The late-night ramblings of an active mind.

[EdLoen]

I lie awake tonight as my mind rambles on as I'm sure some people's do at times.  In this instance my mind kept going on about one thing to a point where it became almost like an internal blog entry--so much so I couldn't quell my brain until I got up and typed it all out (to which you are reading). The topic in question was creativity. More specifically, how mine may have dulled.

What brought this on was that I was thinking about how I, like most kids I'm sure, used to draw these elaborate tree houses the size of mansions that hung in the branches of huge trees. Rooms with huge wall-sized televisions, pools, stairs, slides, poles, elevators, video games, just anything an elementary-aged kid enjoyed.  It's probably memories of these drawings that sparked some ideas behind the cartoon "Codename: Kids Next Door;  but I digress.  I do know that  my recent attempts at recapturing these structures I used to draw so often in class had failed.  I began to think that it could be a possibility that my creativity has dulled as I gotten older. That maybe I'm just incapable of drawing such things anymore.

Its not just with these practices either. I remember playing the "Incredible Toon Machine" as a kid and used the level creator and made up a series of levels that when played in succession would tell a little story of Al and Sid which culminated to a contraption that allowed you to set up which one would get bombed and bring the other to victory.  When I think about that now, I can't fathom how I came up with those levels. If I still had the game to load up and create something like that again, I honestly don't think I could.  I just don't think I'm that creative any more--or at least in that way.

Tangents aside, this of course brings me to the point of this rambling and the reason for discussion: Do you think that as you get older you lose some of the creativity your childhood self had?  Or do you think it just changes? If you went back on your own memory and tried drawing some of the types of things you used to doodle out as a kid, could you (artistic ability aside)?  Maybe the disillusionment that comes with getting older has dulled some aspects of creativity while changing others.  There are also those that just seem to spill creativity like a morning evacuation (to which I'm envious that it seems to flow to naturally to those people). I might have gone a little off base here, but with my mind finally not forming more sentences on the subject hopefully now I can get some sleep. And hopefully I've come up with a decent discussion and not just a nonsensical post.

[ThreeOhFour]

I think there's a tendency to censor one's ideas more and more as we grow up. What would have seemed like the best game idea ever 5 years ago I now regard as average.

As our skills improve we're less satisfied with simple things and try to push ourselves to learn. I made my first few prototypes of 'games' on my Ti-83 calculator, and was quite happy to spend hours selecting pieces of code from the menus in order to get my ideas working. I was happy with making ultra simple things because I had never done anything like it before, and obviously on such a device and with the knowledge I had at the time there are some severe limitations.

Continued efforts to improve increase our ambition and therefore the expectations we set for ourselves. The games that I made that I thought were 'good' one or two years ago now don't look that good to me anymore.

But I don't think it's necessarily a decrease in creativity, per se, just a more critical approach to analyzing one's creations and being satisfied. Do you have any copies of the tree houses you used to draw lying around? Anything that I drew as a younger person now looks quite terrible to me, even if I was pleased with it at the time.

Enjoy your sleep, I know how it feels to lie awake thinking.

[Babar]

I know that at least with poetry when I was younger I was definitely had more output. Even though I didn't theoretically know basic stuff (like metre, pace, etc.), it came easier to me, and the results (and working itself) were more fun (for me, as well as the reader).