Ever start a fire with flint and steel?

Small spark on some fine dry kindling …coax it, nurture it…shield it…feed it…give it room to breathe…

One wrong move and you can put it out before it gets going…even someone getting too close and accidentally breathing on it can put it out…or a pile of leaves can smother it.

That small spark can turn a small flame just for a lesson at Boy Scout camp or even the stone circled campfire for cooking and late night ghost stories…sometime even a powerful raging forest fire.

Sparks of creativity are like the tiny dots of fire that leap from flint and steel.

Everybody has them.

Next time, instead of letting life, work, hierarchy, bullies or lizard brain fear get in the way…take that spark and coax it, nurture it, shield it, feed it, give it room to breathe and keep the wet blankets off of it.

Whether it’s your spark or someone else’s, once it catches…and grows…the powerful ranging creativity “fire” can spread and change the world…or at least the face of gaming.

Trust the idea. I’ve seen it happen..whether it was on Nox, C&C: Generals, C&C: Red Alert 2, FarmVille or Treasure Isle.

Question is, what have you done with your sparks today?

“Too many minds”

That was the advice to Tom Cruise’s character in “The Last Samurai” as he kept getting beaten while training with wooden swords against other samurai.

His failure was caused by his internal conflict – too many thoughts and emotions – he was fighting himself and his opponent at the same time.

I played a lot of the top selling games (Xbox, PS3, Wii) games during the holiday.

I was surprised that some were not as good as I expected and how one of those in particular felt over designed. It had the core game idea and then was overloaded with too many “so so” features.

Instantly made me think “too many minds”.

This kind of design pattern is usually a symptom of too many people (designers, team members, managers, company executives) directing the design and mandating features.  The game fights with itself for simple clarity.

With FarmVille, we followed the philosophy of a single strong voice to guide the game. It works well.

If your design ever feels flat, confused or uninspired, check in on whether there are “too many minds”. Reducing to one creative voice might make things better quickly.

Snowflakes falling,  waves breaking on the shore, bubbles floating through the air, spiders weaving webs and birds flocking in the air.

“Natural Attractors” – that’s my term for these events or elements which seem to introduce a natural fascination in people all over the world.

Each is a combination of “order” and “randomness” which naturally captures our mind as we have that innate urge to watch, just for a moment.

Sometimes these natural attractors can be relaxing, like waves crashing on the shore. Other times they are wrapped in fun, like children blowing bubbles in the park.

I think the core of the attraction is the apparent orderly unfolding of similar yet random elements. The net result being that we intently look for “how things turn out”.

“Natural Attractors” are an “easy way in” to the human brain.

Build a game with one or more “Natural Attractors”, and you’ll probably find people playing because “it’s fun”, even when they can’t put their finger on why.

Ever been fascinated by a time lapse movie of a plant growing? How about fish swimming around a fish tank?

I keep a mental list of “Natural Attractors”. Have any new ones you want to share?

When I see a game design or a completed game, it takes me about 30 seconds to know if the game designer is early in his or her career.

The clue?

When I look at the game screen, I see too much going on. Too many things on screen, too many moving parts and pieces, too many things for the player to do at once. To a player it’s overwhelming.

How did I learn this?

I made the mistake when I designed my first full game (NanoTek Warrior, an arcade shooter for the PS1).  I was so worried about there being something fun going on that I overloaded each level with enemy ships and structures to dodge.

It was unplayable. Even after I later got a clue and went back and redesigned the levels, it was still too overwhelming for most people.

My mistake is that while I thought I was following an existing “formula” for making a game, I still didn’t really understand what I was doing in terms of “making fun”.

I still needed to learn about how to create the right sense of pacing for the experience I was delivering.

For a different perspective, think of your favorite movie. There are fast parts, slower part, exciting parts and emotional parts all crafted into a singular linear experience.

It’s the pacing and mix of these different “parts” which make your favorite movie interesting and enjoyable.

The same thing holds for games.

If you want to see a great example of pacing in a game, check out any of the levels in Mario Galaxy.

Have a game you love or love to hate?

One of the things I used to do as we were coming into the home stretch on releasing a new RTS game was play test the levels.

It was fun and hard at the same time. I had to put myself in the mindset of pretending to see the level for the first time ever, and try to react as a new player would react to events in the world.

The hard part was trying to take notes and feedback during each play session. Nothing like having to stop ever 2 -3 mins to take notes as a way to ruin your game experience.

Play testing C&C: Generals, I had the idea that if we added code to track the game activities I performed, we could create simple graphs with the information and I wouldn’t have to write any more notes!

Worked like a charm. I could simply play a level and then use the graphs to tune each level based on the graphs.

Some simple patterns emerged. If the graphs showed the simply huge spikes in a repeated pattern of “collect money”, “build lots of tanks”, “attack enemy”, then I knew I was making unsuccessful attempt to crack a base defense or take down an enemy force. From experience, I knew that doing that pattern 2 or 3 times was ok, but when it got to be 4, 5, and 6 attempts, the game would start to get boring so we would use the graphs to go back and tune the level.

That experience taught me the power of using real statistics to help tune game play, rather than simply rely on a sense of “feel”. It’s also one of the reason I enjoy working on Social Games. We can use real stats and numbers to tune and improve the game experience for our players each day if necessary. There’s a sense of real freedom doing things this way. If you’re making a game and haven’t tried it yet, I strongly suggest it.

I’ve always had an interest in what a large organized group of game developers could accomplish.

Dave Perry, long standing industry vet (Shiny Entertainment) and super creative mind, has created “Project Top Secret” to build the “first professional community video game in history”. Good stuff!

Check in with is project at “videogameteam.com“.

Anyone else enjoying this game as much as I am?

Who would have figured the right handed joystick skills I developed on Mario64 could translate so easily to my left hand on the Wii?

In all seriousness, I’m finding the game enjoyable, interesting, not particularly challenging (yet), but very reminiscent of the experience I enjoyed while playing Mario64.

As a game developer, the things I find most interesting in the game design are:

1. How tossing in falling “star bits” can instantly liven up the game experience in areas where the game play might get a bit slow

2. The ability to have a second player collect star bits, stun enemies and in general help out the main player. Perfect way for the younger ones to get some great play time with an older brother or mom and dad.

3. How the new controller for the Wii takes the classic experience a step forward and then how “going upside down” takes it even a further step forward. There have been games that have done similar “upside down tricks” before, but in Mario Galaxy, it just seems natural. Bet it was fun for the designers to be thinking in all the directions 3D can provide.

4. Fun, light and bright levels that don’t draw on violence, nightmarish fears or shock to involve a player. The bee levels and the bubble level are great examples of content that feels fresh even though similar things have been done before.

I want to make a special note about the “upside down play” aspect of the game. It’s long been said that we “create worlds” when we make video games. Most worlds so far though are digital mockups of worlds fairly similar to our real world, especially in terms of things like gravity and time. The “Matrix” broke the barrier to freeing us from “regular time” by using “bullet time” and games followed suit. Mario helps break the barrier of “normal gravity” of platformers by introducing their new “relative gravity” concept. Very cool. Imagine what the future holds when more of these traditional type of constraints are broken….

One more bit of info that bears highlighting from the October 2007 article about Yves Béhar in Fast Company.

His 7th design axiom:

“Never ask the consumer about the future. You can ask them what their aspirations are, but you will not get an answer about what you should do. Design will bring those stories to life.”

I’ve seen so many focus group testing waste money because they centered around asking players what features they wanted in a game rather than their “aspirations” or the “fantasy they wanted to live out”. I think that game players are better able to articulate what they want to do, be, and see than they are at telling game developers exact features they would like to see in a game.

I mentioned “Aldus FreeHand” in a previous post. I actually first saw this design axiom used in practice there by the designers there. Similar to game players, graphic artists were much more able to articulate what they wanted to do rather than give the team a design or feature to accomplish that same goal.

In “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2“, we focused on the “fantasy” first started in “C&C: Red Alert” about time travel and alternative history and science. We didn’t go to focus groups to ask them what type of weapons, units and buildings we should add to the game. I find it hard to believe that a player would have come up with a “giant mind controlled squid” that our designer Todd Owens did.

The October 2007 issue of “Fast Company” has an over-title of “Masters of Design” and features an article about “Yves Béhar“. For those of you who can’t match the name, think of innovative designs ranging from Jawbone Bluetooth headset, to Leaf LED lamps, to the $100 laptop, etc. etc. etc. Very innovative and this is his second time as “Master of Design” in “Fast Company”(see his first here).

His quote on page 99, “Design in Silicon Valley is consensus-driven,” Béhar says, “and that isn’ t the best way for strong ideas to come out.”

I agree. In my experience “consensus-driven design” tends to generate a good, and seemingly generic game design ideas that would rate about an 75 or 80 in reviews. It also seems to be the norm in companies where every group outside of the game development team wants to add their own set of features or does not believe in the development team’s ability to make a great game.

The strongest game design ideas I’ve seen were created by a single strong designer, with a vision or insight that came from experience, especially past experience of doing game design in that genre or a previous version of the current game.

I’ve also see this type of “strong ideas” come from the designers who worked on Aldus FreeHand (now Macromedia FreeHand) while I was on that team so many years ago.

It became clear to me in late 2004/early 2005 that “Creativity is a scarce, delicate and precious resource, all too often crushed by ‘committee’ or ‘TPS reports’ or other ‘benefits’ of large corporate office spaces.”