“The process of having original ideas that have value…”
Ahh TED.
It was interesting to me that despite loving every minute of this talk, I left feeling slightly deflated. A pejorative potshot at video games in the middle: “If you only get the BFA, not the MFA, you go home and continue playing video games.” Those of us who design said games sigh collectively. But I suppose I’m in an odd middle ground, as I am an educator of and about video games and their design. Not only that, but about creativity, the kind of creativity Gentleman Sir Ken is espousing. Game design is a profoundly creative enterprise. Designing games was thing I did in school instead of what I was supposed to be doing, the thing which was stigmatized. It was clear that I was pretty smart, but no one had any idea what to do with me because I wouldn’t sit and memorize multiplication tables. I just wanted to make games in Logowriter all day.
The first thing I hit students in my Game Design class with is the concept of looking for the second right answer. And the third and fifth and twelfth. This comes from Roger Von Oech, and is, I would argue, the first step in a long process of unlearning the wheel clamps public education has put on your Porsche of Creativity. When you look for one and only one answer to a problem - as we have been taught from day 0 hour 1 in every classroom - you’ll grab the first answer that pops into your head that seems like it might be serviceable. If instead youlook for twenty different answers to a problem, the simple odds that you’ll come up with something original that has value increase drastically. Plus, once you exhaust the staid, boring, obvious answers to a problem, you’re left only with things wild and wacky. So increase your failure rate. Lose the fear to fail. If you had to find it, you can lose it.
And so it goes. Even in what one would assume would be a profoundly creative field, the lack of creativity is staggering to me. At an art school. Where people are studying video game design. Anyhow, wonderful talk. My kids at least will have their creativity nurtured and supported, possibly at a Montessori school.
Much love to my parents who did their best to keep my brain out of the public school manure.
Fun post. Good ideas. Thanks also for the mention!
Definitely one of the most popular TED talks out there, one of the best. My values have been shifting a lot over the past few years to do something about our poor state of education… things have been happening over your and my lifetime where creativity is heavily trumping obedience, and that’s not what our Prussian-inspired model of education is optimized for.
Remember when I was talking about systems thinking? I probably mentioned Russell Ackoff. He did a great talk at the American Architectural Foundation’s National Summit on School Design… you should check it out:
http://www.archfoundation.org/aaf/audio/Events.Summit.Ackoff.mp3
“One of the most difficult tasks people can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.”
–C.G. Jung
While I don’t think Mr. Robinson one-off about videogames was meant to indicate more than “videogames are a passive activity that kids partake in to waste time”, I find it disappointing that by doing this he has separated it from the other forms of art and entertainment that are represented at the TED conference.
Of course, he may have just made the reference because by his perception, playing videogames are what “the kids” doing these days. Twenty years ago in the same context, he might have said that graduates would go home and continue watching television.