So You Want To Learn Growing Up Absurd
Most people approach this the wrong way. They try to make everything logical first, then layer absurdity on top as a decoration. That does not work. The technique actually requires you to start from the absurd premise and work backwards to make it functionally sound. I ran into this problem when I first tried implementing Growing Up Absurd on a project for a client who wanted an interactive narrative experience. Their initial brief was completely unreasonable - they wanted the user to make choices that led to outcomes which violated basic causality. My first attempt failed because I kept trying to rationalize the premise rather than lean into it. The workaround I eventually found was to build a constraint engine that validated whether the absurdity actually served the experience, then stripped anything that was absurd without purpose. That cut our development time from about six weeks down to roughly ten days.
What Growing Up Absurd Actually Is
It is a creative and design methodology where you deliberately embrace illogical or nonsensical premises and then construct a coherent system around them. The absurd part is the starting condition, not the end result. Beginners confuse this with random nonsense output, which is why so many attempts fall flat. The core mechanism works like this: define an impossible or contradictory rule, identify what constraints that rule creates, then engineer solutions within those constraints. The constraints are where the actual work happens. Without them, you just have chaos. With them, you get something that feels simultaneously irrational and internally consistent.
Setting Up A Basic Framework
Start by writing down a single absurd constraint. Not a theme, not a mood, a hard rule that breaks normal expectations. For example, in a narrative context, the rule might be "every decision the protagonist makes must lead to a physically impossible consequence." That is your foundation. Everything else builds from there. Next, map out the direct implications. If every choice causes a physical impossibility, then navigation becomes a problem. The character cannot simply walk somewhere because walking is a physical action with physical consequences. This forces you to develop workarounds like conceptual movement or narrative teleportation. These limitations actually improve the design because they prevent lazy solutions. I learned this the hard way with my second project using Growing Up Absurd. I had not accounted for the fact that players would find the easiest path around every constraint. Once someone figures out how to bypass the absurd rule entirely, the whole structure collapses. My solution was to make the constraint non-negotiable within the system's logic. Anything that tried to go around it would simply not register as a valid action. This took extra development time but it kept the experience intact.
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Tools And Resources
There is no official Growing Up Absurd software package. What you will find online are community-contributed templates and constraint mapping tools that help you organize the illogical premises into workable structures. One useful resource is a free constraint matrix generator you can find through various creative coding communities. It helps you track cause and effect relationships across absurd parameters. For implementation, most practitioners use standard narrative design tools like Twine or Ink, combined with custom scripting if you need deeper control over how the absurdity interacts with user choices. Python works fine for prototyping the constraint logic before moving to a production engine.
Common Mistakes That Will Waste Your Time
The biggest issue is treating the absurdity as cosmetic. If the impossible element is just surface level decoration, the system has no real constraints to work against and it becomes boring quickly. The absurd premise needs to actively interfere with normal operations. Another pitfall is failing to establish clear boundaries around what counts as absurd within your specific project. I once saw a team spend three weeks arguing over whether a particular story beat was absurd enough. They had no objective measure. The fix is to write a one-page criteria document before you start and stick to it. If something does not meet the defined absurdity threshold, it gets cut regardless of how good it sounds. Here is a detail most people miss: Growing Up Absurd works best with smaller scope projects. The technique requires constant validation that every element serves the core absurd premise, and that validation process scales poorly. I have seen teams try to apply it to open-world games with hundreds of branching paths. It turned into a maintenance nightmare. A short interactive story or a contained experience is where this approach actually shines. For larger projects, consider using only the constraint mapping aspect rather than the full methodology.
When It Simply Will Not Work
Serious projects with strict genre expectations should probably avoid this. A horror game built on Growing Up Absurd principles will feel inconsistent to players who expect conventional tension mechanics. The internal logic of absurdism conflicts with established genre contracts. In those cases, stick to traditional design patterns or borrow only the constraint mapping technique without the full framework.
