Creativity

2021-06-29

currently a heated debate in the mentorship discord about how to score creativity

the idea is that if you follow all mapping concepts then your map demonstrates mapping expertise but does that mean it lacks creativity?

the issue I have with some maps is that they play so perfectly that u know what 2 expect

but with older maps the contrast was more and there were defining moments in the map

halfslashed agrees with this idea btw, older maps generally contrast phrases of the song more than newer ones (which focus more on a uniform playing experience)

recall that this uniformness is ideal for tournament maps and a lot of mappers are also tournament mappers, so this could explain their natural tendency to avoid e.g. drastic changes in difficulty for song emphasis

some people believe that if you're making maps specifically for tournaments then they aren't real maps since they're not expressive enough / lack full creative freedom / etc

the quirkiness of some older maps is part of the reason why people play them (freedom dive, kirby mix, etc)

if they were remapped in 2021 following all the concepts we use today, would players still consider those maps special in terms of the map itself? or just unique in terms of song/difficulty?

some mappers think creativity shouldn't exist in mapping contests

others think it's necessary to differentiate the safe maps from the ones that deviate from traditional norms

maybe mappers get offended when other mappers call their map generic in the creativity section

you could like mapping a certain way that just became so popular that it's now a generic style, for example

currently listening to the full version of an anime song and it's pretty generic in terms of creativity but I guess it shows expertise? lol

guess this song could make for a good tournament map since it's so consistent

don't think I'll map it though since nothing stands out enough to have defining parts in a beatmap

2021-07-06

generally think there's a difference between mappers that copy the patterns they see in order to make something rankable and mappers that create their own patterns based on theoretical knowledge of mapping

let's call the former type a mappers and the latter type b mappers

pretty sure I shared this before but I think it's important

some mentors make their mentees map just like them (since that's how they wanna map I guess lol)

mainly referring to the mentors that specialize in a certain category of maps commonly associated with rewarding the so-called "performance points"

anyway the point is halfslashed didn't teach me how to map just taught me some theories of mapping (how you actually map is up to you)

Creative problem solving requires (1) vast expert knowledge of high stability, and (2) rich new knowledge of high retrievability. Vast stable knowledge makes it easy to solve algorithmic problems. Those problems can be solved at low energy expenditure with the help of fast thinking. Problems that require "thinking out of the box" rely on creativity, i.e. association of remote ideas.

from the fast thinking page I talked about some time ago (hopefully everyone here remembers lol) https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Fast_thinking

so the stable knowledge would be stuff u know u need to do while mapping

and since u know u need to do those things u can think fast about them since u're not questioning whether or not u can or should do something

I believe that restricting yourself in some way (e.g. symmetry only, tourney map) limits the amount of creativity you can achieve if you didn't have that restriction

of course such a restriction can also force you to make more creative decisions, I suppose it depends on the song and feel of the map itself

Problems that require "thinking out of the box" rely on creativity, i.e. association of remote ideas.

if u only know how to map a certain way then it will be more difficult to associate remote ideas since u don't have them

but if u understand how maps work then u can use that while mapping to make basically anything u want

the less time u need to think about whether something is good or not the more time u can actually be creative with what u're making