John Cleese on Creativity

John Cleese gives us an excellent lecture on his notions of what creativity is. 

I completely agree with Cleese on all counts, which is to say my experience lines up exactly with what he's saying. Creativity is a frame of mind that can be cultivated and practiced. It's ruined by some kinds of people, so be sure to kick them out. It's a shedding of that "closed mode," as he says, for a while. You need the closed mode to get things done, but you need the "open mode" to get the wacky ideas that eventually turn into the actually good ideas.

I think the thing that strikes me as most true of all is the part about sticking with something, and putting in more time. That goes against the stereotype, as we might imagine really creative people instantly have amazing ideas. In my experience though, it takes a huge amount of persistence to solve creative problems. When others give up or take a kind of mediocre way out, you should instead keep at it and at it. He suggest 1.5 hours at a time though I think you can actually do much longer stretches than that once you've developed the mental stamina for it.

The other kind of time is just as important, the time you "aren't working on the problem," yet your unconscious is. In project management, this is sometimes expressed in "number of showers." For example, if we can choose to pay for 20 people to work for a 2 months on a project or for 10 people to work 4 months on it, an advantage of choosing 10 people for 4 months is that every person involved will take twice as many showers. Good ideas happen in the shower.

And while we're talking about showers, Paul Graham has spoken about that subject too. He's interacted with more startup companies than just about anyone and he once mentioned that when a startup goes into fundraising mode, they tend to get way worse at making whatever it is they're making. He said at first glance that's because if they spend X time on fundraising work and planning, they are spending X less time on making the product. But that's NOT it, he says. It's that they think about fundraising in the shower. What you think about in the shower is often what your unconscious mind has been grinding and grinding away at. So if that very valuable resource (your unconscious mind) is thinking about how to get more money, then it's not supplying you with the creativity necessary to make good products.

Thanks to John Cleese for articulating what creativity is, or isn't. I think this message is especially valuable for those people who "aren't creative," because it explains that you can solve that by setting up the right situation for yourself and getting into the right frame of mind. You can be creative.

A Discussion of Balance

Here's an episode of Extra Credits about "Perfect Imbalance" on Penny Arcade. While I appreciate that the topic of game balance is getting covered, I don't think the arguments hold up.

First it makes these two points, which I agree with:

1) The two sides in Chess are similar enough that we can call the game symmetric. ALSO, Chess requires a huge amount of memorization to play, and he wishes that you could play in a more adaptive way and have memorization be less important.

2) Starcraft requires a huge amount of APM click speed to play at a high level, and only players who are super great at that really get to innovate in the strategy space (also bad players playing against bad players can get away with more strats). He wishes that thinking about new strategies had more relative importance to the common player than high APM does.

I have posted and spoken many times about those exact two issues, so I agree. But there is then some strange leap lof logic happens. The problem of how "solved" parts of those games can feel at times is claimed to be BECAUSE they are well-balanced. The problems involved are actually 0% because the games are well-balanced. Well-balanceness is a wonderful property and should not be blamed for these problems.

Chess

Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer also agreed that Chess had become too rigid and that memorization played too large of a role. He wanted Chess to be a game that reward moment-to-moment decisions more, strokes of genius more, adaptability more, even general grasp of fundamentals more, and memorization less. To achieve this, he created Chess960. The starting position of the pieces are randomized (according to a few rules) and then mirrored on the other side, so the game is still symmetric. He strived to keep the "perfect balance" of Chess while addressing the problem. I think it's a great idea.

The same problem that bothered Fischer and Extra Credits bothered me too. In addition that problem, the problem of too many draws bothered me, as did the slippery slope nature of the game causes it to end with conceding which is kind of anti-climactic. And in addition to that, I think asymmetric games are just more interesting than symmetric ones. So to address all of those issues, I developed Chess 2.

Chess 2 has 6 different armies (for asymmetry, creates lots of matchups) and a "midline rule" that

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Oxytocin and You

Oxytocin is a short-lived substance your body produces that has to do with feeling connected to people. Though it is perhaps more associated with females (especially relating to childbirth, breastfeeding, and maternal instinct), it's important to all people, male and female. I think it's even correlated to overall happiness, which is perhaps unfortunate for me as I've felt lacking in oxytocin for years.

Anyway, more recently ocytocin has also been linked to morality and trust. Here's Paul Zak's short (16 minute) presentation on that topic:

I find it really interesting to learn about the neurology and biological basis that drives people to be how they are, so maybe you'll find that interesting too.

Execution in Fighting Games

Here's an article about the role of execution in fighting games, by James Chen. I think the title and conclusion are kind of misleading because it does not really discuss the role of exeuction in fighting games, but rather the role of how different move commands affect the game.

Let's start with the good. Every example given is helpful to know, and I think each one is a correct example. In each case, Chen shows how the motion for doing a certain move being one thing rather than another thing affects gameplay and that this is usually for the better. Yes, a dragon punch motion and a reverse dragon punch motion do have different effects, and cause the moves to be used differently. Players should take that into account whether they are playing *as* such a character or *against* one. Good stuff here.

The problem is that that's not really what people mean when they talk about execution in fighting games. It's a very narrow, cherry picked kind of thing that doesn't fairly represent the topic. It also lead Chen to make this conclusion:

"Execution isn’t just about performing your combos. It’s also largely about knowing what your opponent CAN perform in given time frames. That ADDS to the mind games and the gameplay, not detracting from it."

I agree completely that the different motions chosen for moves gives another layer of things to think about and that that kind of variety is interesting relative to a game that had no such variety. The thing is, "execution" in general (not these very specific examples) has the opposite effect and it reduces strategy, relatively speaking. The more a game is about the difficulty of making your character do what you want to do, the necessarily less it is about strategy (that is, making good decisions).

This is why it's not a good idea to make special moves really hard to do. Make them take some *time* so some prediction is needed (even a few frames of prediction), yeah that's great. Make them start at a particular place on the joystick, such as a reverse dragon punch, and that affects how they're used, right. But to have some tiny input window to make them hard to do even when you have decided you want to do them, that's taking away emphasis on strategy. Making a game where the command to throw is secretly an option select tricky thing that you want to do basically always is another way to put more weight on dexterity that necessarily reduces strategy. Choosing commands that overlap too much (for example, ST Cammy's hooligan throw and spinning knuckle) puts more emphasis on dexterity than the decision of choosing the right move. So to increase strategy slightly, it's better to make those not overlap (and in HD Remix, they don't).

Making a game such that bread-and-butter combos require 1-frame linking is another great example of reducing the importance of strategy. In a recent stream, Chen himself said that in SF4, if you can't do Sakura's 1-frame link combo, you shouldn't be playing Sakura. I agree! That goes to show how strongly execution is favored over correct decision making / strategy in the case of SF4 Sakura.

We should really be striving to reduce execution requirements as much as possible while keeping the nature of the game intact. That is, making all dragon punches a single button press would reduce execution, but it would also actually ruin a bunch of strategy stuff by making them too reactive and not predictive enough, so we shouldn't do that. That's not a case where reducing execution helps, so I'm not talking about things like that. I am talking about sequences or moves that are hard apart from any strategic consideration. Like Sakura having 1-frame links as a critical thing, instead of being a character anyone could play. (You don't even need to change the power level of the character or reduce any strategy here, it's just a matter of being more inclusive as to how many players get to participate in that strategy.)

I know there's a lot of execution fetishism going around, and that's unfortunate for a genre that many would like to point to as a strategy genre that happens to have a dexterity requirement to play. Rasing the dexterity requirement above the minimum needed to make it all work just subtracts from the importance of strategy while excluding people. I'd like to see more love for an inclusive approach, as that restores more power to good decisions while inviting even more players to participate in those decisions.

Portal 2 Cooperative Mode and Custom Maps

I wrote about Portal 2's single player mode almost a year ago, here. I said it had great mechanics but was badly in need of some subtractive design, ideally by removing the middle 50% of the game.

Cooperative Mode

I recently picked the game up again, this time playing on Mac rather than Xbox. I played through the entire coop campaign (meaning 2-player), including the "Art Therapy" extra chapter that was added after the game's release. I'm pretty blown away by the quality of the overall experience. Sometimes I give things a semi-joking A+ if I like them, but I think this might be a legitimate A+.

The coop mode doesn't have that long bad middle part that the single player game has, so that means it's just the good stuff left. It's also interesting to see all the puzzles that involve two players (and four portals), as that adds another layer of mind-bendingness to it all. You can do more things with 4 portals, and that means there are even more clever things going on in the level design to make things challenging.

Last year I criticized the single player mode for the suble reason that it seemed to be less about communicating an interesting idea (about whatever new interaction is being showin in that level) than it should have been. Meanwhile, the coop mode seems to have had the design goal of "make the players feel like they are really cooperating." That's a difficult goal, but the game is one of the best examples of coop play that I know. Even the tutorial at the very beginning has you having to give boxes to each other, having to press buttons for the other person to progress, and having you learn gestures to wave at each other or to point to things in the level for the other player to see. It's very much about "helping your friend." The juxtaposition of that design concept with the cold logical nature of puzzle solving makes for quite a mix.

The cooperative nature of the levels runs a little deeper than just having to hand a box to somone, though. In many places, the level design is such that a set of force fields (you can't shoot portals across those) separates one part of the level from another. One player will natural try to figure out what to do on one side of the force field while the other player will try to figure out what to do on the other side. This could very easily be a non-cooperative, 2-player solitaire type thing, but somehow it isn't like that. You can usually see what the other person is doing, and even when you can't, there is AMAZING feature of pressing tab to bring a picture-in-picture view looking out of your friend's eyes. So you can see what they are doing and suggest ideas of what might work. Also, in situations like this you really need an overall understanding of the whole room, not just one half of it. So you have to realize "if only you could get that box in your area over here somehow? Or if had a way of getting one portal on one side of your force field and your other portal on your side somehow, we'd be able to do X thing." There's a lot of planning you are encouraged to do together due to the nature of levels. Valve's A-team was really on this coop mode.

The difficulty of the game seems about right "for mass market consumption," as my friend put it. Kind of hard sometimes, but it never felt like something I couldn't figure out. While I think the difficulty tuning of the puzzle is done well, I do renew my objection from last year that it's unfortunate that the game's overall structure prevents Valve from designing any truly hard puzzles. I wanted there to be some really, really, really challenging puzzles, but that would require them to be something you could skip and still progress past, then come back to later.

Player-Created Levels

For higher difficulty, I looked to the player-created levels. I discovered a map maker named Mathey2009. This guy's work is very, very good. It's ridiculous to see how few ratings his maps have and low rated they are (2.5 out of 5 stars? Give me a break!). Ignore those ratings, they are unjust and mysterious. I recommend you try his map "Cubelessness" first, and when you discover the "interesting use of the game engine," you should know it's not a bug. The map Suspended Animation is also interesting and fleshed out well. His map "The most challenging test chamber in the multiverse" is quite a beast, and intentionally pretty confusing. Finally, "Logic" is his hardest map. Probably it's so low rated because almost no one has finished it. (I finished all those maps, by the way! woot.)

Those maps are all single player. If someone can recommend some good player-created coop maps, that would be great. I have not played any other than Valve's, though I would.

Level Editor

Portal 2 actually has two different level editors. One is a simplified editor, now build into the game itself. The other is the full-featured editor called Hammer (for all Source engine games) that only runs on Windows, so who cares about it (heh). Hopefully they'll make a Mac version of that at some point. Anyway my point here is about the simplified editor inside the game that works on both Mac and PC. It's honestly amazing how simple and elegant the UI for this editor is. Making a Portal 2 level sounds like something only for super geniuses who aren't you, but actually you really can make a map very easily. You can resize the room or parts of it, rotate the camera view, add elements, connect elements, all with just clicking and dragging. No code needed, no numbers, no semi-colons or anything. It's slick.

Making a *good* level would be a different thing entirely from just making *a* level. Because of the nature of Portal 2 as a mindbending puzzle game, it's extremely difficult to make a good level. You have to care about it being solvable without forced-death, about preventing unwinnable states from being possible (dear Mathey2009: you need to work on that one, there are unwinnable states in Cubelessness and The Most Challenging Test Map), and you have to care about a hundred different "exploits" people might use to cheat past the actual difficulty of your map. It's damn hard stuff. But I'm really impressed that if you want to make *a* map, some kind of map that does something, it's easier to do than I would have even imagined because of the well-designed interface of the in-game editor.

Note to map makers: you can't make coop maps in the in-game editor, and there are many other limitations as well. But you can export the maps you make in the in-game editor into Hammer. So you could get pretty far using the awesome UI, then polish it up even more in the full-featured editor (on Windows), if you wanted.

My last thought is that it makes me kind of sad that if somoene made the best Portal 2 map in the entire world, that would be worth about $0. That's too bad! Somehow we gladly pay for stuff a lot worse than the best Portal 2 map in the world.