What Exactly Is Creativity

Ever since I started this blog - mostly to curb my creative atrophy caused by AI dependency - I’ve had people tell me I’m wrong to say AI leads to creative atrophy, since they’re still being “creative” when using AI to write. After all, they’re the ones writing the prompts and directing what to generate. And sure, I won’t say that logic is entirely wrong. But to me, especially in writing or any literary context, AI-assisted creativity starts and stops at ideation: prompts, rough outlines, maybe narrative setups. True creativity, in my eyes, is the ability to infuse personal originality and emotional depth into your own words. But I digress.

In past interviews for newspapers and job applications, I’ve often been asked the same question:

“What makes you creative?”

And every time, I give the same answer. The dictionary defines creative as:

relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something.

But here’s the thing, being creative, or original, might just be a myth. It’s 2025. There’s currently over 8 billion people alive and odds are, someone has probably already thought of that “original” idea you just had - even before you even thought of it.

We consume so much writings and designs through our screens that we’re inevitably influenced by them, subconsciously or not. So… is that still creativity? If we’re just echoing what we’ve absorbed, is that truly original?

I don’t think so. I think that’s just adapted inspiration.

Creativity is not about inventing something from thin air. True creativity lies in translating everything you’ve learned, felt, and experienced into new forms - across mediums, styles, and genres. It’s about sifting through the mosaic of your cultural, technical, and personal experiences and shaping something that only YOU could make. Not something stitched together and spat out from generic AI outputs with a few human tweaks. But something alive, with intention, perspective, and you at its core.

Just Call It Design

To me, design has always been about solving problems. Yet somewhere along the way, we started fragmenting it, dividing it into UX, UI, Product, Graphic, Game, Service, Interaction, Instructional, and a dozen other flavors. Each with its own tools, titles, and tribal language. But as someone who’s worked across all those domains, here’s a radical thought: maybe it’s time we simplify. Just call it design.

The Core of All Design is Design Thinking
Whether you’re designing a mobile app, a packaging label, a customer journey, or a multiplayer game environment, the process we all follow is rooted in the same foundation:
Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

That’s Design Thinking.

It’s not exclusive to UX bootcamps or innovation workshops. It’s the connective tissue that runs through all forms of design regardless of title or discipline. It’s how we understand human needs, imagine solutions, iterate quickly, and create things that actually work. So why silo ourselves?

Same Mindset, Different Tools
Sure, the tools vary:

• A graphic designer may create visuals using Illustrator through shapes, grid, and type
  
• A UI designer might wireframe in Figma, zooming in on hierarchy and interaction flow
  
• A game designer builds mechanics and game feel that shape immersive play
  
• A product designer balances user needs with business objectives and tech constraints
  
• An instructional designer creates engaging educational experiences

But the mindset? It’s all the same - we all prototype, test, solve, and care about the human on the other side of the experience. These aren’t competing crafts or disconnected disciplines. They’re all expressions of the same problem-solving DNA, just applied through different lenses and tools.

“Why Are You Applying Here Instead of a Game Job?”
As someone who’s studied game design, I’ve heard this question more times than I can count in interviews for UX or product design roles:

“Why aren’t you applying to game jobs?”

Well firstly, I would if I could. The game industry is so dead in Singapore that one can barely find a job listing related to it.

Secondly, I’ve always believed that game design is just a niche subset of product design, with different end goals and more technical demands. Game designers obsess over onboarding, flow, motivation, feedback loops, usability, and emotional engagement. We prototype constantly, test relentlessly, as well as balance user needs with creative vision, business goals, and technical constraints. If that doesn’t sound like product design, I don’t know what does.

Splitpushing as Warlock, And Why You’re Playing Dota Wrong

For the past 2 years, I have been playing Dota 2 almost exclusively as Warlock - but not in the way you might expect. No teamfights. No five-man deathballs. Just pure, efficient splitpushing. In Turbo. You might ask: How does Warlock splitpush? Isn’t he useless without his ultimate? That’s the first blunder most players make - they play Dota only at the micro level. But Dota is chess, not checkers. And you’re playing like it’s a blitz match, not a slow positional grind.

From the start of the game, I claim map tempo by buying every Smoke of Deceit I can get my hands on. With Aether Lens and Aghanim’s Shard, I can clear waves from off-map using Fatal Bonds and Shadow Word. With Solar Crest and Drums of Endurance, I buff my creeps like advancing passed pawns, steadily trading tempo for control. Then, with the level 15 Upheaval talent, I buff creep attack speed while zoning defenders - slowing them, damaging them, and triggering exploding Imps from the Shard. Then the real game begins: I force a reaction. Enemy heroes TP in? I’ve already cast Smoke and castle myself safely to another file; TPing to a new lane, pressuring the opposite side, always preserving initiative. I never fight fair. If I get caught, I drop Chaotic Offering and let my Golem walk to the next lane like a wandering rook splitting their attention, demanding trades, and creating zugzwang.

Most Dota players play like it’s a tactical brawl, obsessed with skirmishes, kills, and shiny net worth graphs. But Dota is a territorial war. A solved game of attrition, resource starvation, tempo control, and incremental advantage. You don’t win by padding KDA. You win by removing structure, by invading space, and ultimately, by toppling the Ancient - your opponent’s king.

That’s why I compare Dota to chess. Every lane is a file. Every tower is a control square. Every creepwave is a pawn, expendable, but instrumental. If you overextend for a kill mid without securing your back rank, you lose positional advantage. They get a kill on our safelaner? Good for them. I just captured their Tier 2 top with my pawn storm. And while they reset, I’m already rotating pressure to the other side of the board.

My job as Warlock isn’t to join teamfights. It’s to pin pieces, to fork lanes, to bait rotations and force them to burn TPs inefficiently. Every moment they spend chasing me is a moment they’re losing initiative. It’s tempo theft. Psychological pressure. They don’t see me on the minimap, and panic. Where is he now? What’s he setting up? They check treelines. Drop sentries. React to shadows. But I’m already a move ahead.

A team fight breaks out, but the camera starts panning to their Ancient. The game is over.

Warlock isn’t just a support. He’s a positional powerhouse. A rook, quietly controlling open files, swinging from lane to lane, applying unrelenting pressure until the board collapses.

You can chase kills. I’ll chase mate.

/jk

Understanding Movement in Movement Shooters

Months after wrapping up my final game assignment at DigiPen - EXODUS2 - I’ve found myself reflecting on the intricacies of movement design and physics in games. Building a game from the ground up gave me a deeper appreciation for what makes movement feel good, and more importantly, what makes it fun.

Since I was young, I’ve been drawn to games that let you go fast. I grew up playing Team Fortress 2, Tribes Ascend, and even lesser-known titles like UberStrike (also called Paradise Paintball 3D for the OGs) on Facebook, which despite its simplicity, had a rudimentary bunny-hop mechanic that hinted at deeper movement systems but was sadly not used at all by the community. These games didn’t just allow you to move from point A to B; they rewarded you for mastering how you moved. Pressing the right keys at the right time, turning with precision, and timing your jumps, all added up to a kind of kinetic mastery that felt incredibly satisfying.

This is the essence of a movement shooter: a game where movement isn’t just a means to an end, but a central mechanic that defines how the game is played. Think Quake (Multiplayer), Titanfall 2, or Apex Legends. These games emphasize momentum, skill expression, and freedom of traversal-turning movement into a kind of language that separates novices from veterans.

But designing movement systems isn’t as straightforward as just making players go fast or allowing vertical mobility. When building my own movement shooter, I quickly realized that movement physics aren’t just about basic locomotion; they’re about creating a feel. Getting that feel right was one of the hardest parts. Since I built the movement tech from scratch in a custom game engine, I had to manually calculate velocity changes on a per-frame basis for every type of movement - whether it was ground acceleration, air strafing, wall running or wall jumping. It was painful to implement, but rewarding once it worked. I heavily referenced how bunny-hopping was implemented in the Source Engine which, interestingly, was much simpler than expected.

That said, even the most polished movement tech is only half of the equation. The other half is level design, and this is just as crucial. There’s no point in letting players move fast or jump high if there’s no room to let loose. Players need environments that support and encourage expressive movement. That doesn’t mean maps need to be giant empty boxes. Rather, they need to be open and creatively constructed - non-linear, vertical, and varied enough for players to experiment with the movement tech. Wall-jumping, rocket-jumping, bunny-hopping - all of these require intentional space to shine. This is something often overlooked when people reference traditional movement shooters like Quake or Doom. While those games featured advanced movement, their levels were typically rigid and indoor-focused, limiting opportunities to fully exploit that movement.

Only the PvP Arena maps in Quake, built specifically for competitive multiplayer, truly showcased the freedom and fluidity that movement shooters can offer. My personal favorite reference for movement-driven level design is actually the Team Fortress 2 Jump Map community, as those maps are:

• Large enough to allow high-speed traversal
  
• Creative in layout, encouraging players to think critically about how to reach the next platform
  
• Varied in their use of movement challenges tailored to different mechanics

Making my own game helped me understand movement on a much deeper level. It taught me that “good movement” is more than just a physics formula or a slick camera movement; it’s about creating opportunities for players to express themselves through motion. And when that’s paired with the right level design, the result is dynamic: a game that feels just as fun to move in as it is to play.

Songs on Repeat June 2025

Massive Attack - Teardrop Spotify
7 Birches - Somnus Spotify
卢卢快闭嘴 - 字字句句 Spotify
Pixies - All I Think About Now Spotify
Radiohead - Let Down Spotify
Blonde Redhead - Kiss Her Kiss Her Spotify
Weyes Blood - Andromeda Spotify
Feng Suave - Venus Flytrap Spotify

Why I Started This Blog

With AI being increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, and the ubiquitous adoption of generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude in performing rote tasks, skill atrophy and the downfall of creative writing is all but certain.

Having used such AI tools for most of my university essays and corporate reports, and personally witnessing the slow decline of my creative thinking, I wanted to start a blog of my own to preserve what’s left of my wit and imagination, as well as to retain and improve my own writing skills while sharing my thoughts and feelings on things I hold dear.

Since this is my first blog post, I want to make it especially meaningful to everyone reading by talking about relationships (something I don’t talk about often with anyone). Growing up, I didn’t really care about building or maintaining relationships with anyone, be it platonic or romantic. As someone who is definitely on the spectrum, I’ve always viewed relationships as purely transactional; I’ll only be friends with you if I have something to gain from it, and vice versa, I think you’re friends with me because you have something to gain. That mentality was definitely one of the reasons why I was very much a loner for most of my growing years.

As years went by, it’s ironic that I’ve started to treasure relationships more with each lost one. I’ve always felt uncomfortable that we yearn for the connections, but when they’re lost, we rarely know how to grieve them properly - especially when they’re not dramatic endings, just slow, quiet disappearances. No big fights. No dramatic closures. Just a drifting apart that feels both inevitable and preventable at the same time. What do you mean that I still know everything about you but we don’t really talk anymore? What am I supposed to do with this information?

We don’t talk about this kind of grief: the grief of losing someone who is still alive, just… not here. It’s not as clear-cut as death. There’s no ceremony, no condolences, no socially acceptable way to say, “I miss someone who chose to walk away, or someone I let slip through the cracks.”

And in a way, that makes it worse. Because I don’t know if I should be moving on, or holding on.

Lately, I’ve been trying to sit with those feelings rather than run from them. Maybe that’s what this blog is about too - sitting with the uncomfortable. Honoring the people who’ve shaped me, even if they’re no longer beside me. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe writing will help me ask better questions.