Game Over Screen: Yes or No
Why do we click yes? Gamer’s lose time and time again yet still come back for more. But in the face of failure, creatives can see their confidence crumble in an instant. They shut off the game. To maintain creative confidence, we should tap into the same power of the player.
In Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within us all, Tom Kelly references Jane McGonigal’s research on gamers. She coined the term “Urgent Optimism.” The gamer’s drive to solve problems and overcome challenges. Games require a risk of failure to be entertaining, but in life, we evade these experiences, and let fear hold back our creativity.
Greg Costikyan explores this element of game design in his work Uncertainty in Games. He claims that in life we focus our energies towards “managing” uncertainty, yet we have taken that unpleasant experience and adapted it for entertainment in gaming. This appears as: “performative” uncertainty with player skill, "solver uncertainty" with puzzles, player unpredictability, "Randomness”, “hidden information”, “narrative anticipation,” and more.
Is this not the same for life? We don’t know how we will perform day to day or if we can solve problems. We cannot predict every person’s behavior or our own. We cannot know everything. So why, in a game, is uncertainty encouraging this urgent optimism but in life paralyzing creatives?
Digital worlds give us a low risk situation where we can just reload our last save point. It is entertaining for us to experience alternate lives with less stakes compared to our own.
But when we think of the risks of being creative, it is also low. We worry about failure, but what is failure to a creative if not judgment. We’re worried about how our ideas will be perceived, so we avoid sharing them at all. We don’t want to appear foolish, so we avoid creating. I say tap into the uncertainty because that is part of the fun. We, as creatives, can learn from the resilience, determination, and joy of gamers in the face of challenges and uncertainty? You don’t know if your idea will help solve a problem, but if it doesn’t, haven’t you gotten one step closer to beating the level. You don’t know if your work will be unique or entertaining, but won’t it be helpful to have feedback and make adjustments for the next replay? Approaching risks the same way you would in a video game is not applicable in many situations that involve major consequences, but if it is for the sake of creating, tapping into urgent optimism could allow us to adopt growth mindset and enjoy the process. The fun is in the creating, in the uncertainty, in the journey, not just the high score at the end of the game.
Produced By Victoria Banks
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