Coding versus invention.

Coding is easy. If you know what you want, you just type it in and the program is done. At least that’s how I felt today when transcribing my visual Universe graphs to Javascript.

But I also realized that being creative is not something I can do in code. Typing in all the logic felt like locking in it all down into solid concrete that can never change again. As if the code, fluent while typing, instantly solidified into an arcane amalgamation of symbols that lose their meaning to humans as soon as they leave the fingers and become the exclusive domain of the machine.

This is a fine method when you know what you want.

But knowing what you want is a bad idea when it comes to interactive creation. When advertising uses the phrase “the limit is your imagination” they mean that the possibilities are endless and anything is possible. But in my experience, when dealing with interactive pieces, my imagination is a very real limitation. If you only create the videogames that you can imagine, you’re not going to get far. You need to get dirty. You need to program. You need to make the machine come alive and collaborate with it, play with it. Interactive things should be made in an interactive way.

And that just doesn’t work in code for me. I need visual tools. I need blocks to position, links to physically connect. I cannot play in a word processor. Copy paste is not my idea of creative interaction. When I see all of my work, when I see the relation between the logic and the game on the screen, the effect of the systems that are running, then I start seeing new combinations, I get ideas that go much further than my imagination.

Not just in the sense of “wacky ideas”, but in the much more useful sense of ideas that can actually be built. When you listen carefully to your game, it will tell you what it wants to be. It’s a bad idea to ignore that. And this sort of communication works so much better in a language I can comprehend.