Saturday, January 28, 2006

Group Inspired Creativity

Creativity often seems to be as much a product of a vibrant communities as the contribution of any particularly great individuals. There are many examples - the technology explosion from Silicon Valley, Florence during the Renaissance, European political theory in the 1700’s, Seattle’s music scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Pittsburgh’s robotics because of Carnegie Mellon. The list goes on and on. Once a community reaches critical mass, not only do its members spark ideas in each other, but the community itself naturally attracts talent from a wider and wider range as it gains a reputation for success.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year, its that you don’t need to be great to start doing great things. You just need to do something. If you’re surrounded by a group of people who bring their own ideas and thoughts and inspiration, refining your ideas becomes a very rewarding part of the process in its own right. Let greatness happen later. I know too many people who seem to be stymied by perfection.

I was thinking of this based on a conversation I had with a friend the other day over dinner. My friends and I have been playing games our whole lives. I’ve started making my own. It’s a great group of people, because we have a solid mix of men and women. We also have a wide range of backgrounds from software to art, business, parenting and social work. All of us enjoy the playing games though, so it really helps get a broad perspective for what people really like about games.

My creation has also helped inspire some of the other people to get back into their development. We all sort of gave it a go a couple of years ago, made a lot of mistakes and got quagmire in details. I would love to see one of my other friends show off a game they’ve made sometime soon. Its wonderful to be in a creative community that’s capable of generating good ideas. I’m excited for the next step where I show these games off to strangers.

- Jake

Monday, January 09, 2006

SuperCharged Web Surfing

I remember ten years ago going to AltaVista and searching for stuff. I would scrounge through a shoddily list of results until I eventually found a decent site. Then about four years ago Google came along, and suddenly the results of what I searched were exactly what I was looking for. But there was still a problem -- I had to know what to look for. In other words, I had to know what I wanted to find before I found it. I was constantly in a rut of checking the same five or six sites that rarely had an update I wanted to read.

That’s all changed over the last year or so. With sites like delicious, MetaFilter, a real explosion of quality blogs, such as Science Blog, and the spread of RSS feeds, I am now satisfied. I don’t have to know where to look anymore. Other people find good things and tell other people about it. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire. The group knows the gist of what I want to read about before I do. All I have to do is screen the top 50 or so headlines for what really catches my attention and I'm set.

Some of my friends seem to be constantly surprised with all the stuff that I find on the internet. I tell them, “I don’t actually find anything, I just know how to look.” It’s like the difference between panning for gold in a stream and having someone bring gold bars to your house. It takes pretty much no effort. I just set up a dozen RSS feeds off of aggregator sites, and the rest is reading headlines and following stories that are able to immediately catch my attention. There are so many interesting things that I never, ever have time to read them all.

You might think that I am missing things, by just going along with what everyone else out there is reading. But I don’t think that’s the case. I never found this much good information before I used aggregators. The trick now is to know when to stop.