I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

Okay, so today is another in my series, 20 lessons, 20 podcasts, based on my GDC talk of 2016.

So I'm up to lesson number 18, restrictions breed creativity. So a quick caveat.

This is probably the lesson I'm most associated with.

And as such, it is definitely a topic that I broached quite a number of times on my podcast.

So for regular listeners, I'm going to talk about some stuff that I know I've talked about before.

But a lot, this series gets a lot of listening from game designers that aren't necessarily magic players,

so I'm going to talk about some stuff.

So just a heads up that I know I hit some of these themes before,

because I'm talking about something that means a lot to me, and I've talked a lot about.

Okay, so restrictions breed creativity. So let me start, as I always do on these things,

with an example for magic. So I write a column called Making Magic. Every Monday since 2002,

I've been writing this column. I think I'm up to my like 850th column. And so one of the things, when we started writing the column, we had this thing. Things have changed a little bit since then, but we first started, the way it worked was every other week was a theme week. And then every other week from that was not a theme week. So on theme weeks, I would always write to the theme.

And the non-theam weeks, I could write whatever I wanted.

So the question was, which was harder?

Writing for the theme weeks or writing for the non-theme weeks?

And the answer was, the non-theeme weeks were significantly harder, significantly harder.

And it gets to the crux of what this whole topic today is about, which is, there's this myth about

creativity that being open, having choices makes you more creative.

That what a creative mind wants is infinite possibilities.

And the funny thing is that's not really how the brain works.

That is not... Like when I had my theme week, when I knew what my theme week was, I go, okay, and I had to figure out what I was doing, but I would work within the theme week.

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