Game designer, author, and GDCA 2024 Ambassador Award recipient Fawzi Mesmar is joining us at this year's GDC Showcase to discuss how to create memorable moments in games. It's an important topic that thrives on connection, originality, and a creative mind: subjects that Fawzi Mesmar is ready to tackle in his upcoming book. And we've got an exclusive first look inside its pages.
Demystifying Creativity: On Originality in Game Development "is a study of the psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of creativity, originality and inspiration viewed from the lens of a seasoned game developer." It's designed for students and professionals working in game design who are eager to learn more about the creative process from one of the best.
In addition to his work as an Ubisoft creative director and a game designer, Fawzi Mesmar is the author of the first-ever textbook about game design in Arabic, Al-Khallab On The Art of Game Design, and has co-authored nine comic books under the Men of Honour series.
He is also the keynote speaker for our all-virtual career event, GDC Showcase. He'll be presenting a talk on "Creating Memorable Moments in Video Games," Thursday, Sept. 19 from 8:00 – 8:50am PT. This keynote goes into how players and people generally recall experiences and form memories, to help game developers identify, and create, moments that are memorable and thoughtful. GDC Showcase takes place on Sept. 19-20, and it's entirely online!
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Below is an excerpt from his upcoming book, discussing the concept of Creative Society as "your ability to differentiate between a concept, and how that concept touched you." Demistifying Creativity comes out on December 24 and will be available for pre-order on December 3.
Creative Sobriety
"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sunˮ ― Pablo Picasso
If creativity is the ability to generate ideas that are both original and of value, then itʼs safe to assume that itʼs a trait - much like that of intelligence - that everyone possesses to some degree or another. Does that mean that there are some people that are more capable of doing so than others? In other words, are there people that are more creative than others? The short answer turns out is: yes.
Highly Creative individuals
When examining creativity, there are individuals that stand out due to their ability to produce work that is both novel and valuable, frequently and consistently. They are referred to as highly creative individuals. Understanding what characterizes them involves exploring various dimensions of their personality, thinking, behavior, even brain structure.
American Psychologist Donald MacKinnon, particularly known for his work on creativity and personality, tried to describe the personality of high creative individuals. He stated “A truly creative individual has an image of [themself] as a responsible person and a sense of destiny about [themself] as a human being. This includes a degree of resoluteness and almost inevitably a measure of egotism.ˮ
Highly creative individuals tend to believe that they are capable of being highly creative.
To change the world, one must believe that they are capable of doing so.
Highly creative individuals tend to generate ideas of novelty frequently, which means that they have a unique capacity; to produce ideas, solutions or artistic expressions that are not only new but also unexpected. Their thinking diverges from conventional patterns towards breakthroughs in thought. Originality alone isnʼt enough, their contributions are also equally valuable, as they are useful, relevant and often provide new solutions to old problems or present a new perspective that enriches the understanding and appreciation of a certain context.
Divergent thinking is the opposite of convergent thinking, which seeks a single correct solution to a problem. Divergent thinking involves thinking in a non-linear manner, exploring various options and creating thought patterns that more often than not involves making unexpected connections of elements that seemingly have nothing to do with each other.
We discussed analogous inspiration (the process of utilizing one domain of expertise that is seemingly unrelated as inspiration for another domain) at length in chapter 2. Divergent thinking is the cognitive process that utilizes analogous inspiration frequently, and itʼs a hallmark of the highly creative individual, that allows them to recombine and restructure their knowledge in novel ways.
In addition to their mental capabilities, there are also common personality traits that such individuals share. Key of which is openness to experience which is also the most commonly observed among creatively prolific individuals. Experience could mean travel, jobs, relationships, books, movies bungee jumping, a walk in a park ... it is the will to engage and observe fully our life experience and seek more of it. Which is why they have a wide range of interests, a strong sense of curiosity and a preference for novelty and variety. As they embrace the new, they also embrace the risk and have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Compared to the average person they are more comfortable with uncertainty. Through their belief of their pursuit, they are willing to follow their vision even in the face of potential failure.
From a neuroscience point of view there have been several investigations into creative thinking and structural brain markers in relation to creativity.
Highly creative people seem to be actually wired differently. They are unconventional as well as intrinsically motivated, and are characterized by a heightened sense of confidence, independence, and ambition.
The most well studied psychiatric populations in this regard include individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD and autism. A number of studies on individuals who are characterized by the presence of a high degree of either schizotypal or psychoticism traits, have demonstrated that they consistently perform better than their low trait counterparts on some measures of creativity.
What this basically means, that thereʼs a direct positive correlation between attention deficiency and creativity, up until a certain point of impairment when it starts negatively affecting creative output. Highly creative individuals, in addition to the traits weʼve discussed before tend to show some degree of mild attention deficiency.
Perhaps their mindʼs ability to wander and daydream is what allows them to make connections between more seemingly unlikely topics which enables them to arrive more at originality. The likeliness of creating these connections - or associations - is described as associative hierarchies.
Associative hierarchies
In 1962 Sarnoff A. Mednick published a paper titled “The associative basis of the creative process,ˮ considered to be one of the most influential works in the psychological study of creativity. This theory basically determines that the creative process is fundamentally an associative one. Our minds are filled with ideas, words, images, and symbols all linked together through our individual experience and life journey. These associations vary in strength and relevance, common associations are strong and frequently accessed, while unique and novel associations are weaker and less commonly used.
According to Mednick, each one of us has their own associative hierarchy that is completely unique to them. That hierarchy contains elements that are ordered from most common to most remote. Highly creative individuals tend to have a more flat associative hierarchy, meaning that they can access remote associations just as easily as common ones, a task that is a tad more challenging for their less creative counterparts.
The more elements we have in those hierarchies, or more experiences, knowledge, patterns, images, ideas we have to feed that intricate network, the more associations we can make. Therefore for us to widen our areas of inspiration, the more information or input we take in, the more dense our network becomes. The richer our life experience is, the denser that network becomes. Highly creative individuals have far reach in their associations but they also have a very dense network of hierarchies.
When it comes to our life experience, the more we see and experience, the input such as images, sounds and memories are stored in our associative hierarchy, that gives us more associative ideas that we can then reach to. However, that input also causes us to contemplate increasing the density of ideas within us. Allowing for even more associations and creativity to occur in our work through analogous inspiration. Those seemingly unrelated concepts or ideas connect and allow us to see the world in an entirely new way. The more remote those associations are the more likely we are to arrive at originality.
Creative Sobriety
Creative Sobriety is a practice of reflection, to try to identify the source of inspiration, reasoning or combination of thoughts that lead to the development of an idea and try to identify at what level the idea is at. It is the phrase I put together and the main concept that Iʼm putting forward to you dear reader in this book.
While highly creative people can naturally arrive at connections and associations that are so far away in a reasoning perspective, with practicing creative sobriety you can intellectually push an idea further - or deeper - in levels of association and achieve a higher likelihood of being original. "Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." English comedian and frequent creativity speaker John Cleese suggests in this quote that creativity isn't an innate ability but rather a mode of behavior that can be cultivated and developed.
While highly creative individuals might naturally have a more divergent thinking style, this can also be a skill that can be developed and enhanced through practice. Techniques like brainstorming, free writing and mind mapping are often used to do exactly that.
All of those techniques we will be discussing at various parts of this book.
Beyond techniques however, creative sobriety advocates for reflection and self understanding. Fostering divergent thinking comes from encouraging curiosity and exploration. As illustrated in chapter 2, learning about a wide range of subjects, asking questions and seeking new experiences, the breadth of the knowledge and diversity of thought expands. Which provides access to diverse sources of associations, the more you learn, the more you experience the more resources you have. The more you reflect on who you are, how you understand those learnings, and what your thoughts are the more you form concepts that are more unique to you. Creative sobriety is the practice of trying to identify where those ideas are within you.
Creative sobriety is your ability to differentiate between a concept, and how that concept touched you. Then you achieve originality by an act of creation guided by that impression.
To be more creatively sober means that you need to better understand yourself.
That means that you need to spend a lot more time with your thoughts, not with inputs (information that feeds your associative hierarchies like reading a book or watching a movie). Spending more time with your understanding of the world and how that affects what you do. Itʼs spending time understanding your preferences and being able to articulate or at least ponder, why do you have that preference? Then develop your ability to articulate it.
A practise that is integral to creative sobriety is to be able to stop and take note - sometimes even literally - of our rare experiences, of our understanding of the world, our perspectives, our cultural heritage, the emotional connections we form and so many other things that we take as input and translate to understanding as we go about our life journey.
The goal is to promote a more open and less judgemental mindset. As you reflect on your life journey and get fully acquainted with the core of who you are that inspires you.
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