A Tyrannosaurus Rex for Ideas

Creative productivity is still only half the job once you have all those great ideas, your next task is to murder most of them. The sad truth is that most creative ideas are bad ideas. In my career as a game designer, I have come up with hundreds of original ideas that I ultimately abandoned. The chapters on specific games later in this book will present only the most cogent of those ideas.

What you need is a Tyrannosaurus Rex stalking through your mind, viciously attacking every idea you create. It should pounce instantly and sink its teeth into the soft flesh of your idea. It should rip and tear with bloodthirsty abandon. Most of your ideas will be torn to shreds by your inner Tyrannosaurus. That's good better that they be prey to your own monster than shredded by others or, worse still, fail in the marketplace after you've invested time, money, and reputation on them.

Thus, the ideal game designer is a prolific nursery of creative ideas, spawning hundreds of clever new schemes, feeding these innocent newborns to the hungry idea-destructors. Amid all this creativity and carnage, a few truly great ideas will emerge.

But the balance between fecundity and predation must be perfect for the system to work. Some people just don't generate many ideas to start with, so they tend to cherish what few ideas they generate; it's pathetic. When they foist their miserable little ideas on me, my inner Tyrannosaurus jumps up and down gleefully, eager to masticate the plump little baby ideas. In younger years, I unleashed my Tyrannosaurus too readily, and its ferocity hurt and angered many people. Nowadays I keep it on a short leash; if an idea is truly bad, it will probably die of natural causes. I unleash my monster only if the baby idea actually poses a threat of turning into something real.

LESSON 15

Get creative! Get tyrano-saurical!

Then there are the creative fonts with no inner Tyrannosaurus. They gush with ideas, a few good, most flawed. These people don't identify too closely with their intellectual children; murder one and they happily move on to the next. In general, such people can be useful and productive members of creative teams as long as they are balanced with a good Tyrannosaurus host; however, expect some tension to develop between two such people.

The saddest group is the people whose Tyrannosaurus has taken over. Possibly because they lack self-confidence, these people never manage to get anything out of the nursery. They kill off all their ideas prematurely. Such people need to be encouraged to think out loud, to lay their ideas out even though they know the ideas to be flawed. Sometimes another member of the group can see a way around the supposedly fatal flaw, snatching the idea from the jaws of the Tyrannosaurus.