What is this? This is The Dots, our newsletter about exciting things we find in the world of innovation. We imagine innovation as connecting the dots; putting together a jigsaw. Our puzzle pieces are the pieces of interesting information we absorb in the world, our partners and their products. This newsletter is about these dots we find and connect.
We said we wouldn’t write about AI again but then I (Alex) listened to an episode of Simon Parkin’s excellent My Perfect Console and started thinking about it again. My Perfect Console is desert island discs but for video game nerds. It’s universally a lovely and, at least for me, extremely nostalgic listen. Talking to comedians, crime writers and investigative reporters as well as game industry veterans, Simon uses the games that are important to people to structure interviews that are conversational and lovely and deep. I couldn’t recommend it enough.
Abhi Swaminathan is the developer of a beautiful game called Venba. He appears in episode 63. Venba is a beautiful game about cooking and culture and being an immigrant. Abhi comes from Tamil Nadu and his game features a lot of cooking from that specific part of India. At one point he talks about how conflicted he was about including only Tamil recipes in his game and how he worried that it would alienate players from other parts of India. Recipes are such cultural artefacts influenced so heavily by place and time, it’s one of the reasons I truly love cooking, but they can also be incredibly contentious.
During this exchange Simon says that it’s far better to tell a story for one person rather than trying to please everyone and Venba proves that. To butcher a metaphor, people are far happier to take a turn in someone else’s shoes rather than wear shoes that were made to fit everyone (flash back to asking ChatGPT to think of the future of shoes). This immediately made me think of two things.
First, large language models are an attempt to make shoes that fit everyone. Entirely opinion free, they are designed to just spout stuff that the majority of people would be ok with. They are completely smooth. There are no edges to trip you up or force you to reconsider your perspective. There is no grit with which to form a true pearl of wisdom.
I recently saw this screen grab of an instagram comment which made me laugh but that really rings true. The best art contains something of the artist so when the artist is every known artist with content on the internet then your art essentially contains nothing.
Second and unrelated to AI, honing your workshops to a specific audience will improve them every single time. If you design a workshop, especially a creative one, to please everyone then your workshop is perfectly smooth. At some point soon I will write more about how innovation is often accelerated by frustration but for now remember that there are no pearls without grit.
And in case you want more My Perfect Console…
Here are a couple of my favourite episodes.
Phil Fish’s episode was one of the very first I listened to. The opening bars of Ridge Racer 4 gave me nostalgia whiplash. Phil created Fez, a fabulous puzzle game.
Dan Vecchitto is about the same age as me and his game choices could be my own. Dan made Trombone Champ which is one of the funniest looking video games around. His episode is definitely worth a listen.
Stella Wisdom is a curator at the British Library and her choices are, as a result, quite different. I think I’ve mentioned the Bitsy game that a staff member made mid-lockdown about visiting the library in a previous newsletter! Give Stella’s episode a listen too.