Scribblenauts!!

At first, I really had some trouble coming up with what I thought was innovative or creative. I don’t particularly use any special products, and I’m more suspicious of new technology than the average person my age because I think there is such a thing as too much connectivity (Twitter, anyone?). I was trying to think of something cool that I had in my apartment, and sadly, I was just about to write about my hot water dispenser (which I do love though), when I remembered the awesomeness that is Scribblenauts. I don’t know if those in the non-gaming community would’ve heard of it, but I’ve embedded a trailer at the end of this post, and I hope you’ll take a minute to watch it.

It’s basically a puzzle game with hundreds of levels, and each level has a different goal that you’re trying to reach. “You” are Maxwell, a really cute kid with a rooster hat, and you have to think up ways to overcome or destroy the obstacles in the level and try to get the “Starite.” The hook of the game is that you can summon nearly any object that you spontaneously imagine because the creators put in a database of tens of thousands of words – just type in the word with the touchscreen! As a result, there are literally endless ways to solve a puzzle, and the fun of it is trying to think of something really interesting and creative. One early puzzle, for example, tells you to “get the kitty down from the roof.” Sure, you can invoke a ladder and climb up, but a mouse also works because it attracts the cat to the ground, and so does a fireman!

The game is incredibly addictive because it’s easy to keep saying just one more level, and it’s even easier to see what weird words and combinations you can put to the test. After a while, when the puzzles get much harder and a little bit frustrating to solve, it’s more fun to go back to making up crazy scenarios and watching them play out. Hey look, lions consume dinosaurs! God beats Cthulhu, but not Death! And riding on an armored panda while jousting with a knight? Entirely possible in Scribblenauts world.

The concept is so simple, yet the execution is cool and innovative. The creators of the game must have spent so many hours coming up with all those words and thinking up the infinite resulting interactions. A lot of times, video games are denounced for being big time-wasters that make kids reclusive and violent, but Scribblenauts encourages creativity, experimentation, and childlike imagination. There is a downside, however. The singular focus on the innovative “solve the puzzle in any way you can think of” idea means that there’s less emphasis on the larger quality of the game. This is common in a lot of the creative arts – think of the cool, experimental movie that’s flashy and original, but doesn’t really work as an emotionally compelling narrative. For Scribblenauts, especially for the harder levels, sometimes you can think of the most inventive ways to solve a puzzle, but the more boring and predictable solutions are the ones that actually work. The result is that you revert to just making up interesting objects and seeing how they interact instead of the professed objective of the game – completing puzzles.
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One criticism I have of the article “The New, Faster Face of Innovation” is that it assumes that customers know exactly what they want when they’re presented with something new. Yes, technology can really speed up R&D and the process of testing out new ideas, which is probably generally useful, but I also think that not every idea shows immediate, certifiable results. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea – it might mean it needs to be developed more, or that customers need more time to adapt to it. But if companies get used to the expectation that quick, efficient, and technology-based testing is always the best way to go, they might be missing out on deeper insights. In addition, they may become so focused on solely the innovation that they miss out on the bigger picture a little bit, as with Scribblenauts’ amazing but also ultimately limited realm of possibilities. (Still, watch the trailer please.)