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?

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.