Reading "The Adjacent Possible" felt like a genuine relief. As I develop my site for troll slayers--or, arguably, trolls like me--it will be important for me to keep this in mind.
To be honest, it kind of changed my views on innovation. See, I tend to define innovation in much more extreme terms. Before I read this article, I pretty much considered true innovation to be creating something essentially out of thin air. Of course, I knew this wasn't entirely the case, as many of the most innovative things in the world took elements from other places. Still, it seemed to me that "true" innovation always contained an element or elements that were genuinely conjured up from the "genius" of exceptionally gifted people. In many ways, this led me to be very dismissive of many games that have been deemed "innovative" because I felt a lot of those "innovations" weren't really changing things; just rearranging them and sometimes borrowing them from other places.
As it turns out, though, innovation isn't something that really happens--even partially--in a vacuum. It pretty much consists of taking what's already there, tearing it apart, taking the pieces from various places, glueing them together, and then seeing if it works. Strangely, I find this a bit liberating, though I still feel as though my potential for innovation is significantly lower than that of others. Guess we'll just have to see as this class moves forward.
This new view of innovation is not without downsides, though. See, for the longest time, I've been arguing with gamers about what constitutes innovation, as they have a strong tendency to scream and moan over the lack of "original" stuff being put out in the industry nowadays. In addition to believing innovation is the only way to move our industry forward, these same gamers proclaim it's not even that hard to do it. I've been arguing against both these claims. I believe that innovation happens in our industry all the time and many players just don't stop to appreciate it. I also believe that innovation is probably one of the hardest things for a developer to do.
Given the way "The Adjacent Possible" defines innovation, I can prove that innovation is not the amazing land of "originality" that gamers keep claiming it is, as it consists largely of recycled and reshuffled parts. But that also means they can more legitimately claim that innovating "isn't that hard." After all, if it's just taking old stuff and presenting it differently, where's the "effort"? In short, this article will prove both invaluable and a handicap in the essays I'm currently writing: "The Myth of Greatness" and "Innovation Crapovation." I'm planning to post both of these on my prospective site for "troll slayers" like myself.
Getting away from how this article will be useful to me in arguments, I want to say that it actually encapsulates some things I've felt for a long time. I used to argue, for instance, that telling people to "think outside the box" was effectively asking them to think outside their own minds, a literal impossibility. In that sense, I believed much innovation was just an accident, some random piece of genius people just stumbled across almost by luck, albeit while thinking hard about doing things differently. What this article calls the adjacent possible is a pretty good synonym for that: our minds are constrained by the parts we have, and we can only grow the mansion by recycling things, not by skipping ahead rooms the way people like Charles Babbage did.
It's too bad more people can't see innovation this way. Otherwise, I think there'd be less complaint about our free markets lacking the drive for innovation. Overall, this was very interesting, and I'm looking forward to the next chapter.
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