I have been thinking about creativity a lot over the past month or two and I wanted to start this blog putting my thoughts together. I think there is a large misconception, at least that I used to have about “creative people” and creativity in general. Here are the first pages of Creativity on Google for both webpages and images:
There’s a sense that creativity is this colorful explosion that is bursting out of people’s minds at all times, colorful and literally overwhelming. The image in the bottom left corner says “Creativity takes courage”. To me, all of these things imply a social value on creativity and a way people must think or feel to be “creative”. I don’t think that value is warranted. I think this idea that creative people are bursting with new ideas constantly can give people, myself included, the false impression that they are somehow not creative or don't have creative ideas because they aren’t constantly thinking of new things.
Even the image in the top left corner, presumably the most linked image from Google, shows a binary separation of the brain between the mechanical and the creative. This is a commonly accepted myth that one side of the brain is used for creativity and the other for logic, but I believe it is a myth. However, this idea can pigeonhole people into saying “I’m not creative” because they are “more logical” or don’t use the “artsy side of their brain”. I think this can be detrimental to potential creators, people don’t even try to create because they are afraid of being bad at it or because they “don’t have the brain for it”. So of course, their small forays into trying a new field or a new hobby are going to lead to non-Da Vinci-like results, which then disappoint them, and further reinforce their idea that they are not creative. But that’s probably not true! (oh look, a segue!)
I believe that creativity, like lots of other brain related things, is kind of like a muscle. You have to keep trying and keep working at it and eventually you get results that are more to your liking! USC is really focused on iterative design and rapid prototyping. The faster we can try something the faster we can figure out what works about it and what we need to think about differently. Notice I don’t even use failure, we can learn a ton from stuff that doesn’t come out they way we expected it to. Literally the first reading Richard Lemarchand gave us for his production class was “Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories". The biggest “Aha moment” I got from that article was the following insight from Chaim Gingold:
“He had an infinite series of cool little toys, which he considered sketches or studies. Master artists like Escher or Van Gogh don’t just sit down and crank out a finished piece. Artists create numerous sketches and studies before they undertake finished paintings, let alone masterpieces. Ken’s larger demos clearly built on top of what he had learned in previous ones. It all formed one long line of inquiry and research. In Ken’s world, my failures, which I was now calling prototypes, are like an artist’s studies, a necessary part of any major undertaking.”
We make prototypes to help us build grand projects. We are not going to know at the outset of a project how the final piece is going to feel, how it's going to look, how the story is going to go. All of these things need drafts, prototypes, little demos to prove that small pieces of the whole can all come together and work as a cohesive final product. So we need these little sketches, we need to build work that we probably wouldn’t try to sell on Steam or even show to our friends. (although honestly you should be sharing everything to try and get as much feedback for it but that’s all about personal comfort) (also I think that’s something you can get better at overtime… it's a muscle, the brain etc. etc.)
To bring it back to my point about creativity, new ideas don’t just pop into our brains from beyond the void. Creative ideas are built upon existing knowledge, past experiences, and previous attempts to create something. Use all of your past work, use inspiration from all forms of media, just take one little thing that stood out to you from a show, from a title screen, from a picture, and insert it somewhere. See how it fits, ask what that does for your work and if that’s what you want!
I think in most cases, my personal idea of really creative people making games straight from their minds, having the whole story in place, having all the level designs in place, all of the mechanics just stewing around in their head until they came out with a delicious perfectly seasoned game, is just false. I'm sure for most of those games it took a ton of iteration, throwing level designs out, rewriting all the scripts, scrapping 3 times the amount of mechanics than was actually on display in the final product. It’s just the nature of the work, we don’t actually know what we want until it’s in front of us and we can say “these things feel really great, these other things I am not into how can we improve them?” I think iteration is what makes great works great more so than “creativity”. I think that creativity itself is much more incremental and slowly evolving, potentially even impossible to see at times. I don’t think it is usually this in your face color explosion that I used to think it was.
I have been thinking about this a lot because it is freeing for me to think that I can potentially make creative and interesting stuff even if when asked initially what are you thinking about I may only have one or two ideas that aren’t colorfully mind-explodingly awesome yet. This helps me stay inspired to create and iterate and hopefully it can help you as well!