Dan wrote: >Personally, I think that the humanities suffer from being too little >constrained instead of too constrained. IMHO, true creativity comes when >there is just the right amount of room for possibilities. An example of >this is games. tic-tac-toe is a meaningless game because it is too highly >constrained. Chess and Go are great games because they are optimally >constrained.
Do you include the arts in your category of the humanities? If so, I disagree with your idea that the humanities are too little constrained. My undergraduate degree is in music composition. With "modern" music, pretty much anything goes, but I and most of my fellow composition students found that if we used self-imposed constraints, it allowed us to be more creative. Without constraining ourselves, there were just too many choices, too many possible ways to go with a piece of music that we were left without a sense of direction. The constraints we gave ourselves helped us focus our musical ideas. Choosing which constraints we would use in a given piece of music became one of the most important pre-compositional decisions we would make. A lot of composers don't think about it in those terms, necessarily, but most seem to go through that process. (I had never thought about how this would apply to games or game design before, but that part of your analysis makes a lot of sense to me.) The biggest difference between the current period of "classical" music and the previous musical periods (the baroque, the classical, the romantic, etc.) is that each previous musical period had a set of constraints that applied for just about every piece of music written by just about every composer in that particular time period, but with "modern" music those constraints vary from composer to composer and often from piece to piece. That seems to be closer to what you are getting at with your comment above, if you meant to include the arts as part of the humanities. Other than that, I would have to say that I agree with you that "ultra-light" PoMo (or "responsible PoMo") is reasonable in ways that stricter versions of PoMo aren't. Thanks for your very interesting analysis. Reggie Bautista _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
