Podcast Hoard: RPG Mainframe on Ideas and Desires
Earlier this week on the Mastering Dungeons discord a conversation started about people's approach to brainstorming ideas. It reminded me of a good RPG Mainframe episode on "Ideas and Desires". A lot of creativity is about making interesting and novel connections. Hankerin's thesis is that you need two things to support that - a wide range of raw materials to make connections with, and some mental free cycles to make those connections. He calls this combination your "creativity engine", and the episode is about how to support each of these pieces. It is a nice complement to his previous episode on 3 Creative Must Do's that I summarized here
Ideas and Desires
Your "Creativity Engine" comes from having a strong foundation of both Desires and Ideas. These come from different parts of your brain, and you need to do different things to support them. If you do, you'll be able to sustain a good amount of creativity over time.
Desires: Hankerin describes this as wanting to have a specific experience or wanting to capture a vibe or an aesthetic. He argues that you need to "prime your mind" to have strong desires - you want to fill your brain with "high quality experiences and media" to develop clear wants for your gaming experiences.
Ideas: Hankerin describes this as "preconscious insights" - having some kind of revelation or realization that gives you a creative spark that you can build on. The bulk of the episode is about how to create a "fertile landscape" for preconscious thinking. Hankerin argues that it is difficult to give your preconscious mind time to make these connections when your mind is busy with the worries and practicalities of mundane life. Those are of course important, but you need to make time to set those aside so that your mind can work. He suggests that you try to build a daily habit of some kind of activity (ideally physical) that will help you let those worries go for a bit - this could be exercise, mindfulness, some kind of chore, etc. The goal is not to have a completely empty mind, but just to let thoughts drift in and out. You won't necessarily see the idea right away, it might come a few days later - but by giving your brain time to work you are likely to have more of those great ideas over time.
My Thoughts
This definitely aligns both with what I know about creativity, and my own experiences. There is some good research that when you are stuck on a creative problem, stepping away from it and doing something else can help you get "unstuck" - both because your brain will keep working on it while you are doing something else, and when you come back to it you will often come at it from a fresh direction. This is also why people often talk about having their best ideas in the shower or while doing dishes - it gives your mind time to work. The point about needing to give your mind a lot of raw materials to work with is also important. On the Discord we talked about the show Connections, which is all about the history of science and technology (I had a VHS set of Connections 2 as a kid, loved watching it). One of the things that stuck with me is how many inventions came from someone seeing something in one domain and realizing it is helpful in this other domain. Finally, an important part of a creative process is to separate "divergent thinking" (creating new options) and "convergent thinking" (picking what you're going to go with to iterate and refine). A big problem people have is jumping to convergent thinking too soon - worrying too early about practicalities so that they end up self-censoring. This is why you see the common brainstorming advice of "no bad ideas" - just focus on tossing a lot of ideas out there, and worry about which ones are good or feasible later. Letting your preconscious mind work in the background can help you stay in that open brainstorming mode.
For my own prep, I usually need to get at least some general sense of what the session is going to be about with at least a week to go (otherwise I get a lot of anxiety). But once I have a broad idea I am happy with, I try to set it aside from actively prepping until basically the day before or day of. In the meantime, I will often be mulling the idea over in my head as I'm going about doing other things, and this is often where I'll come up with interesting new wrinkles and elaborations to the idea. Having a week where my preconscious mind is building out the idea more means that when I sit down to do my 8 Steps prep it is mostly just about the specific details. In terms of taking in "high quality experiences and media" - here I probably differ a fair bit from what Hankerin envisions. I do watch TV and movies, but not a ton - and I don't really read a lot of fiction these days. However, I consume a lot of RPG content (particularly GMing advice and tips), and from blogs and Discords I hear a lot about other peoples' amazing games. I find that is a source of inspiration from Desires that works better for me (I come at it more from an intellectual rather than vibes/aesthetics based perspective - I get excited by ideas and frameworks I want to try out).
Speaking of connections - a connection that I made as I was writing this is to a few points Hankerin made in a later episode on Exception Bias that gives a bit of a caution and nuance to this emphasis on creativity. The basic point about "Exception Bias" is that we tend to pay too much attention to things that are unusual, and too little to the ordinary. In the context of creativity, Hankerin argues that we often overvalue novelty: "novelty does not equal quality". Novelty has value, but we shouldn't overweight it relative to a good version of a "meat and potatoes idea". The weirdest ideas aren't always the best, some of the best ideas execute on familiar genre tropes in a good way - so it is okay to go with ideas that feel familiar. The second caution is not to focus too much on chasing after the flashes of insight, of "feeling inspired". Again, his point is not that these flashes aren't valuable, but not to feel like you can only create when you have those moments of inspiration. He argues that most of being creative is the small daily acts of creation - and that if you overly focus on those rare moments of inspiration, you are prone to be too hard on yourself about your creative abilities. I think this does connect back to the "creative engine" if we take it as a way to support ourselves in "showing up and doing the creative worked in a sustained fashion" rather than only about trying to summon the muse for brilliant flashes of insight.