Build something cool in 24 hours

The highlight of Foo Camp for me was hearing game development guru Squirrel Eiserloh talk on total immersion / ultra-rapid game development. I'm dying to try it for everything from creative writing to learning Flash to composing music to video/podcasting and of course game development. I cannot imagine a better, faster path to creativity, innovation, and most importantly getting something done!

The notion is this: stick people in a house for 48 hours, with a goal to have something created at the end. Depending on the nature of the goal, participants may be collaborating (like building a game together) or working alone (musicians composing, writers writing, etc.). The key is the process--a process that forces you to supress the "inner judges" that stifle creativity, and gives you not just permission but an order to create as much as possible, as fast as possible... even if what you end up with is 97% crap.

The point is to learn something valuable from the experience... something you'd likely never get to in your day job, even when--as it is for Squirrel and his game developer cohorts -- what you do in the jam is what you do in your day job. In other words, by working under the ad-hoc/jam constraints, you're able to "improve your craft" and discover things about yourself and the work that you might never find in your traditional work environment. It takes the idea of rapid iterations to a completely different (dramatically compressed) time scale. What could take weeks, months, or years to evolve suddenly happens in hours. And the work never leaves your personal brain RAM! No more cost of switching contexts as you go from personal life to meetings to actual work to commuting to whatever... this is 100% being in the zone, where each hour spent in one of these jams is worth perhaps 10 or more hours at work in your usual environment.

The idea can be mapped to virtually anything for which you want to encourage maximum creativity, innovation, and most importantly... getting something done. While it may be a Big Deal to start your own Foo/Bar-style self-organizing conference, the total immersion "ad-lib jam" model is something we can all start in our home town, wherever that may be. All you need is a handful of participants (maybe 4-8), some delivery/take-out menus for chinese food and pizza (revise to reflect what goes for "fast delivered food" in your culture), maybe a few pillows and blankets, a whiteboard and some markers, and whatever other tools of the trade your participants need to make things.

(Sidebar: out of the 15 or so people at Squirrel's informal session, the most engaged participant was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)

For writers, that could mean laptops or even just paper and pencils. For programmers, that might mean the programming tools (game engine, compilers, source control if multiple participants are collaborating on the same app) or art tools (Photoshop, etc.). For music composition, that might mean real and virtual instruments (guitars, midi keyboards, synth guitars, mics) and sequencing software like GarageBand, Reason, or Logic. And for pure idea brainstorming, whiteboards, post-its, and big flip-chart pages to put stuff up on the walls as things progress.

I won't bother explaining how to run one of these things, because Squirrel and friends have already done this at:
The Ad-Lib Game Society site, which encourages others to start their own "lodges", like their founding chapter in Dallas, Zero Lodge. (He mentions that they've taken inspiration from the earlier Immersion Composition Society, as well as the Indie Game Jam).

But does it have to be face-to-face?

This was a natural question. And the answer was... probably. A big part of what makes this work is that you are not in your normal environment. No kids, no chores, no I-should-be-doing-something-else. More importantly, it's the energy of the other participants that makes this so effective. You know exactly what I'm talking about if you've ever been in a highly engaged group where everyone's really cranking and you can almost feel the brain power and creativity rippling out of each person's head like Wi Fi.

Squirrel said that while they had tried a virtual jam, it wasn't that successful. One example he gave was that while at home you might hit the wall and give up (or get tired and go to sleep or do something else), when you start to hit that point during a live jam, all it takes is one guy walking by playing air guitar with his head phones on and you're suddenly hit with another wave of energy (or at least that little bit of competitiveness and pressure because you know you've got to demo something in three hours!)

The total immersion part of this is crucial, and until someone figures out a good way to make this happen remotely/virtually, face-to-face is probably going to be a lot more effective. (I have no doubt that there are ways to make this work remotely/virtually, but it would take some real effort and creativity to pull it off.)

Here are just a few of the ways in which I'd love to use this approach in my own life:

Storyboard Jam

We develop our books (Head First books, and the not-yet-announced new series we're working on) from storyboards, as opposed to outlines and TOCs. The storyboard is by far the most important part of the creative process for the books, and it's often the most difficult for authors... including those with tons of previous "traditional" writing experience. Having everybody go off and spend hours with their storyboards (either alone or in collaboration with another person), then periodically getting back together for a show-and-tell with feedback would be amazing. In fact, we did do something like this once -- we called it a "Head First Bootcamp" -- that brought together a half-dozen prospective authors plus our O'Reilly editor, for five days in Colorado, all staying in one house, and with food brought in most of the time. One of the outcomes of this intensive week were Eric and Beth's storyboards for the Head First Design Patterns book, currently one of the top five bestselling computer books.

There's no doubt they would have produced these storyboards back in their own home, but this total immersion week did kick-start things in a big way, and gave them the opportunity for vital real-time feedback.

Learn Something New Jam

I've been trying to squeeze in some time to learn Flash, but each time I never get past the first few tutorials. There's always something higher on the to-do list. But if, say, 4-8 people got together, and we all had a sole task--to learn something new and then create a demo of what we learned at the end (with a checkpoint at the halfway mark), then it would give me the permission to just get in there and have Flash loaded into my brain, with the goal of creating a prototype of something I've been wanting to build. I honestly believe that if I don't do it this way, I simply may never get to it. I need someone to say, "You aren't allowed to do anything for the next 36 hours... no email, no going out to eat, no working on anything else."

Music Composition Jam

This one doesn't need explaining.

Write a [screenplay/article/chapter] Jam

Neither does this one.

Game Development Jam

I did a several year stint as a game developer, but have done virtually nothing since leaving that world to work at Sun (which, sadly, involved lots of enterprise development but NO games). I was thinking that the only way to get to work on games again was to work in the field, but that's ridiculous. There's no reason that me and six of my friends -- including coders and designers and maybe someone who understands audio -- couldn't get together and build a game. As Squirrel points out, we'd probably learn more valuable lessons we could take back to our real work than with just about anything else we could do in that amount of time (including attending formal "training" classes).

Let's do it!

So... if you're in Colorado, anywhere around the Denver/Boulder area, please email me at headrush[at]wickedlysmart[dot]com, and let's start a new chapter/lodge of the Ad-Lib Game Development Society!
(And thanks Squirrel for such an inspiring lesson, and for putting up such great info on your site.)

And for everyone else, I urge you to study the info at the ALGDS site and consider starting your own in your area. And who knows... maybe we can attend jam sessions held by one another's lodges. I'd love to crash one of Squirrel's jams (I'll make the coffee!), and perhaps someone from out of town who wants to do a book could come to one of our book jams.

I'll say more over the next few days about lessons learned at Foo Camp, but this was by far my favorite, and the one I'm most likely to implement soon.