A friend who took this class last year told me sometime over the summer that I should follow Pippin Barr on twitter. His GAME IDEA’s are pretty incredible, almost always funny, and sometimes very sweet. (Here’s a link to a bunch of ’em. There’s a list of them on his website here, but the format is maybe a bit better on that first link.) Inspired by how short (but great) his game ideas were, I started a file on my phone of game ideas. They’re nowhere near as funny, and quite a few were written at 2 in the morning (and you can tell), but I have actually used it to document my early concepts for a lot of the games I’ve made for this class. When I mentioned during my pitch presentation that I was trying to decide on a concept from a list of 6, all 6 were from that game idea file.
Some of the ideas in that file are half-formed. Some of them are just dumb jokes. Some of them turned into games I was pretty happy with. In design, we’re often encouraged to experiment a lot with ideation, to write down ideas that have nothing to do with our project, to take a break and then return to the project fresh, to explore the ideas that seem unlikely or over-the-top. I have boxes full of post-it notes on which I (and my classmates) scribbled ideas during ideation sessions in classes I’ve taken over the last few years. Some of the ideas didn’t fit my concept, some fit perfectly, some were coincidentally exactly what I’d been thinking about already, some are dumb jokes or drawings left by friends in the class, and all of them were useful. In one of those classes, I ended up making a video game for my final project. It was called “Little Critters,” and it was a cutesy video game made in GameMaker Studio, designed to, in the words of two different people I interviewed in the course of the project, “trick people into agreeing with [me].” I remember that project, that I was so excited about, with a significant amount of regret. I don’t think I should have made a video game to address the problem I was researching. Maybe, somewhere in the hundreds of post-its and messy sketches, a better solution is hiding, or a piece of a better solution.
Am I going to make “game where everybody runs like they’re wearing a backpack?” Who knows. Is it a funny idea that I might remember years down the line and incorporate somehow into a future project? Again, who knows, but I’m glad I’ve got it written down somewhere.
Approaching this project with my design education behind me is a little complicated, because so many design classes emphasize experimentation, ideation, and multiple, unrelated prototypes, and the timing of this class doesn’t allow for that. Ideation sessions (the more I type that phrase out, the more it feels pretentious – I’m talking about brainstorming, but the design department seems to have an intense love affair going with the word “ideation” and it’s been used in pretty much every design class I’ve ever taken – many many times) are one of my favorite things in design classes. I love pulling out a big piece of paper and writing down some more thought-out concepts I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and also a bunch of gibberish that, if nothing else, can function as comic relief during more emotionally-draining projects.
I’m not positive what my point is, beyond that I’m really happy I started that game idea note on my phone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to add to it. I’ve started tweeting out “Davis gothic” sentences, little weird microfiction things about Davis, and it’s making me see the appeal of tweeting out game ideas, too, if they’re good or sad or funny enough.
Here are a few of my favorite Pippin Barr GAME IDEA tweets. These ones, also.
Also, apparently, there was a game jam where people were invited to make games based on his tweets!
I’m still debating a few ideas for the final game, but they’re all in the game idea note on my phone.