Psychedelics and Finishing Games

[a327ex]

14/07/19 - Psychedelics and Finishing Games

Indie game developers are already selected for high openness, given that openness is the personality trait most related to creativity and interest in aesthetics and ideas. The video above mentions that taking psychedelics has the effect of increasing someone's levels of openness by one standard deviation permanently after one year of taking the drug once, which is an absolutely huge increase. And so if you have an indie game developer, and you have them take psychedelics, chances are that you'll have a person who is now in the very top percentiles for openness compared to the rest of the population.

The way this manifests itself in real life is that indie developers who are higher in openness will be more likely to be hyper interested in the discovery part of making a game, but once the game is established enough, their inherent need to be working on something new (driven by high openness) will override everything else and they'll find themselves unable to see any projects through completion and will be stuck in a loop of always starting a new game. This is a well known problem among indie developers and it happens with many people who are just naturally high in openness without the involvement of drugs.

So my idea is that if indie developers want to be more likely to finish games, they should avoid taking psychedelics, especially if they can already notice in themselves this tendency to keep trying out new things all the time and never committing to a single one.