Berlinale Talents 2015 - Designing Playable Possibility Spaces
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Presentation delivered at Berlinale Talents 2015. Outlines recent work I've conducted in designing creative processes for futurists, game designers, and storytellers.
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Berlinale Talents 2015 - Designing Playable Possibility Spaces
- 1. JEFF WATSON USC School of Cinematic Arts Situation Lab @remotedevice
- 2. Creating conditions for collaboration and creativity
- 9. “Make a movie about ambition, loss, and loneliness.”
- 10. “Make a movie about a newspaper publisher, involving a castle and a sled.”
- 12. Creating conditions for collaboration and creativity Constraints and creativity
- 14. THE THING FROM THE FUTUREA creative process for thinking about tomorrow
- 21. TANGENT (OCADU ATELIER) An imagination and team building accelerator for game design students * see also: Reality Ends Here
- 31. RILAO REMOTE VIEWING PROTOCOLScaffolding collaborative worldbuilding and storytelling
- 42. JEFF WATSON USC School of Cinematic Arts Situation Lab @remotedevice Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- This talk is about two aspects of my work. The first is the idea of how rules and constraints can create the conditions for collaboration and creativity, and how the particular ways one arranges those constraints can yield very different sets of conditions.
- Take mob football, for example. Widely considered the progenitor of association football (soccer), this game has few rules, and gives rise to a very messy and violent kind of creative collaboration, wherein the objective is to get the ball into the goal at the other end of town. Players address this goal collaboratively and in various ways exhibit creativity — in how they make passes, how they exploit the crowd to block or advance the ball, and so on.
- Here is another game, or set of rules, with the same objective as the previous example, but of course here we see there are many more rules and the outcome is much more orderly. The players’ creativity and the way the collaborate is significantly more directed here by the rules of the game, and one might argue that they are able to be *more* creative and work together *more* constructively not in spite of the rules, but rather because of them.
- Which brings me to the other aspect of my work that I want to talk about today, namely how constraints are actually fundamental to creativity. This is really an extension of the previous idea.
- Orson Welles has a famous saying, “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” If you think about it for a moment, it’s easy to see why it’s true.
- Any design project benefits from constraints. If you’re tasked with building a bridge, the more you know about the terrain you’re spanning, the load the bridge must bear, the kinds of materials available, and so on, the easier it is to see what kind of bridge you’re going to build. In a way, the bridge emerges out of the sum of these constraints.
- The same goes for making a movie or embarking on any other kind of creative project. If you just say to someone, “make a movie,” they’re not going to really know what to do. They’ll have to find some more constraints to start zeroing in on exactly what it is they’re going to make.
- This is a much more concrete challenge. From here, one could start imagining specific characters, stories, and so on.
- Here are some other very specific prompts that might lead to…
- …a movie like this.
- So these are the two topics that this aspect of my work address: investigating how to create the conditions for collaboration and creativity, and exploring how to design the kinds of constraints that give rise to creative acts.
- In particular, I’m interested in looking at games and game-like structures for guidance on how to investigate these things. Games and playful activities have long been used to structure collaboration and spark creativity. Think of the I Ching, or the Tarot, or Brian Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies cards.
- Here are a few projects I’ve worked on recently that have helped me to think things through. The first is The Thing From the Future, a creative process for thinking about the future that I co-designed with Stuart Candy.
- The Thing From the Future is a game for small groups. By combining cards, players generate creative prompts which they must respond to by writing down short ideas. There’s a bit of playful competition in there, too, as players must vote on who comes up with the “best” (funniest, most interesting, etc) idea.
- So here we have the first constraint — a drink. Imagine a drink from the future. But we need more constraints for this to be a productive prompt…
- Okay, now this is getting a bit more interesting. Imagine a drink from the future that has something to do with insects. Interesting. But we still probably need more — or, at least, more constraints would be helpful…
- Now we add a card that tells us when in the future this drink can be found, and what kind of future, generally-speaking, it is. So now the prompt asks us to imagine some kind of drink involving insects from about a decade from now, where, for whatever reason, everything has gone to shit.
- And the final constraint is how all this makes us feel. In this case, anxious. Any ideas?
- We’ve run this game as a workshop a bunch of times. People get very imaginative when they play a game like this. In one of our workshops, players played the game for the morning, then spent the afternoon actually making the things they imagined, which we then put in a vending machine. We then left the vending machine in a public place where people could buy the things our participants created.
- Here’s a game I designed for an educational context. It’s a descendent of an earlier game I made for my dissertation work (which I co-designed with Simon Wiscombe and Tracy Fullerton at USC).
- This is a game-making game. It has a bunch of moving parts that I won’t get into here…
- …like these cool laser-cut wooden coins…
- But the gist of it is very similar to The Thing From the Future. In this case, we’re trying to imagine a game…some kind of game. Here we have a specific constraint saying what kind of game it is: an adventure videogame.
- And then we add some more constraints, like that the game needs to somehow be about love…
- …and should involve an invasion…
- …and some spying…
- …and somehow social media needs to be involved…
- …as does GPS technology. Any ideas?
- Our students at OCADU came up with some pretty amazing projects using this system to unlock their imaginations. Like the game on the left, which involved augmented reality, a projector, and a dish of milk. Or the game on the right, which ended up using little dishes of water as game controllers.
- Finally, there’s the creative process we’ll be using here at Berlinale Talents.
- This thing works almost like a board game. It’s a facilitated workshop, but it doesn’t need facilitators. The game does the facilitation. You open the box (actually, it’s a bag, but ideally it would be a box), read the rules, and the provide the constraints for you to collaboratively and competitively build a story world — in this case, the story world of Rilao.
- The game materials provide constraints for the imagination, like details about certain periods of time…
- …places…
- …themes…
- …and specific objects, people, and events.
- Players brainstorm these objects, people, and events to populate the world of Rilao.
- The last time we ran this game, we had around 300 participants who generated 1000s of ideas and hundreds of designed diegetic objects from the world of Rilao. This is a very different kind of authorship compared to traditional ways of worldbuilding.
- By designing “playable possibility spaces,” we create new potentials for collaboration and creativity. This is what we want to explore with you through practice over the next few days. But first, we’d love to take some questions…