On Misdirected Creativity
Recently on Metafilter, someone posted a link to Automated Mario: video of user-created Super Mario World levels that are designed to play themselves. And this was cool and nifty and entertaining.
I got to thinking, though, about the people who were posting and saying that it was nifty but a waste of time. So I scribbled down some disorganized thoughts about why I don't think that that's the case. They may say more about me than they do about my subject, but still I record them here for my own reference:
This is yet another highlight of what seems to me the great triumph of human nature: that, given any system with set boundaries, humans will eventually discover and exploit everything that can be done within that system. I do not consider this person's work a waste of time in any way. Rather, I am delighted that there is an army of people like this person, and that each of them is manically digging into something different. It doesn't matter if it's hacking video games, playing with Lego, playing music, documenting pop culture, or anything else -- because it follows that there are people doing the same thing with getting to space, curing cancer, or even getting around to making those flying cars already.
I tend to call this sort of thing "misdirected creativity," mostly when I do it myself, but in truth there's no such thing as a wrong way to be creative. Every whimsical obsession is a tiny bulge in the aluminum boundary of the Jiffy-Pop pan of the human experience. There have to be vectors in every direction for the whole thing to expand.
Maybe I'm just restating "art is good", but it seems to me that there's more to it than that -- that on a larger scale, this is more a symptom of something good about humanity than it is anything in itself. And personally, I'm quite happy to find something good about humanity for once.
Of course, I may just be saying that I'm a nerd.
I got to thinking, though, about the people who were posting and saying that it was nifty but a waste of time. So I scribbled down some disorganized thoughts about why I don't think that that's the case. They may say more about me than they do about my subject, but still I record them here for my own reference:
This is yet another highlight of what seems to me the great triumph of human nature: that, given any system with set boundaries, humans will eventually discover and exploit everything that can be done within that system. I do not consider this person's work a waste of time in any way. Rather, I am delighted that there is an army of people like this person, and that each of them is manically digging into something different. It doesn't matter if it's hacking video games, playing with Lego, playing music, documenting pop culture, or anything else -- because it follows that there are people doing the same thing with getting to space, curing cancer, or even getting around to making those flying cars already.
I tend to call this sort of thing "misdirected creativity," mostly when I do it myself, but in truth there's no such thing as a wrong way to be creative. Every whimsical obsession is a tiny bulge in the aluminum boundary of the Jiffy-Pop pan of the human experience. There have to be vectors in every direction for the whole thing to expand.
Maybe I'm just restating "art is good", but it seems to me that there's more to it than that -- that on a larger scale, this is more a symptom of something good about humanity than it is anything in itself. And personally, I'm quite happy to find something good about humanity for once.
Of course, I may just be saying that I'm a nerd.