Admittedly, Hello Kitty isn’t particularly creative on its own and neither are chainsaws. However, there is something about the combination of the two that results in a creative product. Perhaps it is the incongruity and resultant surprise of seeing the two elements together.  Hello Kitty products are girly, whimsical, and unabashedly cute. Chainsaws are manly, mechanical and unabashedly dangerous. The incongruity of seeing such disparate elements paired with each other occasions surprise. Some have said that surprise along with novelty is a reasonable definition of creativity.

I just finished reading Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and I know that surprise resulting from incongruity was one of the elements that made the book such an enjoyable read. As background, Pride and Prejudice is romance that takes place in the gentile society of Regency-era England.  Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (PPZ) is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that holds very closely to the original in both plot and dialog. The main difference is that England in PPZ is beset by a plague that turns people into zombies and causes the afflicted dead to rise from their graves. The other difference is that the girls of the Bennett family are well trained in the martial arts by their father and such arts are well respected by society.

The funniest moments of the book are when the author resolves the contradictions inherent in having well-born women of that era who are also well-trained in the martial arts. For example, at a dinner party with the Bennett family, the Bennetts’ cousin and guest, Mr Collins, had been praising and commending the Bennett house, its furnishings and the Bennett sisters.

“The dinner too was highly admired; and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its cookery was owing.

Briefly forgetting her manners, Mary grabbed her fork and leapt from her chair onto the table. Lydia, who was seated nearest her, grabbed her ankle before she could dive at Mr. Collins and, presumably, stab him about the head and neck for such an insult.”

Similarly amusing was a scene in which Elizabeth Bennet was attending a dinner party of Lady Catherine’s and was asked to perform for the other guests after supper for their entertainment. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth played the pianoforte and sang for the guests. In Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth exhibited some of the agility and strength she had developed through her martial arts training by walking around the room on her fingertips (her skirts being tied via a “modestry string” to keep her legs properly covered while she was upside down). The entertainment continued under the watchful eye of Lady Catherine who offered tips and suggestions for technique while

“Elizabeth received them with all the forbearance of civility, and, at the request of the gentlemen, remained on her fingertips till her ladyship’s carriage was ready to take them all home.”

When combining very different concepts such as zombies and Regency-era society, one is faced with contradictions that need to be resolved to make the combination work. Resolving the contradiction requires exploring the concepts being combined to find an internally consistent solution. Regency-era women were taught to be polite and to respond to perceived insults in a congenial manner. At best, they could gasp and flush when an honored guest said something implying they were so low-born as to prepare the meal for a dinner party themselves. However, if Regency-era women were trained to fight zombies, they would have acquired martial skills as well as the courage and resolution needed to wield those skills effectively. Such women would do more than gasp at an insult. They could potentially do something about it by attacking the person insulting them. It is this exploration and resolution of the disparity between concepts that leads to surprising elements in the story which, then, increases the perceived creativity of the product.

It is likely the essence of conceptual combination is the same for both Hello Kitty chainsaws and Pride, Prejudice & Zombies.  It is the differences in the complexity of the concepts and domains being compared that results in differences in perceived creativity.  This makes sense and explains why cognitive psychologists examine the processes involved in interpreting simple conceptual combinations such as “Pet Bird” to better understand how people interpret more complex combinations such as “Restaurants for Intelligent Alien Birds” (Ward, Smith & Fink, 1999).

As I discussed in a previous post, the combination of disparate ideas often results in a creative product/idea. The larger the difference (conceptual distance) between the two components of a combination, the greater the potential for a creative idea. What I didn’t discuss in that post was why the combination of divergent ideas leads to a creative idea. It is believed that one reason conceptual combination results in creative ideas is because interpreting conceptual combinations results in emergent features.

According to James Hampton, an emergent feature is a feature that is not associated with either of the constituents of a combination but emerges as a feature of the combination of those constituents. I know – too much psychology jargon – so let me explain. If I ask people to list the features of the concept of “Pet,” they will list things that are true of pets in general such as friendly, companion, furry, give love, etc. The feature “talks” probably would not show up on this list.  Similarly, if I ask people to list the features of “Birds,” they will list things that are true of birds in general such as has wings, flies, has a beak, poops on cars, eats bird seed, etc. Once again, the feature  “talks” does not usually pop up in this list. However, if I asked people to list the features of the conceptual combination Pet Birds, “talks” is now one of the more common features listed.  In this sense, it is an emergent feature because it emerges when the two concepts are combined but not when they are considered individually.

I believe that the greater complexity of the concepts being compared, the greater the chance of discovering (creating?) emergent features which then increases the creative potential of the combination. Hello Kitty and chainsaws are conceptually distant, but fairly simple concepts. Zombies and the setting of Pride and Prejudice are conceptually distant as well as being complex concepts. The surprise at seeing a cute, pink, cartoon icon being paired with a manly, dangerous, cutting tool is mainly perceptual in nature because there are few emergent features. In contrast, reading a story such as PP&J in which the author has deeply explored the two concepts to resolve disparities and integrate the elements into a coherent whole, leads to the discovery of a multitude of emergent features. For the reader, this results in multiple surprises and multiple opportunities for humor thereby increasing the perceived creativity of the product far beyond that of the Hello Kitty chainsaw.

This suggests that those wishing to get the most bang for their buck using conceptual combination should combine complex, conceptually distant concepts and fully explore the combination. If care is taken to resolve incongruities between the concepts in an internally consistent fashion, then the emergent features that are discovered (created?) in the process should increase the perceived creativity of the final product.

I downloaded the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator and had a good time creating my aliens last night and watching them dance around and act cute (they manage to act cute no matter how fearsome you try to make them).  Even with the extremely limited set of creature features available in the trial version, you can make a surprising range of creatures.  The mind boggles when you think about all the creatures that are possible when you unlock the full power of the engine and start sharing your creatures and creature parts with others.

The mash-up of this creature creator and social networking has me all “a-flutter.”  Why?  Because it ties in so well with my research area and my interests in virtual worlds.

In grad school I was fortunate enough to be able to train under one of the founders of the creative cognition approach – Dr. Tom Ward.  His research, and mine by association and training, examined conceptual expansion.  Conceptual expansion occurs during creative tasks.  When people are coming up with novel examples of a category (drawing alien animals), they tend to base their creations on existing examples of the category (knowledge of animals on earth).  This is manifested in the tendency to include common features of category examples in their novel creations (legs and arms, eyes and ears, etc.). Their creations are constrained by existing knowledge.  Dr. Ward’s seminal work investigating this phenomenon demonstrated the various ways in which exiting knowledge constrains novel products (Ward, T. B. (1994). Structured imagination: The role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive Psychology, 27, 1-40).

The constraining effects of knowledge on creativity has proven to be a robust phenomenon.  Consequently, I expect that we will see the same trends in the types of creatures generated using the Spore Creature Creator, even though the ability to create almost anything that can be imagined is certainly possible with this engine. The first types of creatures developed by people using the engine will resemble Earth creatures in their basic attributes……at least initially.

However, the social networking component that EA has built into the game ensures that the end user won’t be creating these creatures in in isolation for very long.  They will be exposed to other people’s creatures and experience a greater diversity of examples.  This should expand their knowledge of the category to include a more diverse set of examples.  They could then generate a more diverse and less Earth-like creature as a result.  Of course this is just a guess at this point. But I think it makes a very interesting research project.

There is another interesting twist to the story of how existing knowledge affects performance in creative generation tasks.

When people are asked to imagine an alien animal, one of the most common approaches to the task is to imagine an existing earth animal and start the creative process from that point.  The result is an alien that possesses typical Earth animal features.  However, when people are told approach the task by thinking about how their imagined animal will feed, defend itself, move, and reproduce, they end up creating more imaginative creatures.  The creatures generated using this approach are less likely to have standard senses and appendages. In short, thinking of more abstract features of the category results in more novel creations (Ward, T. B., Patterson, M. J. & Sifonis, C. (2004). The role of specificity and abstraction in creative idea generation. Creativity Research Journal 16, 1-9).

In Spore, the creature creation is inextricably tied with consideration of the type of food the creature will eat, how it will move, how it will defend itself and how it will socialize.  Because people are forced to consider these things while creating their creatures, it is likely they will generate creatures that are more deviant from earth creatures than if this wasn’t such a large component of the game.  Because the Spore creatures’ interactions in the game environment are critically determined by their biology, gamers will learn fairly quickly the degree to which they can ignore survival and still survive in the game.

Right now, I have no clue how the influence of this component of the game could be examined experimentally. Give me time

I have more to say about this game as it pertains to emergent behavior as well as a few choice words about EA’s fairly draconian EUA but I’ve prattled on enough for one post.