I enjoy watching Ted Talks every now and again. Especially on creativity. 8 years ago I watched this Ted Talk and it has stuck with me for a long time.
In the Ted Talk, the speaker Kirby Ferguson describes what he considers to be 3 forms of creativity (based on a book he wrote on the subject):
Copy – Replicate someone else’s work
Transform – Take someone else’s work and modify it to make something new
Combine – Taking elements you’ve learned from copying and transforming and building something new
Now primarily this Ted Talk focuses on music and art, forms of creativity where copy is an essential element to learning and growing as a creator. You can copy a song, copy a painting as exactly as possible, etc. This type of exact duplication of an artist’s work makes sense for those mediums – this is we how learn in those mediums.
But ‘Copy’ isn’t overly valuable in game design if you don’t understand what you are copying. You don’t gain much from simply recreating a game. What you need is to know how it’s constructed. I would reshape the model for game design as such:
Deconstruct/Reconstruct – Take someone else’s work, break it down into its parts, add to your toolkit and then reconstruct the work
Transform – Take someone else’s work or deconstructed parts and modify to create something new
Combine – Take various parts in your toolkit and bring them together into something new
Damn near everything you do in your exploration of new gameplay mechanics for games falls into the Transform and Combine forms of creativity, utilizing the many things you have gained in your toolkit through Reconstruction.
If you examine the product cycle of ‘new’ mechanics that explode into the market, you will see that most often they aren’t new at all. Someone has very cleverly used Combine to create a new experience (in another blog maybe I’ll dive into the difference between Product Design and Game Design). Then a glut of games that Transform that hot game hit the market, followed by a handful that Combine more and pull the mechanic in new directions. And then a down cycle occurs where gamers will declare the mechanic overused and dead. Then someone will kickstart the cycle over with a killer product that utilizes Combine in an awesome way again and reinvigorates gamers in the mechanic. This is the collective creative cycle of the industry. Everybody learns from everybody else.
I am not a (modestly) successful game designer without my frequent partner Mike Mihealsick. He deconstructs with the best of them and I have learned more than I can begin to describe by simply working with him. I also owe a ton to Stefan Feld and Shem Philips, whose games I have deconstructed and Reconstructed dozens of times. There are hundreds more game designers I can list here.
If you’re new to game design, then Deconstruct like a madperson. Because your first instinct might be to Transform before you’re ready. An example might be – you take your favorite basic deck-builder and you change the setting, tweak a few keywords, add a slight variation to the economy and you have a new game. And play test it and it feels flat, because it feels so much like your favorite deck-builder that you don’t feel overly creative. This is ok! You did a thing and that is awesome.
If I played your design, I would start to ask you pointed questions. Have you truly understood what deck-building mechanics are all about? What is the incentive structure for players? What motivates different lines of play? What are the opportunity costs presented in your choices? What creates the greatest satisfaction moment in your play? How does the underlying math model work? In other words, did you deconstruct your inspiration and reconstruct it?
I’m absolutely terrible at doing my homework in the industry. I have never read a book on game design, I don’t listen to podcasts often and I rarely read blogs. That’s the consequence of trying to be a game designer while also having a full time career in management, a family including two kids and a house.
But all of those resources exist out there where people have done the deconstruction for you and put it together in a format you can learn from. That’s awesome! Learn from it! Now do it yourself and start creating. There is no substitution for practice.
An examination of all of my published games will reveal I love working in the Combine space of creativity. I love looking for game mechanics that have naturally aligning rhythms in some way, whether it’s encouraging similar incentives, motivations, beats in game play, etc. I then look to see how they might come together intuitively, organically.
Maybe you’ve heard the expression ‘kill your darlings’ (which I hate, it’s a terrible expression). It’s a concept under the Evolve umbrella that means don’t get so attached to an aspect of gameplay that you can’t let it go if it doesn’t work. A game will guide you where it wants to go if you listen. Don’t be stubborn, don’t hold on to idealized visions. Pay attention to what’s intuitive and what isn’t. Pay attention to when your incentives and your rewards don’t jive.
Deconstruct, Transform, Combine. Build your toolkit, exercise it without fear. You will come up with some horrid trash along the way. That’s ok. Do it again.
I am not listing Evolve as a different form of game design because it isn’t game design. Evolve gets into game development, a different skill altogether than game design that exercises a different type of creativity. It’s super critical. It studies players as much as game systems. But now we’re headed into an entirely different blog!