The Creative Process #5 - Voices

To grow creatively you are encouraged to find your voice. What sort of thing is this? Is it your own voice, or one you follow? Do you develop it, or discover it? Do you trust it or work with it?

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This month my daughter did exceptionally well at a local agricultural show’s art exhibit. She’s only four, sorry, four-and-a-half. She entered a number of the kids exhibits, including Lego, selfie photography and drawing a family portrait. We were determined that she would enter as much as she wanted, but also that every piece of work would be hers and hers alone.

She had to be pointed in the direction of her task, but took to it with gusto when she got rolling. I grit my teeth when somehow the “drawing” needed scissors and glue. I winced when her Lego house was populated with a motley crew of pirates, bandito mums, half-cowgirl half-fancy princesses, and kids with beards and missing teeth.

It was a learning experience for her in having a vision and sticking to it. It was even more a learning experience for me to be hands-off and not worry. And moreover, she won first prize a bunch of the categories. Even the hotly-contested Lego one!

Even though every mess of paper offcuts, every splash of paint, and every abandoned pile of Lego around the house kills me, I love seeing her creativity and capability grow. I learn to go with it, and apply just a tiny bit of pressure towards not creating an endless mountain of entropy and craft waste.

My son is nearly four months now and has very much found his hands, his voice and his smile. He is an observation machine and loves tracking his sister as she dances around the room. He hasn’t got fine motor control, or at least intentional fine motor control. He deftly yanked my breakfast cereal nearly into my lap the other day.

He’s a big little boy with a big little voice. He laughs softly but has quite the array of gremlin grumbles, groans and yawps. He bicycle kicks when he’s excited and slaps his knee as well. He never tires of entertaining his dad with splashy kick-kick-kicks in the bath, even thought he’s not entirely sure which mental button sets it off. Occasionally when he smiles he waggles his near-invisible eyebrows, as if he needed to be any cuter.

He’s shaping up to be a real person. Who knows if he is creative or technical or physical. Or gentle or loud. Does he like rainy days or sunny skies?

Every day he inches closer to real personhood. But until then, he has his Dad as his mech legs to move him around the house to look at things and people.

How about myself? Well this month I’ve been running a workshop, which has been mildly exhausting. Outside of work it’s been one event after another. It’s been a bit of a marathon month.

The backdrop of this was Elon Musk finally buying Twitter and crashing it into the ground. Lots of anguish, some performative, some very real. Many of the people I followed on Twitter moved camp, or didn’t, or sorta did. Some people had propped their online business up by Twitter, and now it dashed to pieces. It was chaos.

Musk appears to be someone with no genuine voice of his own, no art, no way to mould the world except barging into established efforts and accidentally breaking things, then walking away shrugging. No one really earns billions of dollars, but Musk definitely hasn’t. Wil Wheaton’s appraisal of him was excellent.

Over the years I’ve pondered about the disproportionate damage an individual can do to the world. A person can do more damage than you can levy a punishment back on them for. On a whim, Musk can fire thousands of people, destroy the communications space of millions and tank the share price of companies (okay that bit was a funny demonstration of the insanity of the stock market). Donald Trump was similar. These artless people with the means to do unfathomably amazing things in the world, and they just turn it to ruin. For arguably no gain.

I don’t know what society or civilizations can reasonably do in the face of this. I wish it was as easy to create as it was to destroy.

I had read that Musk could have secretly bought out every Twitter employee for $5 million each, destroyed Twitter overnight by vacating it, and still had $6 billion left for an after-party. I wonder if a swathe of newly-freed engineers with $5 million dollars each would have made some amazing (and perhaps terrible) things.

In any case, I reactivated my Mastodon account (@brettwitty@mstdn.social). I had previously created it and tried to run it via the trainwreck of an app called Subway Tooter. With the official Mastodon app it’s much better. It’s different from Twitter, and that’s okay.

Moving to Mastodon was a spring clean of those I followed on Twitter. I could recalibrate and reassess what my priorities are, and what sort of voices I want to listen to. And maybe what voice I put online. I was never big on Twitter, and it probably works better for me to listen to people of the same amplitude and closer to my interests.

Amidst this background of tech social destruction and renewal, my general exhaustion led to wallowing in a sequence of games, each echoes of each other.

The first one was Don’t Shit on my #!$@& roof! which I paid only a few dollars for as an Early Access game. The basic premise is that hordes of pigeons are coming to assault your home. Some may even defile it as per the game’s title. You have guns that auto-fire in the mouse pointer’s direction and you have to shoot all the pigeons.

Pigeons drop an occasional player or house experience point, and you evolve your setup via restricted choices. You might choose to evolve to have lots of health or armour. Or rapid fire weapons. Or many passive auto-aiming missiles.

There’s a frenetic flow to it as you kite and dodge, slowly building up XP and hoping you get something you like. There’s a meta-progression across games as dead foes give a meta-currency that you can unlock new modes or start your game stronger.

It is pretty cheesy and only about 2 months old now. It was fine to play while I sunk into a hole and rewatched Rick and Morty.

A friend of mine had pointed me (via Vampire Survivors Success: An Opportunity in the Steam Marketplace) in the direction of Vampire Survivors, as emblematic of a way to find indie game success: have a simple, addictive formula and just add depth through meta-progression. It’s superficially similar to the previous game, but does a few more things right. Rather than waves of pigeons, you have a variety of spooky monsters all converging on you. It gets way more bullet-hellish. The one time I won a run, I had some insane cascade of lasers, explosions and proximity damage, and I really only had to move around to spread around the damage or avoid the occasional mega-monster who snuck through.

Vampire Survivors has slightly better production values, but they’ve really invested in the psychology. Treasure chests are a light show that would make a pachinko parlour seem docile. There’s 142 Steam achievements, so you’re constantly advertising the game to your friends (assuming anyone looks at their profile feed). Meta-progression is there in spades, and there’s plenty of options for builds.

There’s something genius but nasty about the game. It’s not a polished game - the title screen is a mishmash of random art and terrible UI, and the pixel art is uneven - but it throws value and spectacle at you almost like they had a CIA handbook of indoctrination and converted it to game development dark patterns.

The biggest problem I found is that each game session was a breathless multi-hour single run. This ate whole weeks of my precious home time. I enjoyed it, but I mean, people enjoy heroin.

Next was Dome Keeper. You’ve got a dome and you dig below it for minerals to upgrade your dome to keep it alive as shadow creatures attempt to smash in. The gameplay loop here is less frenetic, but there is a natural “one more wave” aspect to it. It too ate relaxation sessions, but there was beautiful art and a bit more strategy to the gameplay.

After a few sessions, the mining becomes a grind and I seemed to fall into a strategy basin. I can’t spend my nights grinding meta-progression currencies upon currencies. I can’t do it for pigeons. I can’t do it for vampires. I can’t do it for shadow monsters. I just can’t.

I had known about Dwerve for a while. I learned pixel art basics through the artist Pixel Pete (Pete Milko) on Youtube. He was responsible for Dwerve’s art and it shows. The art is great, although the rest of the game is hit-or-miss.

You play a dwarf in an adventure where every fight is roughly an Orcs Must Die! level, but top-down pixel art. The dynamic tower defence aspect is cool, although I’m finding the story and progression a slog. I’m finding scarce few strategies to the traps, and the control system is rough. At least it’s a lot of little bite-sized chunks.

The one game I didn’t play was the surprise release: Shadows Over Loathing by the Kingdom of Loathing guys. Not for any good reason - West of Loathing was really great, and Shadows Over Loathing is that game plus Cthulhu. I need to savour it. And it wasn’t a month for savouring.

As the dust settles on this month, I look at my creative pursuits. My inner voice asks me: “What have you achieved?”

At times I felt like I was just churning through time, producing nothing. In moments of clarity, I realised it might be self-poisoning to view my time as productive or not.

I was talking to someone about my recent month whilst in this funk. But as they asked me to recap the month, something peculiar happened.

I explained that I rated a handful of games for IF Comp, contributed to the prize pool and enjoyed the stream of the Top 20 winners.

I explained that I made a 3D image for a friend’s 40th birthday. His loving wife had organized friends to make pictures, write stories or just contribute in some way. I was very keen to contribute. The birthday boy is a cool dude who loves Dune and lustrous beards, so I made an image celebrating both. It came out really well, and they used it for the cover of the collection.

I explained that I fixed my website to include Mastodon links and upgrade all the little plugins.

I explained that I made most of a technically-demanding 3D image and then discarded it because I had a better idea.

I explained all the things I did for my workshop and my family. Lunches and exhibitions and talks and schedules. All with a sore foot.

I explained I wrote a newsletter. Every month. On top of everything else.

My recap took half an hour. And that was just covering recent history.

I have learned to argue against the standard of “have you been productive enough?” I want to be a person who makes cool things for cool people, and in these times of destruction, I want to be someone who creates, not destroys.

It turns out that it’s my nature to make things. But occasionally, when I’m doing too much to notice what I’m doing, I might just need a month to build up strength to follow that voice of creativity once more.

So perhaps next month I’ll make more things.

Wait, Dwarf Fortress is coming out on Steam, when?!

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