Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Game ideas can crop up in all sorts of unlikely places. The smash-hit game fran-
chise
The Sims
was partly inspired by a nonfiction book by Christopher Alexander
called
A Pattern Language
(Alexander, 1977), which is about the way people's lives
are affected by the design of their houses. Just as great scientists look at even the
most common things in the world—light, air, gravity—and ask how they work,
great game designers are always looking at the world and wondering what parts of
it they can make into a game. The trick to finding original ideas, beyond the elf-
and-wizard combinations that have been done so often, 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. 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 you insight and lets you compare and contrast the features of different games.
Sometimes new game ideas are motivated by a desire to improve an existing game.
We think, “If I had designed this game, I would have….” 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 not well
at all. How do resources flow into the game? How do they flow out? How much of
your success comes from luck? How much from skill?
As creative people, our instinct is to devise totally new kinds of games that have
never been seen before. Unfortunately, publishers want games that they are sure
they can sell, and that usually means variations of existing games, perhaps with a
new twist that can be used in marketing. This explains why we keep seeing sequels
and thinly disguised copies of earlier games. As designers, we have to learn to bal-
ance the tension between our own desire to innovate and the publisher's need for
the comfortably familiar. Leonardo da Vinci warned against persistent imitation,
in his
Treat ise on Paint ing
:
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.
Deriving game ideas from other games tends to produce games that look or work
alike. Studying other games is an excellent way to learn how they function, but if
pursued exclusively, imitation produces similarity and, ultimately, mediocrity. The
