The “Creativity Boot Camp” is a workshop run for studios the world over by Paul Schuytema. In his own words, it is "dedicated to teaching the tools and techniques of focused creative thought." Paul ran the single-day edition of his workshop here at GDC today, and I went along to see what it’s like.
Once we’d all settled down, Paul started the day with a discussion on the nature of creativity itself – what it means to “be creative.” Many people offered up suggestions for a definition, most relating to the notion of creating something from nothing. In the end we took a definition along the lines of creating a new idea from a combination of two existing ones. This definition allows us to recognize the impact memory and experience have on creativity – you can’t create a new idea if you don’t have two to ‘parent’ it – and led us naturally into a discussion of how best to take care of our memories, and how hone our idea-combining skills.
Paul spent about an hour talking about mental health and “athleticism,” and also about physical fitness, pointing out that a healthy mind is much better supported by a healthy body. While he admitted he thought it unlikely that many producers would be persuaded to cook up a nice stir-fry instead of ordering pizza for crunching teams, they could at least learn how to make sandwiches. As far as mental athleticism goes, Paul talked about improving memory and related ideas such as speed-reading or note-taking; we also covered the importance of sleep and relaxation in a healthy mind, with a brief foray into lucid dreaming and how it can be used as a tool for forming new ideas even when you’re asleep.
Time for some interactivity. Our handouts included a set of “mental calisthenics” worksheets. First, we were conducted to solve some simple math and logic problems aimed at stimulating the left hemisphere of the brain – next number in the sequence, multiplying fractions, etc. The next sheet, however, led to much more amusing outcomes; this was the ‘creative’ sheet, aimed at the right hemisphere, and included four exercises:
Write down eight random words that are each at least five letters long. Most people exhibited some kind of pattern in their words; as this was shortly before lunchtime, food was a fairly common theme. Worryingly, it emerged that when I read out my words (mongoose, credenza, alimony, evilness, fishcake, lawnmower, and donut) there was no apparent pattern.
Come up with brand names for three products, given short descriptions of each product. Again, many suggestions exhibited similar qualities, drew on the same aspects of the product, etc. (I still think my suggestion of naming the mousetrap that vaporized the mouse “Mouch” was a stroke of underappreciated genius).
Given a slide with six color swatches, come up with a ‘marketing name’ for each color. The bright yellow swatch earned itself “Toxic Citrus” from one particularly astute member of the audience.
Pick one item from a list of four natural concepts (“babbling brook,” “ancient, crumbling wall,” “rolling pasture,” “old bonsai tree”) and one item from a list of modern technological concepts (“Porsche 911,” “color PDA,” “LCD monitor,” “keyboard synthesizer”) and create an analogy that relates one to the other.
Next up we were given a memory exercise; sets of images flashed up for all of a second and then disappeared again, and we were then asked to recall which images were present and in which order. For the first couple of tests, where we were only asked to recall the colors of the objects, most people got at least the set of colors correct (though the order was sometimes wrong); after that, however, we struggled more with a larger number of objects that we had to correctly name (and it didn’t help that at least one of the objects was something that some of us couldn’t identify even with the picture in front of us). This was followed by a brief exercise in speed-reading; our worksheets contained a page full of prose to be covered in a very short period of time, by reading groups of words at a time and identifying repetition.
Then Paul gave us “the Andre Breton.” Andre Breton was a French Surrealist, author of the Surrealist Manifesto and proponent of “automatic writing,” a direct translation of your stream of thought onto paper. Given a quick-fire sequence of images on the screen in front, we were asked to look at the images and then write down whatever words or phrases ran through our heads. Some people ended up with very broken, staccato text; others wrote flowing phrases that sounded more like casual poetry. There was definitely a naked monkey somewhere.
Lastly we took a look at mind-mapping. Paul led us first in answering the question “How do I hold a rock concert?” exploring the different facets of the problem and outlining ideas and how they related. He then gave us a list of six or so questions and asked us to pick one and map it out – I did so and now have a sort of plan as to how one goes about dating a model.
We settled back down and Paul talked for a while about the nature of fun and play for a while, and moved quickly towards our next exercise, a small-scale game design problem. We split into groups, and Paul held up a game he’d worked on a few years ago, a virtual table football (“foosball”) game, with the challenge that we design a “natural” controller interface for it, on both PC and console. We had about ten minutes; I got together with a team of people including Joseph Hatcher, Juan Collado, and Juergen Musil. Afterwards we shared our designs; most people used the idea of using one analog stick for each hand on the console, with a left-right motion of the stick to spin and an up-down motion to slide the pole in and out, and buttons (usually shoulder buttons, though that wasn’t always possible) to switch poles. The PC proved a harder problem, due to the lack of a second analog device (as apparently, demographics show that the majority of players don’t actually have two mice, even though Windows XP supports it). Some people used buttons to switch hands, others gave the player control of one stick while the other was AI-controlled; some people simply ignored independent control and had the mouse control all poles, or one pole plus the goalie. Paul showed us the interface his game had shipped with; the second pole was automatically selected to follow the ball, and instead of using the vertical mouse axis to spin the poles, you could simply “click to kick.” This was simpler, but meant players had no control over the strength of a shot, and possibly felt less “natural.”
Then, a creative problem solving exercise. Despite the carpeting and general stable feeling of the ground, Paul assured us that we were all, in fact, on board a ship that was rapidly sinking, and that we had just enough time as a group to grab six items from his list and get to the raft that would take us to the nearby tropical island. Even with the alluring description of his music collection, nobody opted to take the iPod. Once we were safely on the island, fate sprung a cruel twist upon us as the volcano at the center of the island erupted and we had two hours before the beach would be consumed by magma; everyone in the room became spontaneously superhumanly strong and cut down palm trees with machetes to build rafts (apart from one wiseass group who reasoned that nobody had said the island was unpopulated, and that if there was a volcano on the island then there would be a geologist nearby, so just radio for help and wait to be picked up). Juan also came up with a backup plan for our group, which involved suicide by flare gun. He was very sure to remind us that it would be necessary to scream “Oh god oh god we’re all gonna die” first.
We moved onto a third exercise, a larger design challenge. Paul brought us in as troubleshooters a couple of months into a medieval castle-building project. The problem? Technical limitations meant that trying to run too many castle tiles on the map slowed the game down, and the castles themselves looked kinda stupid – they didn’t adapt nicely to the rolling terrain, for example. We were asked to redesign the castle-building system from a user experience point of view. Solutions included the use of ‘template’ layouts that the user could build on top of, terraforming, and “advisor” systems to guide the player as they attempt to learn medieval architecture on the fly. Personally, I was envisioning The Sims meets Dungeon Keeper meets Generic Physics Engine “Pile of Blocks” Demo, but my solution may have been overly complex.
As the day drew to an end, we moved onto the final exercise: limited game design. Limited game design is an activity I’ve heard practiced at workshops before, but I’d never tried it; it’s really a lot of fun. The way it works is you’re given a board (printed on a sheet of A4 paper in our case), one or more ‘randomizers’ (dice or spinners), and some general playing pieces – army men, Clue pieces, plastic pigs, hollow pyramids of various shapes and sizes… generally the result of reaching into a bucket of child’s toys and pulling out a handful. Then you’ve got a half-hour to create a game from them, playtest it, formalize the rules, etc. Dr Bahram Golshan joined our group, and we examined the characteristics of the board and the particularly notable aspects of it – in our case, the board had two boxes at the top and a triangle at the bottom that were ‘extended’ from the circular structure in the middle – and also the properties of our playing pieces and how they related – such as the fact that the two pyramids we had would fit neatly over the Clue pieces. After a little while of shuffling pieces around the board, we came up with Sauron’s Revenge, in which two competing teams of hobbits (either one player per team, or two) race to try and cross the plains of Mordor and raid Sauron’s Pantry and then make it back alive, all the while trying to avoid being hit by Sauron’s spells (the two pyramids) that were moving around the plains of Mordor, catching unsuspecting hobbits and either keeping them stuck, sending them back to the start, or removing them from the game entirely.
We ended up over-running by about half an hour while people presented their board games, but all in all the day was very educational and generally a lot of fun. It’s probably not a session to attend a second time – unless your memory really does need so much tuning that you forget all the presented information – but if you’ve not done it and you get a chance, I happily recommend it.
Unite 2010
