The town emerges from those individual steps. No one builds a town, they build streets, neighborhoods, and buildings. At this size, while you might have an idea of the whole through a high level outline (like a list of patterns in a pattern language), when it’s time to actually build the focus should be on the human scale with periodic check ins with the much larger whole. Both cellular multiplication outward and cellular subdivision inward. Some projects are so big that their largest centers are out of proportion with their smallest centers, the scale of sizes is so great, that they need to be approached by more of a middle-out strategy. Some projects are a small enough scale that you can sketch out the whole and work your way inward, differentiating smaller sections and centers as you go. It depends on the overall scale of the project, and the scale of your tools. I realized that awareness of the whole doesn’t always mean it’s possible or effective to work from the absolute biggest scale to the smallest scale. But the reason I was stuck went deeper than that. The game actively discourages a wide angle view: as soon as you click a single block into the emptiness, the camera zooms right back in to that single block. What I was doing didn’t go with the grain of the game or with the tools available. Something in my mental model of how to approach the creative task was incomplete. I had hit a dead end-a familiar feeling in creative strategy. In trying to create a unified whole, the size of the whole was so out of proportion to its internal relationships that everything felt disjointed, isolated, and absurd. And then once it was sketched out and I started to click in actual buildings, they looked ridiculous on their own in comparison to the vast grey sketch. It was like trying to fill a twenty foot canvas with individual dots from a pencil. It didn’t have the fluency of a fast and large paint brush to make wide rough passes, it took ages to sketch out each section and see how it felt in relation to the whole. Maybe a river passing through the middle? But the clicking was so slow. I tried filling in the entire extent of the game map, and sketching out some rough neighborhoods or sections within the map. I’ll zoom all the way out and start sketching the town from the widest possible view! That will really be something special because I’ll be developing the whole thing together.” So as I stared at the blank canvas the game provides, I thought to myself, “ Ah ha! I know what to do. When I first started playing, I had just been reading and writing about practicing awareness of the whole as a key creative skill. Just without all the messy supplies and sawdust. Since video games often include a 2D or 3D environment, they’re particularly great for experiencing a virtual representation of what goes into building a physical 3D place. Video games are a medium to experiment with problem solving strategies, get a taste of new skills, try out emerging roles and dimensions of self, and work out social cooperation patterns. But for children play is serious learning. "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. Video games are a densely packed feedback loop for learning creative skills -by playing and practicing within the boundaries of the game, I can try out creative skills and experiment with approaches that I can then bring to “in real life” projects that are often mistakenly considered more “serious” than video games. They’re fun because they’re challenging, and they engage skills in a smooth flow of progression. I don’t want to spend too much time defending the value of playing video games-the fact that they’re fun is enough! But games are rich metaphorical spaces designed to help you enter a deeply rewarding flow state. Why am I building a virtual town with no people in it when I could be building a real building or spending my time on some other “real” creative project? Well, because video games are fun, of course.
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