Game Design

 Game Ideas

This weeks reading was in relation to generating ideas in game design and asking ourselves "What is a game, anyway?", which was the title of the first article. 

What is a game? Image via iStock

It brought up a few interestng ideas, including asking whether a game called "three-to-fifteen" and "tic-tac-toe", are the same game? They are essentially the same game, based on your definition of a game, but this brings up the conversation of what makes a game a game? (In my opinion they are the same game because they are the same in terms of ruleset, theme and basically everything else, the only difference between them is the name.) 

The article asks are stories games and I think that's slightly ridiculous to ask because although a game can have a story and a story can be turned into a game, you cannot play a story. 

It gives us some solid definitions for what a game is, although they aren't the industry standard which is a slow process of getting everyone to adapt a set language to communicate with. 

We then read an article about interviews with 23 game designers and other game professionals on how they come up ideas for fresh ideas for games. 

This was a much tougher read as it was a lot longer and was more academic, but I was able to take some ideas from it.

Ideas Image via Google 

The professional game designers that were interviewed have their own personal and unique ways of coming up with ideas, most of them having no formal learning experience with formulating ideas or brainstorming. 

Everyone was able to find something that suit them specifically instead of using something that would be thought in a classroom as a one-size fits all type of ideation process. Some went on walks in the countryside, others would start other work while letting the ideas form in their head. Others used other medias to come up with ideas, one said he regularly looked at National Geographic as a way to inspire himself. 

Of course, they still had to bring these ideas to group session to bounce ideas off each other, to hear criticism and to even take inspiration from other peoples ideas, sometimes even using others ideas and basing your own work off of that. 

This was really interesting to see how professionals come up with ideas and keep motivated and maybe I can take one or two away ideas of theirs. 

This one was similar to the last one, as it covered idea generation, but it used a more fixed system, with four specific methods; concentration, brainstorming, scamper, and ramsey.

The concentration one is just as it says, think until you come up with your idea. This can be quite detrimental though, as you can get writers block if you sit there just thinking of an idea. But in the article it mentions Motonari Uesugi, a biochemist, who tells of how another scientist would come up with great ideas while walking, but when he sat down he couldn't think of any. This was because of the static environment at his desk. 

The next method was brainstorming, splitting into groups you go through three stages, statement of task, generation of ideas, and then grouping and selection. The first two are self explanatory enough, list out what you have, your resources, then generate ideas. The last one is done by a separate group as the first two and they evaluate the ideas presented by the other group. 

Scamper stands for; substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put, eliminate, and reverse. 

• Substitute: Replace something in an existing project 
• Combine: Take two genres and combine them
• Adapt: Update old mechanics 
• Modify: Change a games objective and aesthetic 
• Put: Take existing mechanics and find new application
• Eliminate: Remove mechanics 
• Reverse: See what other games are doing, and do the opposite

Ramsey is where you gather a significant amount of info and look at it very closely and then expand on all of that info.