Charlie Brooker recently wrote this article about his creative process and it seems to be an honest, if commercially warped, report on his periodical struggle to write something. He amusingly articulates the battle with his inner critic which I’m sure a lot of us will identify with and he talks of his efforts to teleport himself “…into that productive trance-state as quickly as possible…”.
There are two main things that interest me about this:
1. The battle with the inner critic. Any creative person who strives to do anything that isn’t a direct facsimile of something else is bound to concerned that the new work isn’t too similar to some current or past influence and that the new work is still accessible, or at least meaningful in some way. Too close to an influence and will be seen as derivative and this is demotivating. Too new and it has the hurdle of alienation to jump. If the goal is to BE DIFFERENT, then as a creative you are going to bounce off of these two modes of though all the time.
2. The teleportation to a productive trance-state. Chances are that anyone reading this has had this happen to them at least once in their life and I’d wager that this state of mind came about because of some insight into a problem, or some new perspective. I’d be surprised if this came about by any goal driven desire to be different.
There is a great talk by Dan Pink at TED on the Science of Motivation
which goes some way to explaining why this productive trance-state is unlikely to manifest itself for the creative striving to be different. And another talk by Tim Brown on Creativity and Play
And another one by Stuart Brown.
I have a hypothesis that ties these talks to the Charlie Brooker article: Play leads to discovery, and discovery is the hook of interest that sparks further investigation.
If the hypothesis is correct, it would suggest that all trance-like states of creative productivity come from an individual’s enjoyment in investigating something new and the continuing sense of wonder if the investigation leads to new discovery.
What I find interesting about this is that: When in this activity of play-discovery-investigation, there is almost never any inner critic.
So how does this help you? I recently heard an anecdote about Stanley Kubrick. He was filming Full Metal Jacket and was doing the scene where Private Gomer Pyle is forced to eat a doughnut he’d tried to hide in his footlocker while his fellow boot-campers are ordered to do press-ups. If you look at that scene, all of the marines’ heads are in shot. This was no accident and it was less trivial to set up than you might imagine. It must have occurred to Stanley that this was important and it gave him a set of limitations to work within. I imagine that this self-imposed limitation gave him something to play with, and the process of establishing this as one of the underlying elements of that shot gave him a clear, productive process to follow. These sorts of decisions and creatively imposed guidelines probably help stop the inner critic.
In summary then: To shut up the inner critique: play, investigate and discover the hook to pull you in to the work. If you play you will find out new things, different restrictions and new opportunities that will make your product different. If you try to be different, the chances are your inner critic will give you a hard time.
Who?
Jumped Up Games is an indie games company founded by Berbank Green and Jonathan Skuse, based in Cambridge, UK.
Buddies
Our lovely developer friends.
There comes a point in every developers life when they have to play-test their new game on someone who isn’t them. The sooner this happens, and the more often this happens, the better. Play-testing is king.
A developer’s game is like their baby. Sure, it’s a miracle of nature, look at what tricks it can do. Every baby is special, of course it is, but you need outside eyes and fingers to get some perspective.
This weekend we had our first play tester. He knows who he is. We picked him because (in no particular order):
1. He’s exceptionally trustworthy.
2. He’s a good friend
3. He’s very honest, smart and knows a lot about games
4. We have excellent blackmail material
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Here’s something I did today (click to enlarge).
It’s not for the JUG game (the one we’re being mysterious about), but it is for a JUG game. Let’s call it a side project.
Developers, being inquisitive types, always like to ask what it is exactly that we are making. This is horribly frustrating, because I’d love to tell people what we’re doing, but it’s just not… sensible. Not because we’re building anything that will ROCK THE FOUNDATIONS of the industry, but simply because, in true indie fashion, the project is in a constant state of flux.
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And so it begins. We have 42 students, all busily chowing down on their design, code and art sandwiches. The place is packed, and very warm. Their brief is: “A 3 minute game with 2 massive heads”. Their interpretations of this have been excitingly varied.
It all kicked off at 2pm with a rousing speech by Jon and Chihiro from Jagex attended to spur on the design ideas in the first few hours. Terry Cavanagh and Richard from Otterly turned up to look around and Terry will be back later to crack on with his games. (If you haven’t played VVVVVV, we suggest you give it a go, and I have a special love of the Vegetable Game too)
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This Monday at 4pm, local games studios including Sony, Jagex and Frontier are attending Brains Eden at the Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). The Brains Eden event brings academics, students and games industry professionals together for a good old chin wag. If you’re interested in games, you might like to come along.
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While we are busying ourselves on the new game, here is a jolly screenshot of some work we did with some excellent ARU students.
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