Music Playlist: Spotify, Apple Music

Transcript

PART 3: THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY

The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths.

Myths that creativity comes via inspiration, that new ideas are the products of geniuses, that they come from nowhere, and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament.

But creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.

When we create we use just three simple tools. The first of these forms the soil from which all creation grows. We copy.

We think of copying as being uncreative. But copying is at the core of creativity and the core of learning. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that by copying.

Many of technology's biggest successes began as copies.

Minecraft began as a copy of another game. Its creator initially referred to what he was working on as an "Infiniminer clone".

The operating system Linux began as a free clone of the UNIX operating system. Linux is now the backbone of basically the entire internet.

And the clear strategy of Apple is to create better versions of established products and features.

Before Apple Music there was Spotify. *or maybe even Napster*

Before AirPods there were many other bluetooth earbuds.

Before Apple Watch there were many other smart watches.

And lots of iPhone features first appeared in Android.

Although it was Apple that actually invented the smartphone to begin with.

This strategy extends all the way back to the creation of the Mac in the early eighties, which copied many of the best ideas from the Xerox Alto.

Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that... the sky's the limit.

Title: Part 3: The Elements of Creativity

After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new using the second creative tool: transform, taking ideas and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough.

Many of the biggest successes in tech began as something very different and didn't find success until they were transformed.

Discord began as a feature for a game. The game wasn't that successful so they dropped it and only kept its chat feature.

Pinterest started as a digital replacement for paper catalogues. Again, didn't really work but people really liked one of its features – collecting and sharing clippings. So this became the site's core function.

And Tik Tok began as a lip-syncing app for short music videos. But over time, it pivoted to what more people wanted: short form video.

TikTok clip: You're done.

These are all huge successes, but they aren't major innovations so much as variations on existing ideas. **But the massive breakthroughs that change the world, rely on the third and final creative tool: combine. Taking the elements you've copied or transformed and bringing them together.**

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440, but almost all its components had been around for centuries.

Henry Ford and The Ford Motor Company didn’t invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the first mass market car, the Model T.

And the Internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged. It finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by combining several well-established ideas.

These three tools are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine. And nowhere is all of this more obvious than in the realm of games.

Video games don't really try to conceal their copying. They copy from everywhere.

Video games copy ideas from tabletop games.

Alexey Pajitnov began Tetris as a version of a game from his childhood called pentomino. To make it simpler, he made the shapes out of four squares, instead of five, which greatly reduced the number of pieces.

Video games copy from game shows.

Wordle is very similar to the game show, Lingo. In both you try to find a five letter word within six tries, and the game tells you when a letter is correct or somewhere else in the word.

But mostly what video games copy from is video games. The history of video games is a chain of new games taking ideas from old games, transforming them, and iterating on them.

Or sometimes it's a single designer iterating on his own ideas, like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, who created, a series of hugely influential platform games.

But some of the most innovative games combine from multiple sources.

“Deus Ex” combined three game genres. All of these were done better by other games, but when combined the result was unique and innovative and became one of the most acclaimed titles in gaming history.

Other games copy from sources from outside gaming. "Cuphead" is a run and gun shooter, but it combines 30s style animation with a jazz score, giving it a look and feel that's never been done in games.

Some games even allow the players themselves to modify the game. Mods are customized versions of games which can be shared with other players. Plenty of classic games began as mods.

“The Stanley Parable” clip: Employee number 4 to 7. The job was simple. He sat at his desk in room 4 to 7 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.

"The Stanley Parable" is a surreal adventure game that subverts players' expectations of gameplay. It began as a free modification of "Half-Life 2."

DOTA 2, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients, a hugely popular esports game, is a sequel to a game that began as a custom map for Warcraft III.

And sometimes mods even turn into entire genres.

One of the biggest phenomenons in gaming has been "Fortnite", a free-to-play, battle royale game. But the origin of Fortnite isn't really Fortnite. It didn't even start with game developers, it started with modders in a seemingly unrelated realm.

The military simulator ARMA 2 let players make mods and one of these was "DayZ", a survival game with zombies. It's hard to convey how obsessed we were with zombies at this time.

"DayZ" then became a standalone game and people made mods for it.

Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, a web designer, not a game developer and barely a programmer.

Brendan Green: My code is terrible. Like people tell me to fix the game, if I try to fix the game, the servers would explode.

He saw these mods and wanted to make his own. So he created "DayZ Battle Royal", which was inspired by the book and movie "Battle Royale", where it's all against all until there's one winner.

If this sounds familiar to you, it's also the plot of "The Hunger Games."

Eventually Greene's mods turned into another new game, "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," or PUBG, which also goes on to become hugely popular.

It's only at this point that Fortnite finally enters the scene. But initially it's something very different. It’s a game where players make a fort during the day to survive night attacks by -- you guessed it -- zombies.

But once Fortnite's developers Epic Games got a load of PUBG they created a new version that copied PUBG's best ideas. But Epic then turned it into something quicker, more casual, more cheerful, something that looked great in livestreams, and was less buggy.

Gamer streaming clip: I got a bug then because there's a floating SLR on my screen here and it's shooting right now.

And Epic added plenty of other creative takes on other ideas. It incorporated complex building. They made the game free to play on pretty much any platform and generated income from in-game purchases. The game eventually grew into a rich virtual environment that many consider an early example of the metaverse, an open VR world that may be the future of the internet or may be... nothing.

Meta clip, Mark Zuckerberg speaking: Whoah, we're floating in space. Who made this place? It's awesome!

Fortnite sometimes takes copying too far. Players' signature moves, known as emotes, were sometimes duplicated without permission from popular videos, movies, and television shows.

But overall, it can't be denied that Fortnite is a unique, creative and historic title within the history of gaming.

And this phenomenon was created not just by a major video developer but by modders, by pop culture, and by players.

Fortnite's roots even predate PUBG and the Battle Royale genre, and extend back to games like Minecraft, Unreal and countless others, to b-movies like Death Race 2000, and even to pro wrestling, where dozens of guys would vie to throw each other out of the ring until one remains.

Technology has always fueled creativity. But now technology is becoming more than a tool that we use. Technology is becoming our collaborator, our competitor and yes, our replacement. In our final episode, we'll see how AIs create... by remixing us.