Creative Misuse: when the wrong tool becomes the right tool

It's a known principle in designing playgrounds that once kids learn to slide down the slide, then they try to climb back up it like they're scaling the Matterhorn without crampons. It's not exactly how the slide was built to be used, but it is expected. Children constantly repurpose playground equipment to explore their world and their capabilities.

As a grownup and a content guy, I now spend less time on the monkey bars, and more time using a lot of different tools to create stories. All of them are built for a specific, expected use in my workflow. For instance, I gather and order the words in a word processor. Then I send that bunch of morphemes to another tool to be processed into a form (post, video, podcast) for the target audience.

But what if I use these tools themselves to handle the entire publication process--what if I climb up the slide? I’ll tell you about the first time I scrambled up this metaphoric slippery incline after some news.

What’s going on?

My latest video (film? fever dream?), Your Parasite and You, premiered last week at the most excellent HP Lovecraft Film Festival. On the big screen! On opening night!

I can’t wait to show it to you. Which will be sometime late next summer, since YPaY is still making the rounds of the festival circuit.

Except there’s a way you can see it next week: the HPLFF (I love me my initialisms) will be presenting a virtual version of their festival starting Friday 18 Oct.

I’ll be honest, buying a pass just to see YPaY would be kind of like buying flamethrower to get a spider out of your house. But if you are a horror fan, or even just horror-curious, you can see 3 feature films and over 40 short films from 12 different countries, plus several panel discussions, author readings, and other streaming extras. There’s always a least of a couple of films in the festival that truly delight me. That discovery is part of the fun.

So if this sounds like fun to you too, you can get your pass here. (And there’s a possibility I may be on a Zoom panel with some other filmmakers. Still waiting to hear on that one.)

In which I first misuse creatively

Grownups “climbing up the slide” in a creative context happens all the time.

The most obvious example is machinima: using a video game environment to produce narrative videos. (One of the best known early examples is Red vs. Blue, which ran for 9 seasons (!) and built a media mini-empire.)

But wait, there’s more! Beyond machinima, you can use all sorts of software to climb up the slide. For instance, you can use Discord to build a connected community. Or you can build an interactive haunted house in it. You can use one of many online services to publish your newsletter. Or you can re-release the novel Dracula, posting the letters and diary entries on the same day as they occur in the book. There are even games developed entirely in Excel. And I'm still waiting for a sitcom in Slack or the next Black Mirror delivered in Figma.

Are these all a misuse of the tools? Yes. And in a creative way. Hence the term creative misuse.

I have had short animated comedy videos shown at over twenty film festivals in the USA, Europe, and Australia. They've even won some awards. And creative misuse is a core principle in them all.

The videos are are all short animated comedies made in Keynote, Apple’s version of PowerPoint. (There’s a short tutorial on how I do this in the previous newsletter issue Your Meteor and You.)

But I didn’t start with Keynote. It all started with a video game called Starcraft. And William Shakespeare…

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Who the heck are the Zerg?

If I start trying to explain the video game Starcraft, hoo boy, we’ll be here awhile. In the tiniest of nutshells, it’s a real-time strategy game, meaning you tell your little minions what to do, you don’t do it yourself. From the website:

Command the mechanized Terrans, psi-powered Protoss, and insectoid Zerg as they vie for map control of eight unique environments. Build your base and conscript your army in a real-time, military sci-fi vision of the future.

It has been around forever—hey, 1998 is forever in video game years—and is a cornerstone of the esports movement. (And it’s huge in South Korea.)

The game includes a map editor, so you can build your own scenarios of interspecies conflict. There are huge online databases of these new maps.

So one day, I’m looking at the Starcraft map editor, and I notice a couple of things:

1. You can define a location on the map, and tell a minion to go there.
2. You can then have an audio file play while a closeup screen of the minion does generic mouth movements so it looks like they’re saying the words.

Moving people around, and making them say things? That’s machinima! That’s playwriting! That’s moviemaking! I realized I could stage little dramas entirely within the game.

So I animated a joke that was old when vaudeville was young, just to see if it was possible.¹

And it all might have stopped there. But then—

(A lack of) preparation meets opportunity

Right after I did my proof of concept/dad joke, the Richard Hugo House literary center in Seattle announced their next “cultural inquiry” event was going to be entitled Games, which would: “[explore the] impact of games and game playing on our culture, literature and art.” And they asked for proposals of panels, presentations, and displays on the topic.

Not knowing any better, I wrote on their proposal form, “Hey, how about staging Hamlet in a video game?” I sent it back to them, and kind of forgot about it. Because no way were these serious literary types going to be interested in me debasing the Bard.

And then they said yes.

Now I was in trouble. Now I had to produce.

Lessons learned

I dropped through a lot of layers of learning as I struggled to make Hamlet in Starcraft happen:

• Like when I realized the most efficient way to program the scene was just to have every character wait until the other character finished talking, and then start their own line. You know, the very worst style of acting possible.
• Or the couple of times I handled the attack/rest settings wrong, and Hamlet methodically marched through the entire set and killed everybody, including Osric and Horatio.
• And when I didn’t have time to bring in actual humans to record the dialog, and instead used Final Draft’s text-to-speech feature. Which was nowhere near the level that text-to-speech is now, and brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the performances. Like how everyone pronounced Laertes as “lair-its.”

And it got done. Barely. So then I lugged a tower PC and a CRT monitor to Hugo House and set it up as a kiosk so people could trigger the map to play and then watch the mayhem.

And mayhem it was. The whole thing was built using assets and animations from a “military sci-fi vision of the future.” So forget about swords: Hamlet had a gauss rifle, and Laertes had a flamethrower. And the built-in animation for Gertrude’s death was so over the top, that viewers would invariably laugh and then their cover their mouths in embarrassed horror for laughing.

You can see the whole thing here. Please be respectful of Gertrude.

Over to you

Remember I said a few weeks back that part of creativity was looking at things sideways? I love how creative misuse takes that concept literally. It finds hidden potential and helps that potential build something new, something unique. Maybe even beautiful.

Writing this, I just realized that I want to remember to look for that potential in people, too.

Until we talk again, I remain,

Your pal,

Jamie

1. A man walks up to another man, who is standing next to a dog. The first man says, “Hey, does your dog bite?” The other man says, “No.” The first man reaches to pet the dog. And it bites him. “Hey,” the first man says, “You said your dog doesn’t bite!” The other man says, “That’s not my dog.” [cue rimshot]