an increasingly common thing with me - and i'm not sure how much this is Just Me, how much is me getting older and cramming my brain ever more warehouse-full, how much is me working on too many long-ass projects - is not remembering exactly which version of a thing we actually shipped. a dusty little corner of Ryan Amusements in Bioshock 2 from ~13 years ago - did we cut that one encounter? was there a machine there? did we ever get the custom mesh to support that one idea? how many characters did we cut from The Cave? wait really, we cut that one? ah right, i guess we only took that one level as far as the sketch stage. et cetera.
the version of the thing in my memory is more a lattice of all the different versions of the thing throughout development, the early sketches, the first fully built-out version, all the iterations and reworks, everything blurring into this rothko of abandoned directions and multifacted possibilities and steady improvements and all the doorknobs polished on its way out the door, from 1000 feet or too close up to remember anything but a random detail. jeez when i lay it out like this, it does feel like my brain is just getting old.
but i think the reason that those phantoms hang around, all those things un-shipped or reworked or abandoned, is that to be able to participate in the creative process in good faith, i have to be able to imagine my colleague's ideas as if they're already real and on-screen. early to mid development, someone in a meeting has an idea, and the decent thing to do is to try to picture it: mock it up in your head and see if it's exciting, see if you can spot any holes in it, see what questions you have about it, see if there's something that cries out to be added to or removed from it. there's an art to it i think, and it's connected to your relationship to the person offering the idea. you want to give them space to speak their idea into existence, floating invisibly in the room like a word bubble, so you have a clear understanding of what they're communicating. and then, without overpowering it with your own ideas, you want to be able to offer the questions and suggestions it needs to inch towards becoming a real thing - or alternately, to lay it to rest as not worth bothering with, some dignity intact.
if your relationship with that person, the idea-haver, is good, you want them to succeed. you think highly of them and you want to imagine the best possible version of the idea. you may not understand where they're going with it at first but you follow along in support. at some point you see the glimmer they see. it becomes as real to you as it is to them. and then you build something, a rough draft, and hopefully it's as cool as everyone hoped. and if not you try again.
if your relationship with that person is doing poorly, or if the team is stressed out and overworked or if everyone mistrusts one another, then everyone's ideas come out sickly, flimsy, even frightening. the version of their new idea you picture is the weakest and most ill-considered possible version of it, a danger to itself and all the ideas around it. this is the dark place you never want to be with a team. you have to keep your lantern lit in the dark, but sometimes it's real hard.
this is how team projects go from being [gestures at air] nothing to being real things people are united beside each other working on, to being finished things that others can play/watch/hear/eat/touch. you have to first picture someone else's idea in your head - not literally picture it, in the way some people can't actually do, but conceptually. and you have to do it with humanity and humility and with just the right sharpness of a critical eye. it's a miracle i've managed it even once. but i've learned from so many, and they from me.
