Polysyllabic thunderstorm inbound. Brace for impact.

Creativity is a fickle creature. It’s no wonder the ancient Greeks attributed inspiration to flighty, unpredictable muses; it often feels like a wholly separate organism living inside one’s brain, choosing to alternately bless and curse the craftsman according to its own unknowable whims (I insist on the term “craftsman” because “artist” has a lot of baggage attached to it). Days, months, years can pass with nary a glimmer of the muse’s enchanting smile, and yet the most insignificant thing can trigger a dizzying rush of hallucinatory madness that claws desperately at the inside of its cranial prison until one finds oneself scribbling frantically on year-old receipts at 4:30 on a weekday morning.

This kind of intensity is often associated with emotional immaturity, which isn’t too far from the truth. After all, an individual with more evenly distributed emotional responses would be able to exert some control over the creative impulse, mitigating the nervous energy that drives it and maintaining his composure in the process. Someone without such discipline is prone to flying off the handle, caught in the grip of some otherworldly power that hijacks and subjugates virtually all avenues of thought until the wildfire has run its course. It’s an unsettling thing to see, especially for the man at the epicenter of such temporary mania. For the creative man who holds logic and reason as his highest ideals, the knowledge that his most valuable qualities are contingent on some inner monster raging just beyond his control is a terrifying prospect. It means that the source of his greatness is somehow beyond himself, and he hesitates to seize the reins lest he subdue the wild beast into quiescence, depriving himself of that which enriches his life even as it complicates it.

That was really dense and pompous, but honestly it’s the best combination of words I have to describe it.

This dichotomy has been a major part of my life for nearly a decade, ever since I first hammered out a short story in one sitting as a teenager, without the slightest clue where the words came from. The more I thought about it, the further away it got, and the only way to recapture the experience was to relinquish control to the muse and let the work flow from some place I couldn’t reach through conscious effort. But as a strict rationalist, this was unacceptable to me. How can I allow myself to depend on a part of my mind that appears to run on nothing but faith when faith itself is antithetical to my epistemology?

I swear you guys, I only use big words so I can write shorter sentences.

In truth, there is a logical process governing the strange living fire within the craftsman’s breast, even if its chemical calculations are beyond the scope of self-awareness. Working with this alien creature is not unlike taming a wild horse; you may be able to soothe it long enough to climb on its back, but once it picks up speed you have no choice but to hold tight and hope that it takes you somewhere beautiful. It’s a strange and frightening thing to put so much trust in what is essentially a black box, and yet there is no other way to claim the riches that the muse offers.

The whole business comes with a high degree of vulnerability, however, and this is why we have so many miserable artists, suicidal musicians and creative people who are just a bit too far to the left of psychological maturity to have healthy relationships with their more sophisticated peers. Many creative people are still children, trapped in a halfway stage of development where everything is still enormous and hyperbolic, and the spark of insight that would lend blissful satisfaction in a “normal” individual instead triggers a torrent of borderline insanity that could either produce the ultimate work of an artist’s life or send him straight over the edge into self-absorption and total alienation from the people who care about him.

See? Even that paragraph would seem hyperbolic if I hadn’t actually done it once. More than once, actually. Just ask any of my ex-girlfriends.

It’s a tough thing to work around. After all, I don’t really like being a big kid. Back in high school, I used to drive my friends and family completely nuts with my wild tantrums and incoherent ranting. I think I’d prefer to be more grown up about most things. But all evidence points to a significant barrier between total self-discipline and the freedom to indulge the creative spirit. Striking a balance between the two is immensely difficult, so I hear, but it would be unacceptable to abandon one in favor of the other.

For one thing, I consider this to be the quality that will distinguish me as a game developer. I came to this field in a roundabout way, following an artsy-fartsy path that somehow avoided the necessity for unattenuated logic that accompanies the practices of gameplay programming and engine coding. I’ve gotten by on whatever deliberate reasoning I’ve been able to execute from within a haze of anxiety, and even as I continue to exercise my logical faculties I do not expect the fire to just go out. The beast is more stubborn than that.

Friends have asked me – sometimes with disdain, sometimes with genuine curiosity – why I have chosen the videogame, of all things, to be the vehicle for my creative output. In response, I usually puff out my chest, gesticulate wildly and wax poetic about the power of videogames to empower their audience to face difficult choices firsthand, rambling in dense run-on sentences with a facial expression that everyone in the room except me finds utterly hilarious (I’m told it’s a laugh riot). I can feel my face turning red when I get to my theory of videogames as a highly accessible form of method acting; my ambition to create games that demand genuine in-character participation from players; my mostly-unfounded belief that a well made game can both entertain and help the player grow into a better person in his real life, ending with an exhaustively rehearsed stream of rhetoric about the potential of videogames to shape better civilizations through low-stakes simulation of complex moral issues and ultimately the realization that I haven’t blinked in about five minutes and my eyes are completely bloodshot.

Somehow, it’s endearing and a little creepy at the same time. But these days I’m less interested in changing that about myself. The passion is its own reward, really.

In closing, I will leave you with an example of the kind of person I’m talking about. Here is a video of Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham performing his acoustic piece Big Love in front of a live audience. Anyone who has read about Buckingham’s fiery relationship with singer Stevie Nicks (short version: they’re both crazy) will know what kind of intensity these musicians are capable of. Standing alone in the darkness with only his guitar for companionship, he sings and plays like a man possessed, locked in that peculiar state of ecstasy available only to those with skin so thin that even the tiniest grain of emotion grows to monstrous size, casting long shadows across rational thought until the creative process molds it into a glowing pearl – the end product to be shared with the world – and the tension lifts and reason returns once more to the light.

Okay, I think that’s enough hyperbole for one post. Feel free to tell me to chill out now.

~ by George on March 19, 2009.