Comments on: Encouraging Creativity

By: Aprotim

Aprotim — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:21:00 +0000

It’s worth noting, that one of 3M’s most ubiquitous and recognizable products, Post-It Notes, were basically developed by a chemist on his own time. I don’t know if this was part of the 15% time you mentioned, but shows what kind of value fostering this independence can be.

By: Darren Torpey

Darren Torpey — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:05:00 +0000

I'm glad you're helping "break the seal" on this kind of thinking. The lack of creativity I feel when I read about how games companies work is stunning.

I can also imagine that it's a big part of why some people -- the kind of people we want working on games -- wouldn't want to join the industry and others are planning on leaving it. It's not too hard to imagine someone getting far more creative stimulation from their game dev project on-the-side than they ever do at work.

Of course, it can't always be, er, fun and games, even at a game dev company, but still... if Google's doing it with people who aren't explicitly in the business of creating (potentially) radically innovative entertainment, then what does that say about a much tamer and less inspired games industry?

My hope is that this kind of officially-encouraged creativity and out-of-box thinking time will start to flourish at companies that have a stable enough development model (and good enough management!) that they can both see the value of the occassional brilliant idea (Froogle, anyone? -- actually, a good deal of Google's best products resulted from ideas started in 20% time) and can also afford to give it!

By: Patrick Dugan

Patrick Dugan — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:43:00 +0000

It definelty works quickly when you’ve got a stable platform to build off of. I discuss this in my next Escapist article, about the Storytron; you can litereally code some verbs and characters and Fate dynamics in less than a week and have a basic model of a game, and then decide on the rest of the boatload from there. I think this’ll make it easy for non-technical people with political or experimental gameplay/art concepts to test and express them in interactive form.

You’re definelty onto something, and I think the prototyping process lends a designer to having a solid system of metrics to accompany the underlying mechanics.

On that note, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this: http://kingludic.blogspot.com/2006/02/mdma.html

By: Craig Perko

Craig Perko — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:22:00 +0000

I’m finding that rapid prototyping is more difficult than it’s made out to be. The pieces don’t end up fitting together as well as I want – although that’s probably my inexperience rather than a flaw in the idea.

Still, it means I do “moderately sluggish prototyping” instead. :P