A New Perspective

Creative thinking is what defines most of the products we see on the market today - someone somewhere was thinking in new ways about how to solve a common problem.  To most of us, the brilliance of that one idea we see packaged so nicely is overwhelming.  We think to ourselves, "I would never have thought of that!" or "That guy must be a genius!"  The problem with this way of thinking is that it originates from seeing a polished final product, not the messy iterations that came before.

I recently worked on a game design exercise where I was to redesign the game of Hopscotch.  At first, the task seemed monumental.  "What's wrong with Hopscotch the way it is?" I thought to myself.  "People have been playing it for hundreds if not thousands of years.  How can something that tried and tested possibly be improved?"  I was approaching the process in a closed-minded way.  I was allowing my experience and familiarity of the game to block my creative thinking.

Instead of trying to come up with new ways to play the same game, I tried (at the recommendation of the instructor) to think of problems that my ideas for Hopscotch might try to solve.  What I found after approaching the problem in this way was that the ideas for new designs started flowing, much more easily than before I had defined the problem.  This got me wondering what would happen if I faced all the challenges in my life the same way.  How many more problems could I solve simply by changing my approach, by changing how I thought about the problem, by changing my perspective?

This phrase "change your perspective" comes up frequently in game design, and for good reason.  To design a game for a specific audience, you must think about the game from that audience's perspective.  However we don't frequently think about using this solution to our own problems because hey, my problems are centered around me and I'm the expert on me, not someone else!  Yet changing your perspective can mean more than just looking through another’s eyes.

Changing your perspective about a problem could be as simple as restating the problem in a new way.  If the front door is locked, stop walking into it.  Go around the house and try the back door.  That is assuming, of course, you’ve seen the front door.  No problem can be solved without first clearly defining the question.

As with “fixing” Hopscotch, I had to first think about the game at its core.  “What is Hopscotch?”  Often our real world problems are much more complex than a simple child’s game.  They have intricately intertwined pieces forming a seemingly insurmountable mountain of a problem.  The only way to solve these problems is by breaking them down – by separating out each of the pieces and considering them individually before recombining and looking at the larger picture.

You might find you can eliminate some of the complexity by solving one of the smaller problems within the larger set.  You might also find that new solutions present themselves by fitting the pieces back together in a new way.  Perhaps you’ll find that two individual issues you originally thought to be unrelated are actually intimately connected and can (or must) be solved together.

I think applying this thought process beyond game design might just be the key to solving some of life’s hardest problems.  Too frequently we grow too close to our problems.  We get too invested in them and we ourselves stuck looking through the foggy glasses of old thinking.  But instead of continuing to stare at the problem through these old glasses, we could adjust the lenses we are looking through – we could replace the glasses – to see the problem in a different light.  I am not suggesting that this is easy.  I am suggesting that if we can achieve it, we might just be able to find our most creative solutions where we were least expecting them.

This is going to take practice; it will require a lot of work and a lot of effort.  I am going to try thinking about everything in my life in this manner, even everyday things that I usually would not think twice about.  This lesson of game design is too important to keep stored away only for use in game design.  It is a lesson in thinking, a lesson in living, it is exercise for your brain, and it opens a world of creative thought that people once believed to be reserved for a brilliant few.  I believe if a person can master this approach to problems and balance it with good communication then he will find no task – game or otherwise – is too big to tackle.