Adventures in Possibility Space
Innovation is a text adventure game
The first computer game I ever played was a text adventure game called Temple of Loth written in 1984 — in a computer language called BASIC (the hours I spent reverse-engineering the game sparked my life-long love of coding). To play the game, I would type text commands to move through a fictional underground world, progressively “discovering” rooms within the “temple” and encountering various creatures — my progress shown in a map drawn from typed characters:
Thirty years later, I thought of this game when I first encountered the concept of the adjacent possible as popularized by Steven Johnson — the idea that innovation progresses by taking incremental steps through the space of possibilities. This brought to mind a new metaphor — of the innovator as a 2D adventure game player — which resonates with me and leads to a number of other insights.
First of all, there is the thrill of discovery. For me, taking a creative leap does feel very much entering a new room in the temple. There is sudden illumination with which many new things suddenly come into view. And new possibilities for doing.
This “discovery” moment is what gives the game its tension, and the same thing applies in the life of the innovator. Finding (and hitting) that dwarf might be the breakthrough that you need :)
Most of the adjacent rooms, however, aren’t all that useful or interesting. There are many rooms that just needed to be traversed — they are necessary to the game but not “important”. Creativity involves moving through a lot of these rooms — ideas that don’t feel quite right or that lack that spark of discovery. The value of these ideas is in their adjacency to other, “better” ideas to explore.
And to explore, the player has to move in every direction. Going North all the time is a terrible strategy — at every point in the map, it is best to try out all directions to maximize the knowledge of the “adjacent” space — and then decide on a final move. This is the principle of the polymath — to have extra degrees of freedom in decision making by being capable of (and motivated to) explore multiple directions in possibility space.
Like in many games of the Dungeons and Dragons adventure genre, as a player in the Temple of Loth I have various attributes — strength, dexterity, intelligence etc. — each of which is scored using a points system:
Attribute points help me to deal with the things and creatures that I come across in my travels — for example, strength points allow me to withstand blows from the dwarf’s axe. If freedom of movement is an analogy for real-world skills, game player attributes could map to the “meta-level” personal attributes that I need to successfully innovate — open-mindedness, an ability to synthesize, good listening skills etc.
And how much better would this game have been if it were multiplayer! As it pre-dated the (consumer) Internet by more than a decade, the game could only be played alone.. But imagine exploring the temple with a team, splitting up exploration and pooling knowledge. Even in such an crude model, the power of collaboration would shine through. A team has more freedom of movement than an individual player (and a team of polymaths would be even better).
Lastly and most importantly, despite its simplicity and lack of sophistication, the game is fun! My motivations for playing were always entirely intrinsic — there is no good reason to play other than the fact that I want to play. This is true of creativity as well. Whatever the material rewards, I engage in creativity for its own sake. Given the right conditions, every person explores possibilities as easily and naturally as a child exploring the Temple of Loth.
Try out the Temple of Loth in your browser at: https://archive.org/details/TempleOfLothV4.21984JohnBelewAdventureRolePlayingRPG
