'll find some of this stuff on the Net. But do you ever think you'll find anything like Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia Under the Early Count-Kings (1151 1213), or Conjunction, Contiguity, Contingency: On Relationships Between Events in the Egyptian and Coptic Verbal Systems? The latter book, believe it or not, actually contributed to some of the thinking that went into writing this book. Don't kid yourself if you want to compete with Da Big Boys, you gonna have to do some serious reading.

LESSON 13

Read more.

Harrumph!

Reading is a lifelong process. I remember reading Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in sixth grade, primarily because it was the biggest book I'd ever seen in my life. And I've been at it ever since. You don't need to be as maniacal as I've been, but if your bookshelf contains little more than science fiction novels and technical manuals, you probably better reconsider your intention of becoming a game designer.

And if you think that this is just Chris Crawford's personal hobby horse, think again. Will Wright is always recommending to me these weird, strange books; I try them out and wonder what the hell is going on in his head. Sid Meier will floor you with his reading background. Dan Bunten read voraciously. Same thing goes for Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg. All the great game designers are reading addicts and so am I.

So there!

Another useful strategy is to wonder. Wonder about anything and everything. Have you figured out why the sky is blue? If not, shame on you! It's the most common wondering question anybody could ask. And for that matter, why aren't cows green? They spend their days outside in the sun eating green grass; wouldn't it make sense for them to do a little photosynthesis of their own? Why do catchy tunes, especially commercial jingles, go round and round inside our heads until we could scream? Why do young adolescent girls go bonkers at rock concerts? Why are there tiny serrations around the edges of some coins? Why do dogs bark while cats meow? All these questions have answers, and if you had wondered about them, you'd have found the answers by now.

LESSON 14

Wonder more.

Wondering is important because it is an exercise in tightening up the web of associations in your mind. When you eventually figure out why the sky is blue, the answer will also explain why the sunset is red and two previously unconnected ideas will become connected in your mind. More connections make possible more comparisons, and therefore greater creativity.

Reading and wondering comprise the strategy of creative endeavor; they help build your overall creative strength. But when it comes time to tackle a particular creative challenge, you're into the world of tactics, and again I have some specific advice for you.

The first step is to translate the creative challenge into the terminology of your mind: emotion. Reason and intellectualism are not part of the fundamental architecture of the human mind. They are artifices added in the last few thousand years, part of our veneer of civilization. Scratch a modern human and you'll find a hunter-gatherer, full of fears, quick to anger, driven by lust and hunger. These are the basic driving forces of the human mind, and if you want to engage the full creative potential of that mind, you've got to express your problem in its native language of emotion. You've got to feel the problem in your heart. You've got to ache over it, agonize over it, make it hurt. You've got to perceive the problem in direct sensory terms. What does it look like? What does it smell like? If it made a sound, what would that sound be? Most important is the kinesthetic sense: What does the problem feel like in your skin?

A digression on the power of kinesthetic perception: Many times I have used a joke that Alan Kay told me to make an important point about software design. The joke goes like this:

There was this fellow who decided he needed a new suit. So he went to a tailor and got measured for the suit. Two weeks later he showed up at the tailor's shop to try on his new suit. But when he put it on, the fit was terrible. "Look at this left sleeve!"he exclaimed. "It's way too long!" "No, no, no!" the tailor answered. "You just don't know how to wear an elegant suit. Here, all you have to do is hitch your left shoulder up high like this; see how the sleeve lines up perfectly with your wrist now?" The man tried it out, and sure enough, if he scrunched his body up and stretched the left shoulder up high, the sleeve did seem to fit well. "But what about this right leg?" he protested, "It's too short!" Again the tailor contradicted him: "You're not standing properly. If you keep the right leg straight with the knee locked, the leg looks perfect!" Again the skeptical customer tried out the tailor's suggestion, and again the correction seemed to work. Abashed, the man paid the tailor and, with hunched shoulder and locked knee, left the shop, and staggered painfully down the street. A block away, he was accosted by a passerby. "Where did you get that magnificent suit?" the stranger asked. The man lifted his contorted arm to point towards the tailor's shop. "I've got to get myself a suit from him!" the passerby exclaimed. "If he can make a suit to fit a crippled hunchback like you so well, he must be an excellent tailor!"

The moral of this story, in regards to software, is that we accommodate ourselves so willingly to poorly designed software that we start to think that the software itself is good and that we are cripples. Now, when I tell this joke to students, I embellish it by contorting myself and comedically staggering about as the hapless customer. This kinesthetic embellishment makes a deep impression on the students; later in the course I am able to instantly demolish the old "once you get used to this software, it makes perfect sense" argument by hunching myself up and staggering a few steps. Everybody laughs and the point is driven home. Once I even saw an argument at a distance, with one student hunching and staggering, and the other student making concessionary gestures. Ideas expressed kinesthetically really hit home. So feel the problem in your body!

It could take days, weeks, or even months to drive the problem deep into your subconscious. But once you have driven it deep enough, you'll know. You'll feel an emotional fatigue, a sense of exhausted futility. That's when it's time to stop. Take a break, perhaps even a vacation. Desist all conscious efforts at the problem and let it simmer in your subconscious. Get plenty of sleep and dreams so that it can have the time to sink its teeth into the problem. If you've done your job well, you may notice that your dreams are, in an emotionally abstract fashion, indirectly addressing the problem. As the subconscious hones in on the problem, your dreams may well become more specific about it. And one day, when your mind is distracted by some trivial task, the solution will leap out at you, whole and complete. In one blinding flash, you'll see everything and the answer will seem so simple that you'll wonder why you didn't see it before.

This is called a brainstorm, and it has been much studied and much has been learned about it. Great geniuses who have experienced brainstorms have described their experience in detail, and the common elements are widely reported. First, there's a phase of intense emotional involvement with the problem. The creator struggles mightily, but fails. Then follows a quiescent period where the creator is distracted by some extended but mindless busywork. Finally comes the brainstorm itself, and the subjects always report that the entire solution leaps upon them with suddenness.

I have used the technique with reasonable success. I can't force brainstorms to happen sometimes I strain and strain but my mind is hopelessly constipated. But the tactic works often enough that I have made it a permanent part of my intellectual lifestyle. If you have built up the abs and pecs for heavy creative work, and apply this technique with the intensity it requires, odds are that you will have some creative success with it.