I have no visualisation ability whatsoever, but I do have some aural and tactile imagination. My mental idea space is a combination of sounds and words (sometimes storing ideas as sounds is more efficient for me, especially if it’s not something like a story segment that especially suits words). The words may be spoken, or written - in the latter case it’s like Braille (even though I can’t read Braille), and certain feeling-patterns in those words convert into sounds as well. There’s no grouping going on, but I can tell if things go together because the pitches harmonise.
On the other hand, I tend to put ideas not intended to be part of a MVP in an “addition pool” on my computer, because sometimes I forget things. Creating a game involves harmonising but also tends to involve quite a bit of typing as I figure out how to actually do the idea. Items in the addition pool that actually get added tend to be the ones that harmonise well with the ideas I have already implemented.
(I have some propagnosia as well - it’s often easier for me to stick pieces of identity together if the face is one of the last parts introduced to me).
Cheers for being a fellow DM! My group runs a homebrew version of D&D that’s lighter on the grind-y number mechanics (we use them more for a sense of whimsy when it comes to randomness on events, or to pace fights properly) and heavier on the roleplay. It’s been a hobby for quite the number of years now- and the ‘say yes, and?’ and incorporating interactivity and anticipating likely choices made by the group have been useful translatable skills in IF ponderings for me.
You know, I’d bet there’s a huge overlap with IF fans and tabletop, come to think of it.
Yeah, I agree! I think there’s a ton of overlap between the players, but there’s also as you say a lot of good design thinking on the tabletop side of things that also potentially applies to IF game design.
I feel like it’s an under-theorized area though - I haven’t seen many people talk about the connections, even though there are folks like Aaron Reed who have a deep IF pedigree but does tabletop design these days. And I believe Don Crowther was trying to get across the feel of what it was like to play D&D when he wrote Adventure. Once the Spring Thing review craziness settles down it might be fun to do a thread exploring common threads or other design inspirations!
(It’s funny, your mention of being a DM felt weird to me, since I’ve actually played almost no D&D! My old group largely did the White Wolf games - Mage, Exalted, and Changeling - plus some Call of Cthulhu; D&D felt more restrictive and combat focused. I’ve heard the new edition better supports the looser style of play you mention, which I should really check out one of these days!)
Mine is a stove. It’s got two burners in front and goes back as far as I want it, but usually something like six total spaces for saucepans at once.
I usually tend to the front two the most, but I can have other incomplete ideas for stews simmering in the back waiting to develop enough to move to the front, or be added to one of the two front pans to enrich them.
I didn’t know either, so I did some research on the Internet and did you know that a mantis shrimp can stun prey by moving its limb so fast that it boils water, resulting in a shockwave when the vapor bubble collapses?
I can only think of it by analogy, not picture, but I’d say that my creative mind is like a well of dark water in an underground cavern (like the Neath in Fallen London), in the back of a cave, and it’s murky and filled with all sorts of things from decades. And when I’m looking for ideas I stir the pot with a long stick with a net, and then fish up whatever I find, sometimes being surprised or disturbed by what I find.
That is so recognizable. It’s not the rabbit hole, it’s the diverging tunnels that split outwards from it.
For example, I just went from “mantis shrimp” to “ancient Assyria” in one click on Wikipedia. Fascinating stuff. How does anyone get any focused research done under such conditions?
I sort of don’t relate to this idea, either (I mean, in addition to other people who haven’t / didn’t). Because my space is actually the ideas themselves – in the form of scenes I see like films, or sentences I hear in whatever voice I read novels in in my head, or in music, or in combinations of all three. These things are often playing in my head.
This is different from making sure I don’t lose ideas, which is non-mental. I’m way bigger on jotting down (or typing into my phone if no paper is near) ideas whenever I think of them these days.
That’s how I experience it too. No dusty filing cabinets or buckets in a dark attic or anything like that. I find I can only really store ideas mentally, though - for me, committing them to paper seems to dispel and deaden them somehow, like shiny stones you pull out of the sea only to have them turn dull and ordinary when you get them home. So I first draft entirely in my head and only then start writing (whatever the thing is that I’m writing).
I’m impressed by how so many of you seem to have such well-kept memory palaces. Has anyone here seen Dreamcatcher?
I would characterize my creative process as a chemistry set, or, perhaps less pretentiously, a huge stove with a lot of chaotic pots. The creative process is a reduction for me, where I examine the things I love, discover what makes them unique and what things they all have in common, and then BOIL my darlings— reduce them to their syrupy concentrated essence.
As an example, today I was looking at my three favorite horror movies and trying to determine what factors they all had in common. Boiling it down, I built a description of all three: “a cast of diverse friends battles a shapeshifting cannibal monster that pits them against each other, playing on their weaknesses, until there’s only one left”. This could be any of about three dozen movies, of course: can you guess which three I’m thinking of?*
Now that I have that basic root, I start building on it myself. How would I do this? What part of my experience would telling this story draw on? My sugary story concentrate is beginning to crystallize, like rock candy; eventually it swells to an unpredictable and unrecognizable shape. Always based on something familiar, but steeped in ‘me’ to the point where you’d never know.
*answer: The Thing (1982), Return To Oz (1985), and House (1977), aka “HAUSU”.
I got your first one right away, never heard of the third, and laughed at you classifying the second as a horror movie - my parents took me to see it when it first came out, on the reasonable assumption that it was for kids. I was four and cried my little head off (funnily enough, the exact same thing happened to my wife, who’s the same age I am).
I’ve been lurking this thread for a bit trying to figure out how I’d describe my mental idea space and this comes pretty close. Brain twins!
I had been thinking about mine as like a large purse or backpack. The main addendums from your version are that sometimes I can’t find stuff I put in it, or stuff I put in comes out in pieces, or I find stuff that I don’t remember putting in there. Again, this is all metaphorical so I’ve never actually imagined it this way, but that’s how it works.
I read a piece by Stephen King (it might have been Danse Macabre but I think he’s explained this elsewhere) where he said his brain is like a sieve that most stuff goes through, but the stuff that catches and gets stuck - that’s what he is compelled to write about.
So things that won’t leave his mind. That kind of correlates with my other theory - I have ideas all day, and I’m not a journaler, but I’ve noticed I won’t forget a truly good idea.
I’m also weird that I don’t usually write stuff down, at least by hand. If I make the effort to write something I almost don’t need it any more because the physical act of writing with a pen or pencil will cement a concept in my brain (unless it’s stat tables or variable meanings or character names that are actual notes to keep track of). So making handwritten notes often in my case is more of a brainstorming/cathartic thing to clear the channels and not useful notes for later. Blank books are kind of wasted on me because my notes look like conspiracy scribblings of a madman and even I can sometimes barely decipher what I meant with my boxes and diagrams and cryptic entries like
cur goes to the lam - 3 or 4? only if the ice cream
I try to do this, but what ends up happening is that I jot a late-night, in-the-bottle note on a random scrap of paper or in the margin of the book I’m reading, and then I find it later, and sometimes I’ve no idea what the hell it means. Like I recently found a scrap of paper with notes for my Parser Comp game, and it said “It flies away/breaks?”. I don’t know what this means. I simply cannot keep a notebook or go to my computer and do it in an organized fashion.
Are these big ideas? Like ideas for a whole game? Or ideas for parts of whole things? I guess I don’t forget big ideas.
It’s when I’m working on a game, and I have a ton of smaller ideas about how parts of it could go or work, or what could be in them – all those variations are things I need to jot if they visit me at random times, or I’ll definitely lose some of them. And I don’t know which ones I’ll end up wanting.