Our connected game

23 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by sueatkins1.wordpress.com


My kids came up with this game that they call their "connected game." It's the coolest thing ever and I totally wish I did that as a kid.

They both like different things. My daughter wants to play house and "family" and princesses but my son wants to pretend he's a transformer, or a power ranger, or a dump truck, or Spider-man. It's really cute to watch them play this game, because one will be almost totally oblivious to what the other one is playing, but they think they are playing together. It goes something like this:

"I'm the mom and here's the baby. You can be the daddy."
"And I'm Optimus Prime and I have to fight Predaking!"
"And the baby needs food, so I'm feeding her."
"And Predaking is attacking with all his bad guys."
"And then we'll all draw together. But the baby can't draw."
"And then Optimus Prime is hurt. Predaking cut his arm."
"And I'm going to draw a dolphin and my baby. Ooo the baby will be riding the dolphin."

They're playing together, but they are in their own worlds.

The coolest part of the game, though, is that they can connect anything they want into this world. So when they see a new TV show or a movie that they think is cool, they'll often say, "I'm going to add that to our connected game, okay?" And then they act like they are holding a power cord and find a wall and "connect" the idea into their game.

They don't do that for every idea, and sometimes my daughter "disconnects" things she doesn't like from the game and my son cries (he's older than her). He hasn't realized what power you have in imaginary games yet, I guess. For him, it's real.

Anyway, I love how they found a way to make every cool thing in their lives live within this one game and how they can play together no matter what they are playing.

People say that creativity is about connecting unrelated or semi-related ideas, so in that sense, we should all play the connected game and maybe it will make us more creative.

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Are you creative? A Critical Analysis of Creativity

21 April 2015 Jarom Madsen 0 Comments



The question of whether you are creative is self-defeating. Being creative is more than just a black and white, boolean trait. You’d think that given the nature of the term that people would be more generous to apply all sorts of shades and hues of color to the spectrum rather than such cold extremes. But yes, as it is with pretty much anything else in the world, we all have some creativity in us, perhaps some more than others but that quickly becomes irrelevant when all is said and done. Every healthy human being is creative whether they try to be or not.

Let us look at the definition of the term before we venture further. Creativity is how we measure the amount of something that is being produced, generally in regards to ideas as everything we do beyond that is founded on the ideas it came from.  A house cannot be built without plans, a computer cannot perform tasks without first receiving instructions and neither would those tasks be considered actual tasks without some purpose or idea in the first place. So to be able to measure how creative someone is, we first have to understand the idea of an idea.

We often think of an idea as something that is created, never before existing in the order, time, and place of it’s conceiving. I’d argue that since nothing else in our reality can be created or destroyed that neither can ideas. Just like if I found a bucket in the woods, I did not create that bucket. Yes, it is new to me, and while I might claim that bucket as my own and go show everyone my bucket telling them of this wonderful new thing of mine and everyone would have perceived that I indeed had produced a bucket, that bucket would have still existed had I not stumbled upon it. Such it is with ideas. Our universe and reality exist as one cohesive idea which can be broken down into infinitesimal parts. We can stumble upon these ideas much like we can a bucket in the woods but they are hardly created. So on a universal level, no, ideas are not created. However, on an individual level, the idea is most certainly new, and since the structuring of the idea all took place inside our brain, our most personal organ, we will claim that idea as our own creation.


You might now see where I’m coming from when I say that if you’re a healthy living human being, you most certainly are creative. If you have a properly functioning brain, new ideas will constantly be structured as you perceive new things. Now you might jump to the conclusion that this means once you’ve stopped seeing new things that you’ll stop being creative. There’s some truth to this which is why many artists will seek out new locations to visit, new people to interact with, and anything else that will bring in more of the universe to their consumption. But one thing we mustn’t forget is memory. If our minds are constantly creating new files, things are going to start getting pushed out of relevance pretty quickly. Once they’ve fallen out of relevance they still reside somewhere in your mind but require a breadcrumb trail to recover. If you’ve disciplined your mind to leave those breadcrumbs constantly then you can retrieve them in any order you’d like making as wild of combinations as you so desire. This allows you to “perceive” the universe without it having to come to you first. This is what most people refer to when they think of creativity.

Someone who has absolutely zero creativity then would be someone with perfect short-term memory loss that somehow permanently deletes everything from their mind as soon as it enters it. This doesn’t happen by the way to even the dumbest of humans that still have part of their brain in tact. All short-term memory loss patients are capable of doing some kind of retrieval process no matter how severe their condition, piecing together the fragments that they can bring back to relevance in whatever ways they can.

Someone who has perfect creativity would be what most people perceive God to be. Omniscient and omnipotent. Both being able to perceive the entire universe at one time as well as having complete control over it all. The latter brings up my final point.

Skill. Execution. Delivery. All words describing how quickly you can get what is in your brain to be manifested in it’s full glory by something more than the neurons the idea consists of. An omnipotent god would be able to do this instantaneously. Now this is my main point that I want you to remember. Your physical body should never be the limitation to see your ideas brought to pass. If you’ve fully fleshed out an idea in your mind, you can make it happen despite your circumstances. It might be slow going at first. You might feel like you’ve imagined something impossible but remember that you wouldn’t have been able to imagine it if weren’t possible.

“But Jarom! What if I want to fly? I can imagine doing it in my head so why can’t I in real life?” Well, random inquisitor in my head, you can.  If all you want to do is be off the ground for more than a few seconds there are countless ways for you to do that. If you want to levitate in thin air using only brain power to fight gravity, might I suggest you first look to the sources of the idea and to the purpose behind it, then if it truly requires the violation of real world physics, I will direct you toward virtual reality.

My point is, if there is a will, there is a way and you are as creative as you set your mind to be. How creative will you let yourself be? -

Hey, so I'm not C. Louis S.! My name is Jarom Madsen. I am a full-time independent game developer that likes to delve deep into philosophy. Cameron was kind enough to grant me the privilege to write a guest post for this blog. If you enjoyed my thoughts and would like to hear more from me be sure to let me know in the comments section below. To find out more about me and what I do you can visit my website at jarommadsen.blogspot.com or follow me on the Twitter @Jarom_Madsen

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Test-driven reviews

16 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

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I’m still stuck on this idea of test-driven writing. I had a follow-up idea to that which might make test-driven writing useful.

And that idea is test-driven reviewing. Have you ever reviewed someone’s work and you’re not quite sure what to say when you give it back to them? Usually the feedback is something like this:

“It was good."

“I liked it."

“That one part was pretty funny."

There’s obviously some problems with this type of feedback. It’s not very specific, it doesn’t really help much, and there’s no negative feedback. To be sure, it’s hard to give feedback and especially negative feedback, but it's fairly useless when it's just, "I liked it."

You may like it for reasons that the author didn't expect, or maybe you only liked it because you know the author and think she's great, or you want her to feel good about herself.

The author is hoping for specific feedback about certain parts of the work that she was nervous about or even excited about. And the reviewer has no way of knowing what those hopes and expectations are. And once you’ve said, “it was good” the author feels like she has to pull teeth to ask specific questions about her work.

So a great way to fix this is test-driven writing, or at least a part of it which I’m going to call test-driven reviewing. Test-driven writing says you write the tests first, and then you write the chapter or scene or poem or whatever, but test-driven reviewing loosens that to having tests at least before you get reviewers.

I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going with this, but basically instead of just giving the reviewers your work and telling them, “Let me know what you think,” you give it to them along with a set of tests for each chapter or scene or section.

I still need to figure out the best format for the tests and the way to deliver them with your work, but I can only imagine the power it would have to see something like this after someone reads a chapter of your novel:

it should advance Joe’s relationship with Mary:           pass
it should be romantic:                                                    fail
it should be funny:                                                         pass
it should evoke wonder:                                                pass
the plot twist should be believable:                               fail
you should be on the edge of your seat by the end:      fail

Can you feel that? Wouldn’t it be awesome to get that kind of feedback from someone? The reader knows what you are trying to accomplish with that chapter and you know whether or not you did what you were hoping to do. This would be so awesome.

One important caveat is that the reviewer should not be able to see the tests until after reading the chapter. It's not like a quiz you're trying to get right. Seeing these beforehand could alter how the reader experiences it and then the tests aren't as useful.

Some people will worry that it’s too rigid, and I sympathize with that feeling, but don’t forget that after the tests, there can be free-from comments. And if the reader knows what the author is looking for or what her goals were for the chapter, the free-form comments will probably be more pertinent and useful. In fact, having specific tests will probably focus the reviewer’s comments and that alone would be useful.

What do you think about test-driven reviewing? Would you adopt it? Where are its weaknesses?

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TDD and writing styles

14 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments



I mentioned in my last post about test-driven writing what the idea of test-driven development (TDD) is all about. Because of that post, I had a thought that connected TDD with writing styles. And I'm going to explain that to you, but first some background.

There's some debate going on around TDD lately. A big name in the programming world said that TDD is no longer the way to go. That was good news to me because I've struggled with that approach. When I first heard of it, I really loved the idea and I thought it was such a great way to make a solid program.

But in practice, I'm terrible at it.

After my last post, I was thinking about me being terrible at it, and somehow my brain connected the idea of writing styles. It made me wonder if I'm not good at TDD because I'm a discovery writer. And I wonder if architectural coders are better at TDD.

Maybe we're approaching programming incorrectly. Maybe TDD isn't for every team, not because of the technical problem being solved or the environment they're in, but because of the people and their coding/writing styles.

But…

I talked to my friend who is a programmer and an architectural writer and he didn't think the two things correlate. He isn't good at TDD. It might be because he learned programming before it became a thing, but he thinks that his mind is just wired to write code first and then write tests, not the other way around.

So his coding style is the same as his writing style—which is not of the discovery or gardener style—but TDD still isn't the way his brain works.

Even if he had agreed with me, it would only be anecdotal evidence, so either way it's not conclusive yet, but I may have jumped the gun on this idea. He thinks TDD was mainly a way to get people to write tests in lieu of no tests at all.

Oh well

Even if this isn't true, it sure makes me feel better about myself and how I just can't do TDD. It makes me worry if I'll be able to do test-driven writing. But at the same time, maybe that's okay, because maybe it will really be great for some people and not work out for others. Some people are architects and some people are gardeners (discovery writers).

Which are you and are you good at TDD?

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Test-Driven Writing

09 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by perforce.com


I had a funny idea the other day. I was thinking about about my new process for my latest book and I made a connection between that and the programming I was doing at the time.

I call it "Test-driven writing" and most of you won't know what that refers to, but I'm going to fill you in. In programming there is this idea or method of how you write programs by starting with the tests that should pass when you're done.

Here's an example from the Ruby language using a tool called Rspec:

 it "should update the user name when edited" do  
  # your test code goes here  
 end  
   
 it "should display the awesome content on page load" do  
  # your test code goes here  
 end  
   
 it "should not fail when the user double clicks the submit button" do  
  # your test code goes here  
 end  

I think it's fairly easy to understand what it's trying to test. So you write these tests beforehand and then write the code to make the program work. Next, you run the tests and they should all pass before you move on.

The tests inform the programmer what the program is expected to do. Usually there are thousands of tests that have to pass and they are very detailed and for every small piece of the program.

So I bet you can guess what Test-Driven Writing is all about.

You write tests before you write a scene and then at the end of the scene you go through your tests and make sure the scene passes those tests.
 it should: advance Brad's relationship with Karen  
   
 it should: end in a cliffhanger  
   
 it should: set up the next scene with xyz  
   
 it should: hit the following emotional beats: humor, drama, suspense  

I'm not sure how serious I am about this. It's an interesting idea and it could maybe possibly be useful, but I don't know if it's worth the time it would take and I'm not sure if it work as well as I'm thinking in my head.

It was really just a funny connection between two of my passions and I thought I should write it down. If you do end up using it, tell me how it worked out for you and whether or not you'd use it again.

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Velocity is not as important as sustainability

07 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

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There is this idea in software development called velocity. Okay, velocity isn't a new idea nor exclusive to software development. But what it refers to in software development is how quickly your team can close tickets which means building features or fixing bugs.

There are two reasons for keeping track of velocity. One is just to be able to predict when you can be done with a new feature or whatever. So predictability and planning is one reason.

The second reason is to get faster. If you track your velocity, you can set goals to get faster and work harder to increase your velocity.

The first reason is acceptable, but the second reason is terrible if you care about being successful over the long haul.

From the business side of creativity, I can understand the impetus to want to move faster. Faster equals more value and therefore more money. Money allows you to keep creating, so you need money. You need to ship products.

But faster has long term consequences that hurt the business in ways that are hidden, or at least they are not apparent and many businesses fail because of this.

It comes down to sustainability. Getting as much done as possible and pushing hard to work faster and faster makes you forget wandering. It makes you forget to protect your ugly babies. And without wandering and ugly babies, you become stagnant. You might have an amazing product, but it will not last forever—especially nowadays.

It will eventually become less important in the market and you will need something new, or a new take on it. You can't do that if all your focus is on making stuff faster. You need to spend time wandering around and being creative so that you can innovate and create new things. You need to nurture your ugly babies. That takes time and money, but it pays out large dividends in the long run.

I'm not saying move slowly. I'm not saying be lazy and sit around waiting for inspiration. When you get that inspiration, move forward quickly. Work hard and fast, but don't forget to take time for exploration, short experiments, ugly babies, and creative wandering.

In the long run, productivity isn't the most important factor. It's sustainable creativity.

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Moonshots and missing the stars

02 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by 9to5google.com


I read this article about Google[x]'s mission to take moonshots. He, Astro Teller, refers to moonshots as what JFK did in 1961 when he said we were going to be the first country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Moonshots are those huge, wild goals like going to the moon.

Astro Teller talks a lot about failure and how important it has been in his career to fail sooner rather than later. He built something for seniors and then when they were done, had some seniors come in so they could ask if they would use one. All the seniors said no. What took them months to build was useless because no one would use it.

He said how he could have found out in a couple days what it had taken them months to learn. He says he learned how important it was to get the hard learning done first. He also said that if you don't do the hard learning first, you'll tend to shy away from the hard learning because you don't want to know the answers—because you worked so hard on your project.

Later he says:
What we’ve learned is that the only way to make progress is to make a ton of mistakes — to go out and find and even create negative experiences that help us learn and get better

He also talks about three different kinds of failures: failures that are actually features (for very early testing), failures that you can learn from, and failures that are just the cost of doing something awesome (that you don't learn much from).

He also said that failures don't have to be "not success." They can also be, "we tried that and it didn't work. Now we know more than we did yesterday."

This was a very cool article that talked a lot about their current and failed projects. The way they've gone about these really cool projects that push our understanding of the world and ability in many fields is really fascinating. It's long, but it's a really cool read if you're into those kinds of things.

So get out into the real world, learn stuff, and try to fail. That's the only way to know if you're on the right path or if you need to change. "You can't do that in a conference room," as Astro Teller says.


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