The formidable
René Descartes,
a philosopher who
knew a thing or
two about the
importance of
rumination time.AdviceToolbox
Descartes had set out on a quest for pithy yet
profound philosophical insights, as philosophers
are wont to do. While having a snack one day, an
interesting thought occurred to him: ‘Dooreetoe,
ergo num’, which is Latin for “I eat junk food,
therefore I am delicious.” This never really
caught on, because even early adopters in the
1600s weren’t quite ready for the concept of
junk food. He decided to step back and ruminate
for a while.
UNFAVOURABLES
After a particularly raucous Halloween party,
Descartes felt inspired. Scrapping the junk food
concept, he decided to go in a more esoteric
direction with: ‘Incognito, ergo summa’, which
is Latin for “I pretend, therefore I am fabulous.”
Descartes felt the seed of something special
in this idea, but he wasn’t quite sure how to
water it. He decided to hire a market research
consultant to check it out. The consumer testing
showed significant resistance to phrases which
begin and end with vowels. The unfavourables
were overwhelming, with the Extremely
Opposed and Somewhat Opposed combining
for over 73% of the sample. Respondents also
felt (by a 2:1 margin) there were too many
instances of the letter N.
Descartes was crestfallen, but he started
thinking about these results.
He thought and he thought,
until finally, he started to
think about the fact that he
was thinking. Over and over
he’d ask himself rhetorically,
“Am I thinking?”, and each time the reply came
back, “I am!” Descartes lost sight of his product
and was obsessing over his process. He couldn’t
let it go. Ultimately, his incessant perseverating
became too much for him. He decided to pay
a visit to his friend and fellow creator, Auguste
Rodin, who also lived in France, just a couple of
centuries over.
Descartes spent many hours sharing his
perturbations about thinking and thought. This
inspired Rodin to create his famous sculpture,
The Scream. I guess Descartes exceeded Rodin’s
tolerance for thoughtful ravings.
On returning home in time, Descartes
went straight to his lab and began tuning his
‘Incognito, ergo summa’ product. First, he
disemvoweled the head and tail. Next,
he removed the Ns. Finally, he dumped the
wfmag.cc \ 29 Developed in just
five weeks, E.T. was
ultimately brought
low by the lack of
time to ruminate
and fine-tune
its mechanics.second ‘M’ at the end, which now seemed
superfluous. Et voilà! Cogito, ergo sum was born.
Descartes’s contribution launched modern
rationalism and also validated consumer testing
methodology for centuries to come. But wait,
there’s more.
Being a person who despises waste, Descartes
wondered what to do with the discarded letters.
He threw away the vowels,
because in France vowels are
everywhere. But what to do
with the rest? He then took
the leftover consonants and
used them to create a tiny
confection which he dubbed ‘M&Ns’. Sadly, this
never got off the ground because he couldn’t
write the recipe in Latin, so he was forced to
settle solely for the philosophical contribution.
C’est la vie!
This is possibly (though admittedly
implausibly) a true story. Nevertheless, the fact
remains: time for tuning and rumination are
critical to the success of a creative product.
On E.T., that time simply wasn’t available.
Of course, in development, everything is a
trade-off. In this case, the lack of critical
development time provided an abundance of
critical feedback once the game came out.
Thinking, tuning, and rumination are all
necessary to produce a great game. If I had
more rumination time on E.T., we might be
singing a different tune today.“Time for rumination is
critical to the success
of a creative product”