Practical Creativity

um I'm supposed to remind you to check your email for session evaluations those will show up I'm supposed to remind you to mute your cellphone's so please do that I'm going to talk today about inventing new games because we all know we live in a world of clone after clone after clone after clone there are reasons to invent new games and not all of them are good and I will talk about that too sometimes being creative it's it's not necessarily an exclusive virtue right but it can be if used practically and really my goal for this talk we're going to do a little bit of work shopping in here I'm going to warn you my goal for this talk is to try to give you really concrete useable stuff you can take away so as far as who I am my name is Raph Koster and I wrote a book called a theory of fun I've been working as a lead designer a creative director starting with mmo's like Ultima Online a very long time ago now I've done pretty much every job there is in the game industry now some of which I really hated and I like the creative ones the best so those are the ones I'm going to focus on there's a lot of ways to think about creativity and I'm going to focus primarily on innovation I'm going to focus on coming up with brand new game ideas and I'm going to spend a lot of time more time just fortunately talking about coming up with new mechanics as opposed to coming up with new themes or stories to tell frankly coming up with new stories to tell which I will cover is relatively easy we have a lot of other media that we could go look at for that our failure there is mostly a failure of imagination I want to caution you all that innovation doesn't necessarily mean success right in fact often it means the exact opposite so we'll spend some time on that - ok start let's talk about what is creativity exactly a lot of people have the idea that it's the muses descending from the heavens with fire and Oh music and I don't know what else and and that's just usually wrong most research on creativity shows that it tends to arise out of scenes it tends to write a rise out of urban areas the clash the collision the mixing together of disparate ideas from different cultures or subcultures or disciplines okay in other words creativity is what happens when you take oil and water and actually try to mix them it isn't the grand mystical thing it's actually a fairly straightforward process that you can cause to happen quite intentionally and it's a skill set that you can actually practice and develop into a habit personal expression is wonderful but it isn't necessarily creative it isn't necessarily bringing something radically new into the world how do you go about it well the first thing that you really need is to have you know do you guys know what a substrate is under an aquarium anybody here keep fish okay it is the most boring part of setting up an aquarium right you need gravel and maybe some muck of various sorts you need bacteria you need maybe some soil it's the stuff that sits the bottom of the aquarium the covers a couple of inches of what could be awesome looking colorful fish but without that substrate nothing in the aquarium works if you try setting up an aquarium with with no substrate you'll quickly find you can't actually have a suitable ecosystem for anything to live the same is true of a whole lot of things in our lives but in particular I want to talk about the substrate that we need to be creative in the discipline of games in game design in other fields your substrate is different if you were here to learn about poetry I would tell you you should go off and study prosody and meter and rhyme you should study linguistics and other languages in the case of game I'm going to tell you to study games and to study how games are put together the pieces and parts of games the first thing I want to encourage you to do is to break your notion of what a game is and I'll just throw out some random assertions first-person shooter is what we usually call a genre right but just for a moment consider the idea that first-person shooter and poker are the same thing aa game a singular game a way to think of this is that you have a rule construct a set of behaviors and rules and and resources and that kind of thing that interact with one another often we see it skinned differently like a Lord of the Rings chess set is still chess right then we see variants so for example you might modify a rule and that opens up the door to new styles of play but the game is still recognizably poker add enough of these and you end up with a family we start thinking of poker the family and eventually you end up with the poker genre the original version of Poker was played with less cards hat did not have multiple rounds to it you just drew and then you saw what you got right and gradually variants started coming in wild cards and so on until today we have poker and when you say poker most people actually think of let's say Texas Hold'em which is a very specific variant within the Poker family but we can still look at all of these and say they're still all poker there's something there that makes us say this is all in common can you guys let's I've warned you I'd workshop something uh you're looking at me so you get picked throughout as onra 2d platformer somehow I knew you'd say 2d platformer right so if we think of 2d platformer in the same lens as we are with first-person shooters here right here's first-person shooters can you do that for platformers start with Mario sure that's acceptable I would go earlier I would start with Donkey Kong okay and then comes its first reskin or clone you start getting things like Donkey Kong jr. very quickly we start running into variants so we start getting things like kangaroo kangaroo very much like Donkey Kong or Donkey Kong jr. we start seeing differences in the maps we start seeing differences like that but kangaroo adds punching which is a whole new thing it adds obstacles flying in from the sides pretty soon we have a whole family of 2d platformers eventually Super Mario introduces the side-scrolling and really starts locking in what the family of it is right but really we look at any of these and we say I jump and I have to get to the other side right I mean that's still the heart of the platforming game almost every video game we make is actually a variant it is incredibly rare in videogames for us to invent truly new games this stands in stark contrast to let's say the tabletop game industry where almost every game is actually a new game truly a new game a new rule construct when we talk about German board games virtually every German board game is actually significantly different okay but that's not true when we look at video games in video games you can actually say a game is a genre and usually you will be right when we do see significant creative innovation in game mechanics it tends to be down at the casual end and it tends to be at the abstract end okay puzzle games for example we're seeing an explosion of innovation today with indie games and with mobile games precisely because innovation is often very expensive and highly risky so it flourishes at times when budgets are low cost of entry is low and cost of failure is low right because of that we've had an amazing period of new mechanics being invented of creativity in the industry as we're seeing budgets rise I would predict we see less creativity in the industry actually now because of that I want this to be realistic here I'm going to talk a lot about creating brand new games from scratch but the fact is the same tools techniques tips tricks work for creating variants work for extending a family or extending a genre you don't have to necessarily be creating a game from scratch you can still use these these tools in order to extend first-person shooters in a new direction so all the biggest things you need to do once you've gotten used to thinking that first-person shooter is a game you need to start learning how to really break down things and start looking them really atomically and this is something that particularly for those of us who are worse more used to working in triple-a more used to working in large-scale narrative constructs than anything else this is often a skill that's a little bit weird okay we often tend to look more the game surface than at the mathematics underneath the game the thing is going back to the simple games of the 70s the 80s or focusing a lot on the casual end of the spectrum like mobile is actually super valuable to you even if you tend to work at the large scale and that is because mechanics are usually games games are built out of smaller games and so you can take these mini games that might be an entire game down at the casual or mobile end of the spectrum and move them into being features and something that's larger scale so super valuable to build up your mechanics library the absolute best advice I can give everybody who is a working game designer in the video game business first obsessively play lots of board games second obsessively play lots of mobile games and third get yourself a MAME cabinet and play the games in chronological order one of the big reasons to force yourself out of the narrative lens is in order to distance yourself from your usual modes of seeing so let's give you here's an example let's say we take a deck of cards and we distribute it into four separate piles we make sure that every pile has an ace in it okay but other than that the rest of the cards are random and I'm going to say start on pile one and begin flipping cards over when you find the ACE that unlocks the next pile and you can begin flipping over more cards anybody think this game sounds super fun anybody this was game of the Year last year okay mechanically that is all the rules set of gone home really implies that is not a knock against gone home a mechanic's can be very very simple this mechanic here is called environmental storytelling that is the name of the mechanic and what is it you find hotspots in an environment and you click on them and at some point the hotspot unlocks a block of more hotspots that's it okay learning to see things this abstractly is actually an enormous help okay and it doesn't denigrate the story in any way right it doesn't denigrate the amazing value that the story provides instead what it does is help you build a library like this this is a random little subset off the top of my head a very common small game mechanics it's far from being exhaustive and therefore I'm now going to pick on people will start with tyke give me one that isn't on here actually anybody starts shouting them out if you want yes in the green shirt item Association that's right so linking together items through shared qualities yes that could be a form of set packing and it might not yep that's a good one somebody else collection absolutely just building collections again that could be a form of set packing might not one of the really interesting things about these by the way is that you'll find that there are isomorphic to one another what that means is sometimes the same mechanic can be described using completely different words as a different mathematical structure but they work the same inside okay so you can actually see Sudoku as being a fill the map problem you can also see Sudoku as being a set packing problem and if you dig into the math of it those are different branches of mathematics but that's okay because different branches of mathematics often tackle the same problem just using different tools and techniques can anybody think of a different one you guys just aren't awake today lorilynn I'm picking on you yeah there are a huge number of game mechanic patterns that are social that's right probably one of the biggest and commonest is rolls rolls is a fundamental pattern for all social games and it's a good indication of how abstract it is in a social game on Facebook you really have two roles neighbor and player and they're both vital to progressing right in a given play field on a soccer team you have goalie and you have striker and so on and we can extend this through any kind of team-based or even non team-based multiplayer game if you're in wow we have healers and tanks and new cures so rolls is a great example of a mechanic pattern I don't think there's a good way to build an exhaustive list of this so for those of you who are happily you know photographing this from exhaustive game design patterns super useful book another one advanced game mechanics another super useful book and these vary dramatically in the ways in which they describe these patterns but they're just collections of mechanics patterns like this that you can then use and what you want to do is learn as many as you can because these are the tools on your workbench so that was the substrate now we talk about how you use them you never I'll just be blunt nobody ever comes up with something out of the blue life just doesn't work that way in practice most creativity is taking a pattern out of its comfy recognizable context and moving it into a different one that might seem boring okay just the other night I was watching how we got to now the new TV series on PBS by Steven Johnson there was a glass maker in Venice who wanted to make clear glass the only reason it happened is because he tried a plant the ashes of a plant he imported from Turkey and mixed it into the glass and somehow that made it clear I don't understand why that works but it did somebody else entirely said you know what if we then grind these we could make lenses and they invented spectacles but it took a long time to pull that out into a different context and invent microscopes and telescopes and took a very long time to pull that into yet another context and invent fiber optics right so moving a very simple idea from place to place and context to context and changing it in the process is actually your biggest tool for creativity and it's the reason why scenes work right disparate groups of people coming together in an environment in order to bounce ideas off of each other it's why non-homogeneous teams tend to be more creative than homogeneous teams or teams that have worked together for a very long time here's an example of this you are all familiar with the humble die and when we use a die we always think of it in the same way it generates a random number from 1 to 6 but if you say here is a die and I'm not allowed to use it as a random number generator you remove that from the table it starts opening up all of these new kinds of contexts so for example you could use it as a hit point counter after all it's got a scale 1 to 6 you can turn it you could use it as a timer right it's got a scale it moves up and down you could use it to indicate state maybe 6 means I am knocked down and 2 means I am you know an aggressive mode you could use it as an indicator of max so instead of tracking things it could be this is the max possible I could reach and then I don't know how many of you have played the wonderful tabletop game blueprints you literally use dice as building bricks in that game the numbers matter but you're literally building a little building out of dice I'm sure there are more ways to use dice the point being pull a simple tool out of its context out of its assumptions and move it into someplace else and suddenly you might get a whole new fresh set of ideas this is why if you're playing with cards and using cards for a prototyping tool it's valuable to have a regular kind of deck and an unknow deck they look so different one uses colors the other doesn't and so on it pushes you in different directions just the fact that uno has four colors in a regular deck has two even though mathematically they are basically identical okay what else could we use cards for you're looking at me sir so you get picked pull cards out of the context there's a classic example of what people use cards for there are games that use car mechanics sure library of actions yep from what's a classic example house of cards right that's radically pulling the card out of context what's another one right fortune-telling is a classic application for cards that's right cards could be literally used just for the fact they are a convenient sized match to cover stuff up in fact let's invent a game right now with that idea let's take a card we lay it face up I don't know what we got let's say it's the eight of diamonds the game is about covering up the diamonds so every card is now a play field and now we've got something else that we need to lay down to cover up the diamonds what cards you end up maybe the the pips on the card are actually the monsters in that dungeon room and that's their initial position right move the element out of its context and all of a sudden stuff just starts appearing completely new possibilities the simplest way in which people try to affect game design changes and variants and so on is to extend a statistic let's add fireball six this does not work not only is it not innovative it's boring it's boring because you are not offering the player anything new to learn you're not offering the player anything new except an incremented number odds are an incremented number measured against another incremented number I use fireball six on a bigger pork XP sack which actually means my ratio is still one to one right or whatever that's just not interesting players see through the patterns CF my book theory of fun a new stat though complete lately new statistical metric that can add a new rule and if you add a new rule now you're in the realm of creating a variant so if you add a time constraint on virtually any game you might accidentally create a Time Attack mode you might accidentally create speedruns time was always there probably but it wasn't a formalized stat right you haven't actually bothered to track it and display it the minute you track it and display it goals will be created around it rules might be created around it if you track number of moves in virtually anything let's try number of moves in an FPS all of a sudden we now have an accuracy meter number of shots fired over number that hit let's try it in an RPG I've actually never seen it in an RPG is there such a thing as an efficiency meter and an RPG there could be right and some players would probably find it a pretty interesting game so adding a new statistic if it adds a new rule and thereby creates a variant can be pretty fruitful now you have to watch out a proliferation of statistics is not necessarily going to be the best thing and so because of that I would encourage you each time you explore adding a statistic try taking a different one away and see what happens not all of them will work but the permutation of it will probably lead you somewhere interesting this one here is a classic way of doing this there have only been five fighting games in history everybody always gets really pissed off when I say that especially because Street Fighter is not on my list okay but if you think about it the ER fighting game is rock-paper-scissors you've got three attacks no defenses and you can't move that's it start adding a tax that's just extending a statistic but something like karate champ actually added defenses a new statistic a noon move class a new rule and of course they added the statistic of distance and now all of a sudden you have this game most fighting games to this day are still this game they are rock-paper-scissors moving back and forth on an aligned axis right in fact Virtua Fighter and so on Street Fighter there's still this it doesn't matter if they're in 3d because the 3d is a narrative thing it's an optical illusion right it's not real karateka created a whole new genre by changing the topology of the dimension saying we're going to make that dimension infinite and it created that side-scrolling beat-em-up and that's a whole family tree that grew off of it but it wasn't until battle arena toshinden which added side step that a true new dimension was added into the fighting genre and sidestep frankly was a pretty lame one it wasn't an intuitive control it still as far as most of the games have gone somebody did actually say let's extend the dimension one further all the way to a full 2d plane that was Bushido blade it turned out to be a bridge too far to my knowledge the last fighting game that did that was Bushido blade - and there it ended right so adding a dimension is an incredibly common way to extend things if you think about what happened with platformers this is the technique that was used to extend 2d platforming first we had screen bound then we added the dimension of an infinite scroll then we added the third dimension and we got Mario 64 and pretty much there it stayed since then right for those who are trying to be creative and working on these fundamental building blocks I actually strongly urge you to think analog rather than digital and there's a bunch of reasons for this one is that if you step far enough back from digital you realize that it's still turn-based it's just that the turns are on a timer that expires 60 times a second okay so you can still apply mechanics these mechanics still work turn-based all the way down at that level right and so often you can prototype even action game mechanics digitally this here is a highly processed photo of my analog game prototyping kit and this is just a fraction of the crap that I have in there I go to Michael's and I buy out chunks of the craft aisles okay incredibly useful uh flat wooden squares random wooden shapes a fellow because flipping binary state is super useful they're the closest thing to a two sided die that you can get random things like Stars chips hexes circles go beads a hex mat you know all of these things go into the mix why do they go into the mix because saying something like could I stick a hex grid underneath a first person shooter is an interesting way to start mashing up contexts working analog even for digital is an interesting way to force you to step back and look at something very familiar your shooter your platform or your farming game your puzzle game whatever and make it unfamiliar to you again and making things that you know very well unfamiliar to you again is a classic creative technique and it's one of the reasons why the history of creativity is littered with people getting stoned in various ways speaking of unfamiliar the quick brown fox they claim jumped the lazy dogs over and more forever cycling Madhur quoted alphabets leveling zip an indexed joker wild unlucky vixen pangram beast spending cues and hoarding js the thrifty ditzy wench wife hats phonemes fro and too when flow tricks and jokes the cards of status quo delights us so books bursting free the japes glyphs queries cat Alexis Sigma's woven from words quotidian to dazzle vex pry illumine beckon y judge letters equal math must be seizing Renard's mind values coughing waxing jabber equations poking til nothing's left except a panchromatic sieve quibbling Z's and K's hortatory just and swift I like sticking poetry in my game design talks just cuz I have an MFA in it can somebody tell me what the weird thing about this poem is every line has every letter of the alphabet it is they are pen Grammatik lines that's right this is an example of working with a constraint okay poetry is full of working with constraints on purpose giving yourself a an extremely limiting box to work in is a time-honored classic creative tool okay one of the ways in which artists are trained is that they tell them here's this gorgeous still-life construction of stuff that you should go draw you have seven seconds go and they make you do that over and over again it's called gestural drawing and it's done to force you to stop looking at it familiarly by imposing a constraint imposing a time constraint think about what you can do imposing constraints if I'm designing board games for example I had a very successful design run with this board game I took some of the pieces out of that kit and said I'm going to make a game using only these pieces and you know what I got a really good game out of it okay forcing constraints on yourself is incredibly valuable uh somebody on that side of the room since I've picked on so many people here and who isn't Laura line name a game genre tactical RPG okay somebody over here name a constraint think about something that is like an impossibly tiny box for a tactical RPG you have to work in a in a cube okay a tactical RPG that must fit inside a cube how about another constraint a non-violent tactical RPG that's a great one that's a really really good one are you getting the idea here you give yourself an impossible limit something that makes you go there's no way to do that in there and you know what you'll probably start coming up with solutions you'll probably start inventing new game mechanics adding a verb or goal now you have to be careful adding goals players can't juggle too many at once really good games tend to have more than one goal operating at the moment-to-moment okay cause damage not take damage great example two goals that might be in conflict attack and defend at the same time how is defender created from lots of fairly boring shoot-'em-ups by adding this little extra goal you have to protect the little people right that alone made the game dramatically deeper dramatically more interesting there had been games about just rescuing and there had been games about just shooting things combining the two choplifter another example from the same time period using the same mix of verbs radically different games of course but you can see that the creativity that emerges from throwing in disparate ones and in particularly should be ones that are in competition with one another ones where you go oh crap do I spend my time doing a or B right force the players to have to make that decision moment to moment now your overall game picture might have one of these as paramount right in defender there's no question that defending is the core goal right because you lose if you but at the moment to moment defending and killing intertwine and balance each other really regularly same thing speed we talked about adding the speed statistic players have added the do it fast goal to any number of games that we didn't think to do but do it too ok which was a failure on our part as designers perhaps but today we have the speed run movement which is enormous from players imposing a new goal on games that had frankly been exhausted in terms of game plan if you add enough goals to something you eventually add up with a sandbox game it's dangerous to add lots of disparate goals that aren't balancing one another right but if you have a multiplayer environment adding disparate goals per role is actually super critical it's actually the thing that creates roles so the goals of a goalie are radically different from the goals of a striker this one has been incredibly fruitful lately as we moved to touch ok a lot of people like to say the game is the interface the interface is the game and that isn't really accurate okay and I'll diagram why but it is a very fruitful way to think about things if you how many of you have played soccer physics anybody go grab it on your on your on your mobile device it's on iOS I know it's probably been cloned on Android also you get one button that you can tap or hold and that's all the controls you get for a soccer game okay changing the number of axes of movement the time duration of movement breaking a simple control into a complex one combining a complex control into a simple one modifying your input so now it's haptic maybe it's buttons maybe it's joystick no let's move the joystick into twin joysticks right I don't know how many of you have ever played Robotron on the actual cabinet versus playing Robotron with a single joystick and button its effect a variant of the same game and it is a different game defender with the reverse button or with a joystick that is a four-way joystick is effectively a different game in the defender family okay and you can see this as it spreads across ports in on various devices the reason why this works is because games are in fact made out of games we usually think of a game this way right and that isn't necessarily wrong it is good to think of this is still the game of defender with different controls that is a valid and valuable lens but it's also good to think of the controls are a game and defender is a game and we master them separately I might be great at defender on the Atari 2600 or something where it's one joystick and socket the defender with the up-down and a reverse button in the arcades very easy to fall into that trap believe me I did wasted a lot of quarters because effectively there's a whole new game buried in the controls so it's false to just think of things in terms of this is what the game is games are made out of games and it's better to think about how can I take an entire game chunk of game you know sub game out of this game and replace it and inputs are one of the easiest things that you can do that with take defender put it on a Wii mode aa whole new game right even if it is still defender on the other end right swapping out inputs incredibly useful changing topologies the graph space we often don't look at games in terms of the graph I've used this example so many times asteroids is not played on a square it's played on a doughnut right pac-man is also played on a Dunham's donut or mobius strip depending what level you're on um snakes and ladders is played in non Euclidean geometry with wormholes right learn to look at games that way in terms of the Raph's in terms of their topologies and all of a sudden it opens up new things in Space Invaders we move side to side in a bounded way the enemies wiggle side to side and they move outwards change the way in which they move outwards and you get Galaxian but take that line and wrap it into a circle and you get tempest or gyrus okay all you've done is change the graph topology by linking the ends of the line you've changed what had been a line into a circle or you know an infinite loop and that radically changes things it really does the number of variations on Tetris with Tetris played with different shapes is insane and there are versions of it where the play field has a different topology and versions of it with the pieces use a different topology you could take virtually any game so somebody named a game somebody in the back I'll pick somebody if somebody doesn't raise their hand back there farmville okay somebody pick a different topology farmville farmville in 3d so to really do that that means plants hanging in the air okay think about that that's actually kind of interesting orchid farming maybe right plants might grow in any direction maybe they spread how about another one some other game DDR okay DDR with a different topology or graph sorry mudroom DDR so that one's kind of interesting but actually I was in Argentina not that long ago mud rooms are there hypertextual spaces so that means they can have arbitrary graph shapes nodes with arbitrary links if you think about it I'm walking down the street in Argentina and I found inlaid in the sidewalk the steps of the tango the steps of the tango and in fact any given dance are in fact nodes in arbitrary graphs because every dance has a different pattern of steps you just invented the dance teaching game right brand-new game I told you we'd come up with new stuff here what game is this breakout space invaders yes which one is it could be either one it could be both right when you take that step of abstracting you something all this could be either one which means you could do an a meets B how cool would it be to play space invaders where your method of attack was breakout and they shot back right that game probably exists actually because it's almost too obvious doing mashups of things that share underlying topologies is actually a really fruitful way to go there's lots of possibilities there DDR meets Simon Says right that's kind of how DDR was born that is what DDR is that Simon Says with your feet try doing this now with things that don't seem like they have anything in common could you mashup blackjack and Robotron I have no idea but try see what comes out of it if there's enough they're shared in common it might turn out that hey shooting robots and push your luck is a good technique when we think about a game we usually reach instinctively for the most straightforward simulation tool and that might be a really big mistake think about it last year at GDC I was in Soren Johnson's talk and he was talking about mostly tabletop game design he was talking about RTS I was like could you do an RTS where you don't have a map where it's stimulated with just cards that's like probably a whole new genre of game right because you're taking something that's poorly suited for simulating one of the standard elements of RTS the real time and the territory right but what else could you apply badly suited simulation techniques - it's not that you're going to end up simulating the same thing it's that you're going to find different ways to enact the relationships between things could you simulate a first-person shooter with only dice there's probably something there the die roll maybe is your field of view maybe it's actually you know you roll the dice in the direction try to roll it along the table to hit somebody yeah you start exploring these things by moving things out of their familiar context classic example of moving things out of context is by choosing a new metaphor now this is not the same thing as just a new skin a skin is something like Lord of the Rings chest set on top of regular chest that that's not that interesting that's a little boring but what happens if you literally change the metaphor if we take a first-person shooter and say that it's about cameras all of a sudden that says wait we could have depth of field in the game we could have rule of threes in the game right we could have composition in the game and we start inventing entire new fields for the game so it's not just skinning look what happens when we change this which is just about visiting nodes on a graph from eating into painting girders painting girders all of a sudden we have to jump adds a new game in to painting a house which adds the notion maybe you can paint over you can repaint you can have other people competing which opens up Qbert which is the same game as pac-man visit every note on the graph right but this isn't even not on a grid it's actually a regular square grid turned this way and chopped in half because the relationship between the squares is still on a grid what would happen if you actually use a triangular graph or a hexagonal graph things change pretty rapidly so are there other genres you can think of where you go oh I might be able to take that and radically alter it just by picking a new skin metaphor an alternate way to describe the mechanical verb this also works moving mechanics out so yes pac-man is visit every node on the graph but if you say I actually only want to visit certain nodes on the graph now it's picking up objects right and then if you say what if these nodes on the graph are hidden it becomes a secret system pac-man was mashed into Super Mario and that is how we got Super Mario by mashing in the abstract mechanic of visiting particular nodes on a graph visiting particular locations so all of that is very mathy that doesn't mean that math is the only area for innovation because you can innovate on the thematic side as well there's really only a couple of rules here and it's fairly straightforward you want the mathematical underlying stuff to match up well with what you're trying to make the game be about and frankly the biggest problem with innovating in terms of games on the narrative artistic experience side is that we pick really boring familiar experiences to model when we should be asking ourselves what is this actually about because the vast majority of games are about becoming more powerful and nothing else right which isn't a particularly innovative or interesting idea right so if you want to innovate on that front you should be asking yourself questions on a slightly deeper level even games even films that are about the badass hero are very rarely about being a badass hero standard example I use is the die hard you've all seen die hard die hard is about a man trying to reconnect with his estranged wife he is so willing to do this that he will literally walk on broken glass that is what the movies actually about and yeah there's terrorists on an exploding helicopter but it's not where the emotional core of the movie resides now you can approach solving this problem from either end you might start at the experience end think of a cool interesting complex thing that you want to say from an experience point of view that's a perfectly what valid way to approach it it's actually a very common way to approach it these days the risk here is that you then drill down into the same mechanics as always odds are that if you do that you're going to undermine the point you were trying to make you're going to undermine the message because the mechanics that you'll be using probably map to other things in people's minds already if you want to be really successful at getting across a point you want to find mechanics that cleave closely to the same point as your theme one of the first steps is ask yourself is there a story that literally hasn't been told so I throw up a bunch here but again somebody tell me a game about something that has literally never been seen on earth and the easiest way to do it is go back to your last vacation or childhood experience think about a peak emotional moment in your life and just tell me what that experience was learning to ride a bike great I have never seen a game about learning to ride a bike ever fantastic great somebody else over here adopting a child great right it's actually trivially easy to come up with these razor super super easy our only failure here is complete lack of imagination it just because we haven't taken the step back and you know what really does this you know I get to judge games for awards at the end of the year getting all the games in one box and laying them all down with their covers face off on the carpet and realizing that every single one is a stubbly head shaved bearded dude with a giant gun really makes you realize how similar all of the stories are right so you choose a theme that's different you can also start from underneath if you come up with a new mathematical relationship a new rule set ask yourself what does this mechanic mean does this mechanic imply teamwork does this mechanic imply persuasion does this mechanic imply radicalization what what are the implications of this particular mechanical relationship systems fit inside one another since games are made out of games you can ask yourself if this mechanic ends up being about friendship let's say I have two units that can only successfully move when they are near each other and linked that's the core mechanic in eco right you ask yourself theme Attica Lee what does that mean oh it's friendship then you ask yourself what is the system in which friendship is a key ingredient and what happens is you start to converge your top and your bottom ask yourself what is a story I could tell about friendship right maybe I need to use that mechanic in the game where my parent teaches me to ride the bike and suddenly you start meeting in the middle so I'm not actually a huge fan of only coming at it from one end and I think in triple-a we tend to come at things just from the top and I think down at the casual puzzle kind of end we tend to come at things only from the bottom and then we slap whatever skin we want on there but really interesting innovation is probably going to innovate on both levels at the same time right so this game recently I was at a designer retreat and the question came up how come there isn't a good romance game yet well my wife is trying to be a romance novelist so it turns out they have like romance novels are down to a science they know exactly the steps exactly what goes in there and the core thing about romance novels what they are about is to people who have flaws and the other person helps them overcome them they're about the gift of completion right and so I literally sat in this design group and I was like scribbling that and then I would move down and go what is a mechanic well gifting obviously has to be gifting but they also have to get to know one another so that means I need to be gifting them resources only I don't know how many they have then I move back up what are these resources well they're things like confidence they're things like independence they're things like commitment because those are the typical themes of romance novels that I move back down and I'm back down in the system this game turned out fairly successful I would have brought it with me but unfortunately it was so successful that when they shipped it from the printer they shipped it to Hawaii where I can only presume it was on honeymoon alright those are all things that are very game specific the rest of this is stuff you could pick up from any random self-help book so I'll just warn you right now creativity since it is a skill also needs to be a habit do it habitually I don't know how many of you have ever visited a game of week.com but you should go to a game a week calm and feel utterly and completely inadequate as creatives this guy puts out a new unique game a week excellent habit just like working songwriters try to write a song every day they throw away almost all of them it's a habit believe it or not having a messy desk is a virtue why because the disordered environment forces you to make unique rare connections remember creativity is about making unusual connections between things a very orderly desk is not going to generate fresh connections you want to accidentally spill your chocolate into your peanut butter and the only way to do that is to have your working area be kind of messy this is also why it has been shown that working in a noisy slightly distractible environment and they actually know exactly how many decibels it should be has been shown to increase the rate of idea generation so you can actually visit this website it'll generate coffee shop noises for you in the background at the right volume level exercise is extremely stimulating you should be doing it anyway clearly I'm not doing it enough stand-up at least once every hour for at least five minutes that kind of thing stasis is a bad thing don't do a kind of like not rock climbing where you might fall and die it needs to be something where you can let your mind wander get enough sleep probably all of you have a smartphone that means all of you have a sleep tracker it's built into the motion detectors on your phones now super useful particularly you want to pay attention to the amount of REM sleep you're getting worth a try you use your phone as an alarm clock it will actually wake you up when you're naturally waking up and then you won't feel as groggy in the morning take notes by hand not typing handwriting has been shown I don't know why maybe because it's slower maybe because it incurs different cognitive loads for whatever reason retention is better when you take notes by hand and it a lot of novelists to this day say you know I went back and I wrote that longhand and won an award for it so I personally use a stylus on my tablet rather than typing on my tablet don't be afraid to completely fail and fall on your face okay I don't know how many of you have been doing brainstorming meetings the classic way but it's wrong the classic way of doing brainstorming meetings is to say every idea is good nobody criticized anybody that outputs two ideas per person per hour if you allow the other people in the room to say no that's a bad idea and here's why you get seven ideas per person per hour go figure we're all taught incorrectly for a generation it's incredibly important to be okay with failure it's incredibly important to keep those failures around okay I had a game that I designed it was a tabletop game that used little round counters with colors on them arranged in circles where you're trying to do set packing to get certain patterns of colors into your hand and it was so damn fiddly it was a disaster it didn't work at all we kept trying to play it just didn't work I shoved it two years later I come back to it and I go wait if I put those own cards so I could actually overlap the cards now that game is going to be published by Boeing Boeing and cards against humanity and the Kickstarter will be later this year keep your fails around because you never know when they're going to turn out moved into a new context to be really good ideas the myth of the angsty depressed artist is people are more creative when they're actually happy this is why exercise works just relaxing works high-stress is a creativity killer just a warm shower helps frankly right let yourself float in a swimming pool whatever it is that you do to relax for me often it's playing guitar I can sit and zone out with the guitar and doesn't matter what I'm playing and it will lead to ideas and new ways play the movie to yourself in your head this is a classic creative exercise close your eyes all of you those are now quit reading the slide I see reading stop and picture a wheelbarrow okay class a creative exercise people who are more creative supposedly see things like the pattern of rust on the side of the wheelbarrow and they know what color it is they can see the little pile of dirt and maybe a little bit of strong that one brick that is nestled in the corner they know the way in which the handle along the sides of the handle it's actually that you shaped curve of metal that then becomes round and the way the one screw always catches your hand being able to dive that deep is what drives the creativity play the movie in your head you can open your eyes now okay supposedly those are more creative are able to see more detail in those movies it's one of the best ways of pushing yourself out of the context the world is full of systems and relationships so read like crazy you wouldn't know it but something like the AI and early mmo's was partially inspired by the fact that at MIT that we're putting little robots on rollerskates ideas come from funny places right read about every subject you can think of because that's where you start making connections that come out of context don't settle for the familiar don't settle for it among people mix up your teams don't settle for it among places try moving your desk every week to a different location it will probably prompt ideas explain things because it forces you to abstract it forces you to reduce things back down into essence and look at things systemically and then finally realize that everything I said doesn't mean you'll be successful creative leaders are usually perceived as being worse leaders than people who do things by the book usually the people invent a new game are not the ones who make the big bucks off of it so if you're financially motivated this is not the way to go it's risky even if you do all of these things you'll probably fail more often than not so why do it well it open other doors for you it's fun it's how you leave a mark and I assume all of us are in this because we wanted to do that there are lots of ways to make money and more reliable ways than this if you execute you can in fact on a blue ocean so there is a business reason to do it and these days especially being creative in your particular way and everybody has a particular way builds your brand and that's incredibly important these days because marketing as we know it is dead so here's the takeaway we're in a creative field this is a creative business make it a habit make it a skill and be practical about it it's not rocket science it's just hard thanks [Applause] we're supposed to move to the overflow room but it is if we have questions but it's lunchtime so I'm not sure it matters so if anybody does have questions or you can all leave for lunch because you're hungry I will post these slides on my website Raph Koster comm at probably over lunch I have not found a place where you can buy blacas pieces without having to buy blacas that said if I were prototyping that I would probably go buy wooden cubes which are available pretty cheaply both online and a craft store they add up you can get cubes in various sizes and I would glue them together way cheaper than buying blocker sets that is connected into a singular ecosystem so yeah you're cheating that's fine you have a sump tank that's fine you need to have a substrate or a some there okay yeah any other questions I'm sorry I didn't quite follow Oh an investor if you're an investor how do you find the right creative process for game are you looking for creative people or yes I would look for track record frankly I would look for people that have done it before I would also look at the exact opposite end a complete novices complete novices have you ever noticed that when you listen to bands or putting out their first album their first album is often startling and then their second and third are not as interesting it's because people who don't yet know what everything is familiar often invent completely new things because they don't have the context and it's not yet you know and then when they settle in they just do things the way they always have and they get less interesting so a team of veterans and novices might actually be a more interesting thing to invest in then a team of you know well practice people who've made exactly the kind of game that you've always made you know that kind of thing try to find people who both have a track record of exploring new areas and find people who'll just bring fresh ideas people who just haven't done this haven't done it that way to force creative sparks and if you're an investor realize you'll probably be first mover and the second mover will eat your lunch right so minecraft was built on infinite miner Blizzard was built on well literally a half-dozen other games that they cloned and improved and polished the hell out of right I don't know that Blizzard has ever invented a game in their entire existence what they do is be second mover very very well so if you're an investor you might not want to do creativity at all a lot of games companies just do fast follow right they look for innovative new things and then they follow on it anybody else all right thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 258,292

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: zyVTxGpEO30

Length: 64min 25sec (3865 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Nosteme]

Such a good video for anyone wanting to get into game design