building ramps to extend corgispace

Adam Saltsman has a term he's started using, "corgispace". Let's quote him on what that means:

(this whole thread is worth reading, click through)

It's about working with the grain of the material. It's about saying "hm, that's hard, let's not do that". It's about finding the dumb hacky way to do it, because you are making a finite thing.

Here's another Adam quote:

It's about keeping iteration times short. It's about working in such a way where you can see the effects of your actions. So you can try a goofy thing and then see where it goes, rather than having to make sure it's gonna be worthwhile ahead of time.

(I think a bunch about the corrosive effect on a project when every change has to be put through a ticketing system. Compare to the BOTW thing of adding notes directly in the world)

I think about seeing the Sokpop showcase at AMAZE this year, and about how a bunch of the games were broken or crashed sometimes, just logic errors or edge cases getting hit. They worked well enough to be fun, to be playable, to be something that you could derive a large quantity of joy from. But also, in a expo environment where they ran for hours on end without being reset, they sometimes had issues. Crashes, glitches, whatever. Because that's not what they optimised for. They optimised for making 100 games. And for those games to be fun, or interesting, or whatever that particular game was trying to do. And... I mean, isn't that the right way to do it?

I think this is a really powerful way to work. I want to work in this way more.

But!

I find myself inevitably attracted to the boundaries of the space. I wonder what things are within reach, and what things are tall. I think about what height comes from convention and expectations, and what height comes from technical limitations, and what height comes from the natural structure of human nature and physical reality. I think about what shape things could be if some of these things were changed, and what work would be involved in changing some of these things.

I think about building ramps. I think about all the places a corgi could go if a ramp was added. Like... the sofa. Or upstairs. Or on the bed. I think about what these things metaphorically map to. The games you could play on top of the kitchen counters. There's cool stuff up there! I'm not entirely sure it's safe for the corgi, and I'm not entirely sure what the corgi would do up there... but that's part of what makes it interesting.

There's different types of tool, right? There's tools which make previously impossible things possible (like the Large Hadron Collider). There's tools which make expensive things cheaper (like swiss roll production lines). There are tools which allow professionals to be more expressive (like theremins). And there are tools which allow people who aren't interested in complicated things to do more things than they can before (like Downpour). I'm most interested in this last type of tool. But to build this type of tool, you need to use a bunch of the other types of tool. So it's worth keeping an eye on all of these, to see if suddenly there's something cool that someone's placed just out of these reach of all these damn corgis.

And the thing about building a ramp is that once you have built one ramp, tons of corgis can get up there. It can have a big effect! A second order effect, for sure. But think of all the corgis doing cool new things with this space that they wouldn't have gotten to otherwise!

Building ramps isn't the only way to do this, of course - you can also be a corgi who does cool shit and inspires other corgis. Or you could host Crufts, and help show all the other corgis what cool stuff other corgis are doing. This metaphor is getting increasingly tortured, but what I mean here is that curation and community organising is a powerful way to affect the culture of a creative community. This point was the end section to my recent talk about making creative tools, which you can watch here.

Anyway

Ramps, am I right? And thinking about what spaces a corgi can get to, what a corgi might do there. The statespace of possibility that a new tool opens up. The way you never really know until you actually see a corgi play around up there, but also you can have a sense of it.

But on the other side...

Maybe I want to be a corgi, go to the places which are easy to get to. Get good at running around at ground level. Get fast at trying new things, and not getting stuck on the perfect thing, just out of reach.

I can operate in either mode. But it's probably useful to be intentional about what mode I'm in at any particular moment.

Or maybe I need to make more ramps while staying in corgi-mode?

Bonus Round

I haven't watched this interview with Adam Saltsman yet, but I will:

Also here's the tweet version of this post:

Wow what a messy post this is, it is an undigested thought trying to connect to a thousand different places. Let's hope writing it helps digest the thoughts.