Education in Creativity

I'd like to spend some time reflecting a bit on the history of the game pitches that we've had and how we've got to the point where we are, because I've learned an incredible amount. I feel that our team is in the unique position of building a game off of a proven, fun mechanic instead of an idea. While other teams have been struggling to make the implementation of their interesting idea fun, our team has been struggling to make the idea of our fun mechanics interesting.

This is not what I expected to learn, but it's exactly what I needed to learn.

I spent time talking about the current iteration of the game pitch today with Zac (who has a brand new baby as of this evening--grats!) who told me that they're focusing on making their game into something that's both rewarding and fun for both people playing. I feel that my strengths are in tuning a certain game to be fun, and with a solid idea behind me I could turn even a game about Thermodynamics with mandatory calculation into something that would be fun to play.

Aside: STEAMship WAS awesome. I was genuinely happy with the final iteration of that game.

Back to my conversation with Zac: I expressed to him that I would much rather be in his position, because I feel like I've been put in the one situation that I was completely unprepared for. I told him that this entire experience of making a thesis or an idea around this game has been amazingly frustrating akin to a poor game of 20 questions, where the script would go something like:

Roger: This game doesn't have a solid hook, nobody will care about this game.
Jake: We've thought about a topic that we think is interesting enough to make a game around.
Roger: That topic has nothing to do with your mechanics.
Jake: We've come up with a way to incorporate our topic into our game
Roger: You don't really care about that topic, get something that you're really behind.
Jake: We've come up with an idea that we're all passionate about.
Roger: That idea isn't a game, it doesn't sound fun.
Jake: We've found a way to make this new idea fun.
Roger: That game doesn't have a solid hook.
Jake: We've not slept trying to think of a game that could possibly fill every requirement given to us on this, and have come up with an idea that we think will work.
Roger: You're thinking too hard about this.

Really, it feels like I've spent the last 4 years as an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering being trained to think a certain way and I've been trying to undo it all in the last 4 weeks. Thinking a completely different way is amazing, educational, and rewarding--but incredibly difficult nonetheless. I didn't think you could learn how to be creative, but I think that this program is as close as I can get to an education in creativity.