Game Design - “Creativity is a scare, delicate and precious resource”

Posted in Aldus, Fast Company, FreeHand, Game Design, Games, Macromedia, TPS Reports, Yves Béhar , by mskaggs on // October 10th, 2007 October 2007

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.”