Getting an Idea

Game ideas come from almost anywhere , but they don't walk up and introduce themselves . You can't sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. Creativity is an active, not a passive, process. You have to put yourself in an inquisitive frame of mind and then go out and look for game ideas. Look everywhere. Some of the most mundane things could be hiding a game idea. Even delivering newspapers provided the basis for a successful arcade game, Paperboy , though developers spiced up the job by letting the player break windows with the newspapers and making him dodge cars on his bicycle.

One idea isn't enough. It's a common misconception that a brilliant game idea will make you a fortune . In fact, this occurs extremely rarely. You might think you have the game idea of the century, but concentrating on it without bothering to think about other game ideas is a little like pinning all your hopes on a single lottery ticket and not bothering to get up for work while you wait to see if your numbers come up. Unlike lottery tickets, ideas are free, so think about new ones constantly. Make a note of them and go on. If one seems especially promising to you, then you can start to expand and refine it, but don't let that prevent you from thinking about other games as well. When thinking up game ideas, more is always better.

Dreaming the Dream

Many game ideas begin as dreams. Not real dreams, but daydreams, things you think about when you're staring out the window or watching the clouds on a summer afternoon ”these are the thoughts that you have when you let your mind roam free.

Computers can make dreams real. This is the unique characteristic of interactive entertainment that sets it apart from all other forms. Interactive entertainment can take you away to a wonderful place and there let you do an amazing thing. Books and movies can't do that. They can take you away to a wonderful place, but they can't let you do an amazing thing. Books and movies can create fantastic worlds and show them to you, but they can't let you be a part of them. Computer games create worlds , and they can let you live inside of them as well.

A lot of computer games are light entertainment, designed to while away a few minutes with a puzzle or a simple challenge. But larger, richer games begin with a dream. If you've ever thought to yourself, "I wish I could " or "Imagine what it would be like to ," then you've taken the first step on the road to creating a computer game. The computer has the power to simulate reality (with varying degrees of accuracy), but, more important, it has the power to simulate dreams. Computers can create almost any sort of experience you can imagine visually, even experiences that are physically impossible in the real world. The design of a computer game begins with the question, "What dream am I going to fulfill?".

Perhaps it's a dream of exploring a dungeon infested with monsters. Perhaps it's a dream of coaching a football team. Perhaps it's a dream of being a fashion designer. But before you do anything else, you must dream the dream. Understand it. Feel it. Know who else dreams it and why.

Game Ideas from Other Media

Books, movies, television, and other entertainment media are a great source of inspiration for game ideas. The game Interstate '76 (see Figure 2.1) was inspired by 1970s cop shows. Movies such as the James Bond series often inspire games. Any story containing an exciting action with something important at stake can form the kernel of a game. Think over the books you've read and the movies you've seen, and ask yourself whether any of the scenes in them could serve as the basis for a game.

Figure 2.1. Interstate '76 was a great game inspired by another medium.

You can't, of course, go stealing other people's intellectual property. Even if the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland seems like the basis for a great game, you can't go ahead and make it without Disney's approval. But you can certainly make a lighthearted game about pirates ”as LucasArts did with its Monkey Island series.

You should also look beyond the usual science fiction and fantasy genres and beyond the usual sources. How about poetry? Beowulf's epic battle with the monster Grendel and then his even more terrible battle with Grendel's mother in a cave at the bottom of a lake sounds like the basis for a game. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" might make you wonder about cavalry tactics. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Would a game based on cavalry warfare be interesting to anyone ? It's worth thinking about. The smash-hit game The Sims was partly inspired by a nonfiction book called A Pattern Language , which is about the way people's lives are affected by the design of their houses .

Game ideas can crop up in all sorts of unlikely places. Just as great scientists look at even the most common things in the world and ask how they work, great game designers are always looking at the world and wondering if it can be made into a game. The trick is to develop a game designer's instincts , to look for the fun and challenge even in things that don't sound like games at all.

Game Ideas from Other Games

A great many people who play computer games want to design them as well. Something about playing games stirs up people's creative juices. When you play a lot of games, you develop a sense of how they work and what their good and bad points are. Playing games is a valuable experience for a game designer. It gives insight and lets you compare and contrast the features of different games.

Sometimes we get game ideas through frustration. Most of us have had the experience, at one time or another, of playing a game that wasn't quite right somehow. The user interface was awkward , the game was too difficult, or the payoff was boring. We think, "If I had designed this game, I would have ." We have in our minds an imaginary ideal game, the one that would fix all those problems and the one that we would make if we had the chance.

To learn from other games, you have to pay attention as you play. Don't just play them for fun; look at them seriously and think about how they work. Take notes especially of things that you like or don't like and of features that seem to work particularly well or particularly badly . How do resources flow into the game? How do they flow out? How much is luck, and how much is skill?

As creative people, our instinct is to devise totally new kinds of games that have never before been seen. Unfortunately, publishers want games that they are sure they can sell, and that usually means variants on existing genres, perhaps with a new twist that they can use in marketing. This is why we keep seeing sequels and thinly disguised copies of earlier games. As designers, we have to learn to balance the tension between our own desire to innovate and the publisher's need for the comfortably familiar. Leonardo da Vinci warned against persistent imitation , however, in his Treatise on Painting :

"The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the work of others as his standard; but if he will apply himself to learn from the objects of nature he will produce good results. This we see was the case with the painters who came after the Romans, for they continually imitated each other, and from age to age their art steadily declined It is safer to go directly to the works of nature than to those which have been imitated from her originals , with great deterioration and thereby to acquire a bad method, for he who has access to the fountain does not go to the water pot."

There is a downside to deriving game ideas from other games. It tends to result in games that look or work alike. It's an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, approach. Deriving game ideas from other games is an excellent way to learn about games and gameplay, but if pursued exclusively, it produces similarity and, ultimately, mediocrity . The greatest games break new ground. They're unlike anything seen on the store shelves before. To achieve that, you have to dream.

From Dream to Game

A dream or an idea alone is only a start; it is not enough to make a game. A dream is a fantasy that you have by yourself. You can make computer games purely for yourself if you like, but most of us don't have the money to do that. A computer game is something that you make for someone else. You'll also discover after you've built a few games that playing a game that you worked on is a very different experience from playing a game that someone else has created. When you know what's on the inside and how it works, some of the fantasy is lost. Just as actors often don't watch their own movies, some game developers don't play their own games. For one thing, of course, if it's a single-player game, they already know how to beat it. But the experience, the dream, isn't quite the same when it's a game you built yourself. In your heart, you know it's an artificial simulation.

The chief purpose of a computer game is to entertain someone else. This means that you and your development team are the performers, the people who create the entertainment. An essential part of your job is communication, transmitting your dream to your audience, the players. If the game is in a well-known genre and setting (for example, a World War II flight simulator), you can be pretty certain that a number of people already share your dream. But if your game is in a new setting (a futuristic city of your imagination , for example) ”and especially if it's in a new genre ”you have to be very careful and thorough in communicating your dream to others. Some of the very first questions a publishing executive is going to ask you are "Why would anyone want to play this game?" and "What's going to make someone buy this game instead of another?".

But what does it mean to entertain someone? Many people think entertainment is synonymous with having fun, but even that isn't completely straightforward. People have fun in all kinds of ways. Some of those ways involve very hard work, such as gardening or building a new deck. Some of them involve frustration, such as solving a puzzle. Some, such as athletic competitions, even involve pain. One person's entertainment is another person's insufferable boredom. In building a computer game that entertains, it's important to understand how it entertains. And to do that, you have to know what a game really is.