This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Untitled Page

title: The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning :created: 2023-09-20 :updated: 2025-10-06

creativity, learning

The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.

These same kids have messed about in Scratch (wikipedia.org) through the school as well, but they rarely stick with it for very long.

I think Scratch is brilliantly done and I don’t wish to speak ill of it.

But it struck me how the limitations of the easter egg made it more compelling to play with. The feature was a little buggy and did not handle multiple instances very well. This led to interesting behavior as they added more and more instances to the page.

This "toy" had way less features than Scratch, but it was pretty free-form in use and it was easy to invoke. It also had severe limitations and was easy to break.

I think Scratch is so featureful that it is intimidating to newcomers. The paradox of having so many toys is that it’s hard to know which one to play with.

In both learning and creativity, I think there’s a lot to be said for a very simple toolbox that invites play but doesn’t present too many options at first.

I think a lot of people can relate to this in the visual arts: Give me a nice set of paints and brushes and a big blank canvas and watch me agonize about what to paint. But put a ragged piece of scrap paper and a pencil in front of me and watch me start to doodle!

Are these the same principles at work? It feels like they might be.

See also: free-verse-programming

Why other people’s dreams are boring

Another type of limitation is the structure of a story. That structure could be anything, but it might be that the story is told in 3-acts or that it is entirely based on the motivations of the characters, or something else. It doesn’t have to be much of a limit, but it’s something.

I think the lack of limits in the form of structure is what makes people’s dreams (generally) so boring to hear about - there’s no limits and no structure and no rules. It’s just seemingly-random events.

A movie that breaks its own internal rules is frustrating, but dreams don’t even have rules to break, so it’s not even interesting to criticize them!

Small budgets

A big-budget movie can be clever and amazing. But I think that requires the style and restraint of the director. Otherwise, you can just make the first thing that comes to your mind - which is probably going to be the most obvious thing to come to your (and your audience’s) mind!

But a small-budget movie has to be clever to be any good at all. If you’ve got $300 for props, you’re going to have to come up with something different…​and that can lead to surprise and delight because you did something unexpected with the material available.

Again, big budget stuff can be surprising and delightful, too, but I think that requires a ton of willful determination on the part of the artists involved. That’s might be why the successful ones can be pretty forceful personalities. (Not that I think artistic genius and being a nasty person need to go hand-in-hand either. I’m not promoting that idea here. I don’t think that’s the same thing.)