Try To Get Confused
Try To Get Confused
Oscillating between vision and impact
Okay, so, lately I've found myself dragging my feet on the game in a big way. This is nothing new for me, any self-driven project that takes several years is bound to have peaks and troughs of motivation. In fact, this has happened to me so many times I'm starting to (finally) notice some patterns.
One of the trickier aspects of making indie games is just how many jobs you have to do. When I "work on the game" I could be acting like a:
Director
Project Manager
Designer
Engineer
Marketer
Artist
Player
Worse still, I have to change between these roles frequently, often multiple times during the work day. Setting aside the inefficiency of context-switching1 this process is rife with challenges. As a Director, I usually know what the game needs next, but, as a Project Manager I'm eternally trimming scope and fighting complexity. As an Engineer I typically resent all the other roles for giving me so much damn work. Sometimes the Engineering mindset creeps into the Director mindset, subtly pushing me away from good ideas because they'll be tricky (or, conversely, boring) to implement.
Broadly speaking these roles can be split into two buckets: vision-oriented and impact-oriented. I’m borrowing this distinction directly from Dimitri after our recent conversations2. As a director, designer, artist and marketer I have to sit back and envision all the ways the game could unfold. It’s my job to blur out the current plan and see the ways it could refocus3. Then, soon after, I will have to switch to an impact-orientation to actually implement just one of these possible visions. This means specifying systems, managing the backlog and, of course, actually hitting the keys to make things happen. This vision-impact dyad seems to be the diverge-converge pattern of creativity in disguise. This happens cyclically throughout any creative project, with WizardChess it has played out dozens of times over the last 3 years.
This is simultaneously the fun and the pain of working in tiny teams. In a larger organisation you occupy a (hopefully somewhat) defined role and stick to mostly vision or impact, but, in a small team you have to be able to switch on a moment's notice.
So, we’ve identified a few challenges but there's nothing too controversial here so far. During the creative process we have to switch from diverging, to converging and back to diverging again, cyclically. I've been riffing on these themes of relaxing and reforming constraints lately and this is yet another manifestation of the same abstract pattern4. The question is: how do you know when to focus on vision and when to focus on impact?
Well, it's all about confusion. See, as you broaden your vision and allow your thinking to diverge, you will become progressively less sure of what it is you're making and why. Eventually this becomes unignorable and the stress of all these branching paths of thought causes—in my experience—a little emotional breakdown.
"What are we even doing here? Is this game actually any good? What is the personality of this project? Have we lost sight of it? Am I capable of having good ideas at all!? Have I ever had one!!?"
This confusion is a natural part of the process. You can't diverge forever! At some point you have to make some decisions and narrow the possibility space back down until it can converge on a real implementation. So, when you're losing sight of the vision for the project, it's time to switch to impact-oriented thinking. Let's fix some things in place and build scaffolding to support further development.
Leaving aside the process of actually making your ideas converge5, we're now in phase two of the cycle. Here we test our ideas against reality and progressively try to bring our mental models to life. Convergence is not as simple as building a feature or hitting a milestone, typically as we start to anchor things down we find that they don't quite fit the way we hoped—or perhaps they don't fit at all! At some point we're going to have to switch back to thinking about our vision and diverge, but when?
Yet again, confusion is our guide. Too much focus on impact leads to designing yourself into a corner and, often, blaming yourself:
"This isn't working. It's not actually fun. It's not how I imagined. There's way too much to do to ever finish this. I don't remember why we started making this damn thing in the first place!"
Confusion is a signal that it's time to change modes6. Too much focus on impact leads to myopic thinking. I realised while talking to Ricky7 this week that I was losing motivation because I'd become confused about where we were heading. I was venting about how we've planned so many biomes, units, enemies and bosses for the game that it feels insurmountable and I'm getting depressed just looking at the task list. His response?
"Let's cut some stuff out and make it work with less."
It's pretty obvious, but when you're so focused on impact you have to freeze the vision you're working towards in place and it can be tough to realise it needs defrosting. A theme running through this post: conversation is an incredible tool for creative re-orientation.
So, here’s my claim: each inflection point in the diverge-converge cycle is marked by confusion, creative doubt and a lack of motivation. These emotions are not distractions, they should not be paved over with willpower, they are the only guide we have for dancing with the unknown.
Forging boldly into the unknown is the secret of humanity's success, it's the central premise of our universal story: The Hero's Journey.
Each cycle of diverge-converge (AKA vision-impact) is also a cycle of adventure into unknown lands and bringing home the treasure. We're supposed to get confused, hesitate, lose hope and then regain it just before giving in to the darkness and doubt.
Don't fear your confusion or condemn it, notice it for what it is: a marker on your trip through this primordial process. Interestingly, while this cycle is soaked in uncertainty and fear, on the other side we can clearly see it all made sense. The meaning of the challenge is discovered in the post-analysis, when we come back to from the chaos to comfort and digest the lessons.
Maybe if you fully understand what you're doing, you're playing it too safe? Try going on a ridiculous adventure sometime, it kinda sucks, but that's the point.
Until next time,
Ben ✌️
PS my previous post was featured by Substack, which might mean it’s worth reading next:
🧠 Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About
🎙 Biology, Life, Aliens (Nick Lane w/ Lex Fridman)
🎙 Chess, Streaming, Life (The Botez Sisters w/ Lex Fridman)
📄 Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets
🧘 “Is Fixation "THE" Necessary Cause for Suffering?” (Shinzen Young)
🐸 Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs?
I try to batch similar role tasks into a given day/week to mitigate this, but it’s a trainable skill to switch mindsets at will
If you like this post, you’ll almost certainly like more of Dimitri’s writing
I can’t stop using metaphors from AI apparently, I’m thinking of stable diffusion in this sentence
YAMSAP for short? Sounds like a delicious yam syrup to me
That's another whole post, it isn't always possible. For now, just draw the rest of the owl
This was such a wonderful read, thank you so much! It never occured to me to overlap this with the hero's journey or connect it as a sequence of events that follow a rhythm. Totally helped me connect some of the dots in my own mind. Also low key might feel adventurous now, when I face uncertainty and doubt next... remembering that that is part of my mission :')