Nye’s Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in the age of AI & Distributed Systems.

This week I’m on my way back from Beijing, where I spent the week looking for passion in a sea of check lists.

I had just spent 22 hours on two planes crossing this enormous planet of ours.

I found myself standing in front of rooms full of Chinese students, attempting to recruit for our game development program. I’d visit schools, set up presentations, and offer one-on-one consultations where students could ask me anything.

And they did ask repeatedly, urgently…

”What are you looking for? What should my portfolio have in it?”

It’s a fair question. I could rattle off the technical specifics: we like to see some 3D modeling knowledge, understanding of basic programming concepts, a sense of narrative. I'd like to see evidence that you have at least attempted to make games before.

But the truth is, after twenty-five years working in animation and VFX before transitioning to education, I’d developed what doctors call “gestalt,” the ability to recognize something holistically, intuitively, before I can articulate all its parts.

And what I was really looking for?

-- “passion.”

That answer landed like a brick. Confusion on faces. Frustration visible. They wanted the checklist. They wanted to know exactly which skills to demonstrate, which software to master, which test scores would guarantee admission.

Looking at their faces, I saw a real sense of “does not compute.”

It was bad enough I didn’t speak the language, but I also didn’t give the measurable outcomes and specific requirements. I was responding in what must have seemed like mystical nonsense.

For me, the disconnect revealed something about the collision between different educational philosophies, and ultimately, about what we’re really trying to accomplish when we teach the art of creativity.

It took me a while to understand the gauntlet these kids were walking through. So I dug into it.

The Chinese education system is designed to handle a spectacularly enormous challenge. Roughly 290 million students from kindergarten through high school move through the program. For context, that’s nearly the entire population of the United States.

The system’s solution to this volume is “high-stakes testing” on steroids. At the pinnacle sits the Gaokao, the National College Entrance Examination, which makes the SAT look like a friendly quiz on the side of a Happy Meal box.

Taken over two or three days (depending on the province), the Gaokao is essentially a one-shot determination of your entire future. In 2024, approximately 13.4 million students sat for the exam, competing for roughly 10 million spots in universities across the country.

Your Gaokao score doesn’t just influence which college you attend, it determines it, along with your major. Score in the top tier? You might study at prestigious institutions like Peking University or Tsinghua University. Score lower? Your options narrow dramatically. There are no extra considerations.

Despite middling SAT scores, I got into college by being editor of the school newspaper, running cross country and doing art and theater projects. But in China, it’s just your score, your province, and the mathematics of allocation.

This creates what I came to think of as a Chinese culture “milestone mindset.” From elementary school onward, Chinese students move through a series of high-stakes exams: the Zhongkao (high school entrance exam), mock Gaokao exams, and countless other evaluations. Each one serves as a gate, and the entire system trains students to ask:

”What would you like me to do next?”

The system produces students with discipline, focus, and work ethic. Chinese students consistently rank among the highest in the world on standardized tests in mathematics and science.

I believe this approach creates an educational culture fundamentally different from the messy, exploratory, passion-driven creative work that I was hunting for. When I asked those students about passion, I was essentially asking them to reverse-engineer their own desires from a system that had been engineering theirs for over a decade.

To them, I was an alien from another planet.

Before we get too smug about Western educational superiority, I absolutely admit American education isn’t exactly crushing it either. We have massive problems in quality, and frankly, plenty of our own high-stakes standardized testing that narrows curriculum and absolutely crushes creativity. Our students might be given more permission to “find themselves,” but many emerge from our system equally lost, just in different ways. I just wrote about how the reading numbers are uncomfortably bad.

Chinese education is good at things like discipline, focus, and the willingness to work hard at difficult problems. Those are genuinely valuable traits. Any creative professional will tell you that inspiration without execution is just daydreaming. You need the technical chops to manifest your vision. Hard work matters.

But sustainable skill development requires more than discipline and practice alone. It requires more intrinsic motivation, what we colloquially call “passion.”

And passion isn’t what most people think it is.

Despite my exuberance, I’ve always been an introvert. It’s not a personality trait you’re born with, or some gift that either sparks inside you or doesn’t. Passion is an emergent property, something that arises when three conditions align:

• autonomy (control over your work),

• mastery (seeing yourself improve),

• and purpose (understanding why your work matters).

This is crucial to understand because it means passion can be cultivated. Yes, It can!

When students work on projects they genuinely care about, skill development accelerates like crazy. They’ll spend hours debugging code that would feel like absolute torture in an abstract textbook exercise. They’ll iterate on visual designs with patience that amazes me. They’ll research technical solutions with the intensity of detectives hunting down clues in endless rabbit holes.

This matters more than ever in our current moment. AI and automation make technical execution increasingly accessible and what becomes valuable isn’t just what you can make, but why you’re making it. Projects that speak to genuine questions and desires exist beyond mere technical experimentation. They carry something irreplaceable:

vision.

The great teachers don’t just teach skills as milestones on a roadmap. The great teachers light students on f—***ing fire!

And then I met her.

She was wearing a beat-up white Yankees hat and spoke broken English, but she had brought her laptop to show me her work. It was a collection of game prototypes, half-finished experiments, and weird little interactive experiences that didn’t fit any standard category.

Her code was messy. Her game mechanics were unbalanced. Her ideas were unformed, raw, and I didn’t understand the cultural references. But as she clicked through her projects, talking excitedly in her limited English, I felt my spider sense go crazy.

These weren’t games made to satisfy an assignment or check boxes on a rubric. These were ideas that spoke. Each prototype revealed someone thinking deeply about how they could connect with players on an emotional level.

We asked her to apply to our program. When she did, we learned something that made the whole recruiting trip feel cosmically aligned:

our program was her first choice!

Finding that kind of passion is rare in any context. In a system explicitly designed to channel students toward measurable outcomes rather than personal discovery, finding it felt like discovering light in creative darkness. Against the odds, she wanted to be a game designer. And man, could I feel it.

That’s what we’re really looking for when we ask about passion. Not polish. Not perfection. Not the ability to list every skill on the curriculum. We’re looking for that spark of autonomy, that drive toward mastery, that sense of purpose that makes someone willing to struggle through messy code and half-formed ideas because the vision matters to them.

It’s hard to find out there. But you have to. Because when you do find it, everything else becomes teachable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And it makes the 22 hours on a plane totally worth it.

That’s it for this time. I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends.

We’ll see you next time!

Nye Warburton is an educator and adventurer who just returned from Asia. This essay was improvised with good ol’ human labor and augmented with Claude Sonnet 4.5.

For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

• The Resistance is Reading, Nov 23, 2025

• Projects with Purpose, Oct 25, 2025

• Educational Citizenship, March 6, 2025