“You cannot be creative unless someone is pushing you off a cliff somewhere.”
– Jozef Frucek, Fighting Monkey
When your back is to the cliff, there is both urgency, and necessity.
Urgency in that we have to act. Now.
And necessity in that it’s of the highest priority. Life and death.
There is also a constraint present, in that we can’t step backwards – if you move back, you fall off of the cliff.
So, via the cliff we have introduced a spacial or movement constraint.
When we have urgency, necessity and constraints, we create interesting solutions.
When video game designers create video games, there can be a problem. With no real constraints in a virtual world, anything is possible.
And what do we find? Many gaming platforms start to look very similar.
Often when we introduce boundaries, constraints or limitations (space, size, budget, number on the team, time, height, connectivity..), we can break through the norm – upset the status quo.
Through forcing ourselves to look at this another way, we find something different, something new, even something better.
P.S – I recorded an interview with Jozef last night. It’ll be out next week on the Access Potential Podcast. You can find this in iTunes or Spotify
