The Josh Theory of Awesomeness

Whether it's books, games, movies, plays, or any other kind of entertainment, how do you create something that's truly amazing and memorable? The key is to apply what I call the "Theory of Awesomeness".

To properly present it, I'll have to start by explaining the prevailing view: what I call "The Checklist Method". The checklist method is the idea that there are certain elements to a good piece of entertainment and to create a masterpiece, you try to include as many of these elements as possible. For a book or a movie, it would include items like good characters, detailed setting, surprise twist ending, humor, romance, tragedy, etc. For video games, it's more along the lines of solid gameplay, interesting story, good graphics, good sound effects, and so forth. These lists can get quite long, especially if you start discussing what works well in a particular genre. Even reviews are often based around the Checklist Method, rating each element separately then taking the average.

The Theory of Awesomeness takes a different approach: Each piece of work must start with an idea or a set of ideas that are really interesting or entertaining. The success of your work is based more on the execution of your few brilliant ideas than the presence or absence of the various checklist items. I'll use some examples.

I recently read a book (I won't name it, since my comments here aren't particularly favorable) that did a great job of hitting the items in the checklist method. Solid characters, interesting setting, a properly foreshadowed twist ending, violence (standard in Fantasy), romance, a range of emotions, etc. It was fairly enjoyable but not particularly memorable.

I'll contrast it to Harry Potter (the books. Not the movies). The Harry Potter novels have numerous plot holes, tons of "Well, why didn't you just do this?" moments, and some of the worst deus ex machina I've ever read. And yet, I love them. They're far more flawed than the previously mentioned book, and they don't hit as many of the checkboxes on what supposedly makes a good story, and yet, they're far better overall.

The reason is because there are a few things that J.K. Rowling does masterfully. Though Potter's in a fantastic, magical world, most of his experiences are just enough like what the reader experiences that they can closely relate. Her characters strongly radiate their personalities to the point where the reader feels exactly how she wants them to about each person (i.e. how many people didn't have an overwhelming desire to strangle Dolores Umbridge during the fifth book?). There are a few things in those books that are done so well that most readers either forgive the flaws, or they don't even notice them.

If you want examples from other mediums, consider Tetris (Great story? No. Great graphics? No) or Monty Python (The only checklist item it hits is humor). Both are extremely well-known and well-liked, much more so than most works that have done a far better job hitting the checklist points.

Does that mean that the checklist theory has no merit or that once you've found your awesome points that you can just ignore everything else? No. The checklist items are common elements often contained in a great work, and generally, they should be analyzed for possible inclusion in your own piece. The deciding factor is how they affect the aspects of your work that make it really good. I've seen comedies with a good, emotional story where I felt that they were improved by it, but trying to do that with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would have just handicapped their ability to be funny. I love the fact that the Wheel of Time novels have a detailed, in-depth world where each nation has distinct culture, history, traditions, and even speech patterns, but trying to put the same into Harry Potter would have just added a lot of text that would distract from what made the books great. Even the fans who can't get enough would probably prefer that to all come through a separate volume, rather than being included in the main text.

The key is to identify your point(s) of awesomeness. If you go out with the idea of "I want to make an RTS game" or "I want to write an Urban Fantasy" and you just start working on the checklist, you might make something good, but I don't believe that you can ever create a masterpiece. Rather, your starting point should be "Here's my awesome idea. How can I make it work really well?" Most of the time the checklist items will work in your favor, but sometimes they'll undermine you or at least, bloat your work with stuff that the audience isn't all that interested in.

Girls' guide to dating

Common situations and the three appropriate responses for each:

Situation A:
A guy asks you out on a date.

1. If you like him, then say “Yes.” If you like him but happen to be busy at the requested time, help him reschedule immediately
2. If you dislike him or if he just isn't your type, say “No” or something with a synonymous meaning.
3. If you despise him and are looking for opportunities to make him suffer immensely, act really nice but tell him that you are busy. Continue putting him off until he quits asking.

Situation B:
Your phone shows that you are getting a call from a guy who recently took you out on a date.

1. If you want to go out again, answer the phone and when he asks, concur with his request.
2. If you don't want to go out again, answer the phone, and when he asks, say “No” or something with a synonymous meaning.
3. If you believe that he is a plague on mankind and you would like to crush his willingness to ask girls out so that he will never have children, don't answer the phone or return his call. Continue to repeat this until he quits calling, so that you can drag the suffering out as long as possible.

Situation C:
The date is ending, and the guy is walking you to your doorstep

1. If you would like to go on another date, say “I would like to go out again,” or something similar.
2. If you would not like another date, thank him politely, then enter your dwelling (reference Situation A if he asks you out again).
3. If you have joined a cult of Satan-worshipers whose goal is the emotional destruction of mankind, and you wish to be a devoted follower, then thank him profusely for the date. Tell him how much fun it was and give him an affectionate hug. For bonus points, invite him in and introduce him to your family. After that, when he calls for another date, act like you really want to go but continue putting him off until he gives up. If you're convincing enough, you can sometimes draw out the torture for a couple weeks.

Santa

There are a few well-known serious talks that parents have to have with their children. One that I've been wondering about lately is the "Santa isn't real" talk.

My siblings and I dodged that one simply because my parents never taught us that he existed, so we were enlightened from an early age. For those whose parental lying necessitates this kind of talk, I wonder if there needs to be a guidebook that handles the best way to approach the subject and how to deal with common questions or concerns. Here are a few excerpts from what I think those talks must usually be like:

Kid: Why didn't you tell me that it was you buying those gifts?
Parent: Because we believe that gratitude should be reserved for enigmatic fat men and not actually given to those who deserve it.


Parent: We told you about Santa to make you more excited for Christmas.
Kid: Yeah, but that just raised false hopes. Had I known that my Christmas presents would have been capped by your budget, I wouldn't have expected so much, and thus, wouldn't have been nearly as disappointed.
Parent: We're preparing you for the future. You'll constantly go through cycles of convincing yourself that life doesn't suck only to be proven wrong.
Kid: So you only told me about Santa to make the disappointment that much sharper when I didn't get what I wanted?
Parent: You'll thank us for it when you're older.


Kid: So it turns out that I would have gotten all of those gifts regardless of if I was bad. That means I no longer have any motivation to do good, right?
Parent: Well we might not get you gifts if you behave too badly.
Kid: Should I use your past regard for the truth as my means to analyze that statement?


Kid: Now exactly why did you lie to me about Santa?
Parent: Well, we believed that it was important for you to be excited about Jesus' birth, but we decided that Jesus was too boring, so we fed you some BS about a magical philanthropist so that you would be excited about the holiday.
Kid: So Santa was just a mask for the much less exciting Jesus.
Parent: That is right.
Kid: Can you just skip to the end and tell me about the really boring person that Jesus is masking?


Kid: Once you decided to lie to make me excited about something, why did you choose Santa? Telling me that Star Wars or Lord of the Rings was real would have been much cooler and not been so easy to disprove.
Parent: Santa is a major part of our culture.
Kid: Wait a minute. Your behavior has nothing to do with what is intelligent, makes sense, or will improve your life or relationships? It's just blindly following your culture?
Parent: Well, I guess when you put it that way...
Narrator: And with a sudden depressing insight, the child now understands the cause of so many of the world's problems.

Waiters

Holding to my values can be an exceedingly difficult task. One value I'd like to call my own is "vote with your money". Purveyors of this phrase suggest that if you dislike the behavior of a business, you can facilitate its failure by not spending your money there.

To understand why I have difficulty holding to my values, the fact must be understood that I find food to be extraordinarily pleasing. Gluttony is such a major part of my life that if the Lord hadn't blessed me with high metabolism, my personal gravitational pull would have disrupted the earth's orbit by now.

Many years ago, some brilliant chap devised a scheme to make a business that appeals directly to people like me. He called his creation a "restaurant" and he themed it entirely around food. The finest chefs in the land were brought forth and spent their days concocting substances designed to provide maximum happiness to any human who inserted them into his mouth and proceeded to consume them. Truly there never was a greater source of joy among all the people.
As with all good things, though, these restaurants began to be corrupted. For when the unwashed plebeians entered, they came bearing disturbing ideas. The heretical notion was put forth that the experience surrounding the eating was of greater importance than the eating itself, and fearing the wrath of the masses, the restaurants succumbed.

One of the proclivities among these miscreants was laziness: another--inefficiency. The real horror came when they combined the two.

"Why should we get our own drinks," they asked, "when another person can get them for us."
"Is it truly necessary that we order our food when we're ready? Or should we wait for a person who isn't even sharing our meal?"

And worst of all. "I really hate having to make the decision on when to leave. Wouldn't it be best if some uninterested party made that decision for us?"

And thus the waiter was conceived.

The purpose of this waiter is to force those who come seeking delicious nourishment to wait. Would you like a drink? You'd better wait for the waiter to come inquire of you which liquid you covet. Even though you could reach the drink dispenser yourself with a single-digit number of steps. Have you beheld the food that you would like to order? Well, you'd better wait for that superfluous human to come by and ask you.

What if you would prefer a fork for your sushi because you've found yourself to be incompetent in the ways of chop sticks. Instead of surreptitiously slipping over to the fork area and acquiring one of the aforementioned devices, you have sit dejectedly until the waiter walks by and inform him that you wish to offend the culture of the restaurant and use American utensils.

Eventually, these inconveniences are set aside as you have both the glorious vittles and the instruments with which to eat them. The next fifteen minutes are splendid, apart from the minor bout of dehydration because your cup is empty and you aren't allowed to refill it. At the close of this part of the process, the restaurant has fulfilled the measure of its creation, and your most appropriate activity would be to vacate it.

But, alas, the waiting isn't over yet. You are once again forced to wait for the waiter to bring you the bill, at which point you cast your credit card at him and wait another five minutes before he returns with a receipt to sign. And here is the part where things get truly abominable: You are expected to pay extra money to this person who lengthened your visit. They call it a 'tip', and if the waiter has only mildly damaged your eating experience instead of utterly destroying it, you are expected to make it's value 15% of your food purchase. It is, after all, much more difficult for this person to carry a twenty dollar steak than a three dollar plate of mashed potatoes, so the tip must be inflated appropriately.

It is here that my values are challenged. "Vote with your money" is my theory. By bestowing my hard-earned lucre on this person, I uphold their position. Clearly then, it's vitally important that I give no tip. In fact, to ensure that a revolution succeeds as I desire, I should eat out as often as possible, always withholding my tip.

But then I have a realization: it goes something like this: "Josh, you make video games for a living. You go to a nice office full of cool people who treat you well. Here is a poor sap who spends his days dealing with annoying people like you. He's probably struggling to make ends meet. He works evenings which has brutal effects on his social life. In addition, the restaurant pays him roughly the amount it costs to buy the gas to drive home. Give him some frikkin' cash, you incorrigible miser."

So I do. Perhaps one day, I'll develop the skills necessary to be a jerk, but until then, waiters, you'll get your tip.

Optimizing Politeness

So we have this little thing called 'The Golden Rule' which saith: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

For some things, it's a pretty good policy. I'd prefer not to have people eviscerate or defenestrate me, so I figure it's appropriate that I don't do those things to them, either. In some cases, though, it doesn't work as well.

One of the best examples of this is holding the door open. Now, I understand, if you're closely tailing some chap that it may be nice for him to perform this behavior, lest it fly shut into your face and give you justification for saying "Ouch!". However, this is usually not the case.

Often, when I am a significant distance from the aforementioned door, the human who is traveling through it decides that it's expedient to hold it open for me, anyway. I'll use math to demonstrate why this is bad:

If my current velocity and trajectory causes the door-opener to perceive that I would like to emulate him in traveling through the opening created when this door is ajar, he could run a rough mental calculation and determine the approximate time before I reached the door. If he, for example, estimated that it would take me 5.47 seconds to reach him, yet it would only delay my journey for 1.2 seconds for me to open the door myself, then we have a net loss of 4.27 seconds.

However, there are other complications. It is possible that I'm not actually heading for the door. Further, he has removed from me control over my environment. Last of all, common politeness obligates me to thank him, and the combination of all of these has far more power to derail my train of thought (which is always going somewhere weird like when I come up with these posts) than the instinctive act of opening the door.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are cases where this door-holding obsession that people have can actually be helpful. If I'm carrying a live salmon or have my hands glued together, the difficulty of opening a door is increased tremendously, and I'm grateful when somebody relieves me of this arduous activity. However, when somebody's thoughts are, "Hi, I'm going to burn 5 seconds and interrupt your train of thought because it will save you 1 second if I am correctly prognosticating your destination," I do find it slightly annoying.

Some day, I'll learn to be a jerk and make progress in optimizing the world. For now, I just thank them and move on.

My Conversations With Search Engines

First:

Me: Hello, Google, I would like to know how to open a file using JScript.

Google: Here are thousands of webpages telling you how to open a file in JavaScript

Me: Yes, but I want to know how to do it in JScript

Google: Since JScript and Javascript are the same thing, I have happily given you all the links with either one.

Me: Actually, they're not the same thing, and I need to do it with JScript

Google: To help you out, I've even put every instance of "JavaScript" in bold so that you'll know which websites you want to visit first.

Me: Okay, look, these links aren't helpful. You've buried the ones that actually reference JScript 50 pages in. Can you only show what I'm searching for.

Google: The best thing about about assuming equivalence between JScript and JavaScript is that if I only returned the 800,000 pages that only say JScript, you might run out of stuff to look at. Now, you'll have to opportunity to go through millions of pages before you reach the end of my wisdom.

Me: Yes, but can you please just give me the pages that say JScript.

Google: Aren't you glad I understand what you want even better than you do?

Second:

Me: Hello, Google, my friend Marc wanted me to look at his web page, but I can't remember the address. So I'm just going to put his name into the search engine and see if I can find it.

Google: Fortunately for you, there are many people named Mark who have the same last name. Aren't you excited about how many pages you have to look at?

Me: Yes, but his name is "Marc", not "Mark".

Google: The great thing about the name "Mark" is that it is also a commonly used noun and verb. For example, here is a page where somebody referred to somebody else by their last name only and said that they were going to "mark" them. In fact, I've found hundreds of pages with something similar, and I just know that you want to look at every one of them.

Me: No, I don't want that many pages. I only want the ones that say "Marc"

Google: The thing I've learned about humans is that they never know what they want. I'm pretty sure I'll have far more success guessing the intent behind the search rather than actually looking for the terms they entered.

Note: In both of the above cases, I fixed the problem by using msn search (now called Bing, though it wasn't during my first experience). To some degree, it does the same thing; it's just not nearly as bad.

Third:

Me: Hello, Youtube, my friend recommended a band called Valkyre. I'd like to hear a few of their songs.

Youtube: That's wonderful! Here's a link to the game Valkyrie Profile, and here's a video somebody made involving the Starcraft Valkyrie unit. It gets better, though, many songs, both old and modern use the term Valkyrie, and I'm going to give you every one of them.

Me: No, you don't understand. The band is "Valkyre", not "Valkyrie". That way you can narrow down the videos to only the ones I want.

Youtube: I have a dream...Some day, correct spelling will truly be a thing of the past. The Internet has made great strides in making sure that every word has at least three valid misspellings, and I'm proud to say that I'm now contributing.

Me: No, no. That's BAD. People should spell things correctly, and you should actually pay attention to what I'm writing.

Youtube: Sadly, a few backward-minded people still care about spelling, so I'm going to swallow my pride and put a link that says "Did you mean Valkyrie" below the search bar. But I'm going to assume that you did, even if you don't click on the link, and I'll send my results accordingly.

Me: Can you please just give me the results for Valkyre?

Youtube: I'm so happy. This poor man misspelled Valkyrie, but I quietly brushed his error under the rug and pretended that he didn't. It will make his life so much better.

These are all actual events, though I've simplified them and anthropomorphized the search engines. Note that if you try to recreate this problem, you need more than just the name given. You also have to have other words to narrow down the search. If it returns a lot of irrelevant pages, it's happy, but if it would only return a few pages, it starts doing stuff like I describe above so that it still can return a lot of irrelevant pages.

For example: If you only search for the term "Valkyre" in youtube, it complies because it can return a lot of pages where the video submitter misspelled "Valkyrie". However, if you search for "Valkyre music", it's horrified that it can't pile thousands of results onto you, so it commences with the egregious violation above.

I understand that there are actually benefits to these features, but the user may not always want them. Here's a recommended UI for future search engines:

The "Google Search" button is for people who know that the search engine understands their intent better than they do, and the "Actual search" button is for people who really want what they entered.

Basically, search engines are a little like people on forums. They'd be a lot more useful if there was an option to make them actually read what was typed.