Practical Creativity

[Music] Um, I'm supposed to remind you to check your email for session evaluations. Those will show up. I'm supposed to remind you to mute your cell phones. So, please do that. Um, I'm going to talk today about inventing new games because we all know we live in a world of clone after clone after clone after clone. Um, there are reasons to invent new games and not all of them are good and I will talk about that too. Sometimes being creative, it's it's not necessarily an exclusive virtue, right? But um, it can be if used practically. And really my goal for this talk, we're going to do a little bit of workshopping in here. I'm going to warn you. My goal for this talk is to try to give you really concrete usable stuff you can take away. Um, so, uh, as far as who I am, my name is Raph Coer and I wrote a book called A Theory of Fun. I've been working as a lead designer or creative director starting

with MMOs like Ultima Online a very long time ago now. I've done uh, pretty much every job there is in the game industry now. Um, some of which I really hated. Um, and I like the creative ones the best. So, those are the ones I'm going to focus on. There's a lot of ways to think about creativity and I'm going to focus primarily on innovation. I'm going to focus on coming up with brand new game ideas and I'm going to spend a lot of time more time disproportionately talking about coming up with new mechanics as opposed to coming up with new themes or stories to tell. Frankly, coming up with new stories to tell, which I will cover, is relatively easy. We have a lot of other media that we can go look at for that. Uh our failure there is mostly a failure of imagination. Um I want to caution you all that innovation doesn't necessarily mean success

right in fact often it means the exact opposite. So we'll spend some time on that too. Okay start let's talk about what is creativity exactly. A lot of people have this idea that it's the muses descending from the heavens with fire and music and I don't know what else. And and that's just usually wrong. Uh most research on creativity shows that it tends to arise out of scenes. It tends to arrive uh arise out of urban areas. The clash, the collision, the mixing together of disperate ideas from different cultures or subcultures or disciplines. Okay? In other words, creativity is what happens when you take oil and water and actually try to mix them. It isn't the grand mystical thing. It's actually a fairly straightforward process that you can cause to happen quite intentionally and it's a skill set that you can actually practice and develop into a habit.

Personal expression is wonderful, but it isn't necessarily creative. It isn't necessarily bringing something radically new into the world. How do you go about it? Well, the first thing that you really need is to have, you know, do you guys know what a substrate is on an aquarium? Anybody here keep fish? Okay. It is the most boring part of setting up an aquarium, right? You need gravel and maybe some muck of various sorts. You need bacteria. You need maybe some soil. It's the stuff that sits at the bottom of the aquarium that covers a couple of inches of what could be awesome looking colorful fish. But without that substrate, nothing in the aquarium works. If you try setting up an aquarium with with no substrate, you'll quickly find you can't actually have a suitable ecosystem for anything to live. The same is true of a whole lot of

things in our lives. But in particular, I want to talk about the substrate that we need to be creative in the discipline of games, in game design. In other fields, your substrate is different. If you were here to learn about poetry, I would tell you you should go off and study proity and meter and rhyme. You should study linguistics and other languages. In the case of games, I'm going to tell you to study games and to study how games are put together, the pieces and parts of games. The first thing I want to encourage you to do is to break your notion of what a game is. And uh I'll I'll just throw out some random assertions. Firsterson shooter is what we usually call a genre, right? But just for a moment, consider the idea that first person shooter and poker are the same thing, a game, a singular

game. A way to think of this is that you have a rule construct, a set of behaviors and rules and and resources and that kind of thing that interact with one another. Often we see it skinned differently like a Lord of the Rings chess set is still chess, right? Then we see varants. So for example, you might modify a rule and that opens up the door to new styles of play, but the game is still recognizably poker. Add enough of these and you end up with a family. We start thinking of poker, the family, and eventually you end up with the poker genre. The original version of poker was played with less cards had did not have multiple rounds to it. You just drew and then you saw what you got, right? And uh gradually variants started coming in wild cards and so on until today we have poker. And when you say poker, most people actually

think of let's say Texas Holde, which is a very specific variant within the poker family. But we can still look at all of these and say they're still all poker. There's something there that makes us say this is all in common. Can you guys Let's I warned you I'd workshop something. Uh you're looking at me so you get picked throughout a genre. 2D platformer. 2D platformer. Somehow I knew you'd say 2D platformer. Right. So if we think of 2D platformer in the same lens as we are with first person shooters here, right? Here's first person shooters. Can you do that for platformers? Uh, start with Mario, I guess. Start with Mario. Sure, that's acceptable. I would go earlier. I would start with Donkey Kong. Okay. And then comes its first reskin or clone. You start getting things like Donkey Kong Jr. Uh, very quickly we

start running into uh variants. So, we start getting things like Kangaroo. Kangaroo very much like uh Donkey Kong or Donkey Kong Jr. We start seeing differences in the maps. We start seeing differences like that. But Kangaroo adds punching, which is a whole new thing. It adds obstacles flying in from the sides. Pretty soon, we have a whole family of 2D platformers. Eventually, Super Mario introduces the sides scrolling and really starts locking in what the family of it is, right? But really, we look at any of these and we say, I jump and I have to get to the other side, right? I mean, that's still the heart of the platforming game. Almost every video game we make is actually a variant. It is incredibly rare in video games for us to invent truly new games. This stands in stark contrast to, let's say, the tabletop game industry where almost every game is

actually a new game. truly a new game, a new rule construct. When we talk about German board games, virtually every German board game is actually significantly different. Okay, but that's not true when we look at video games. In video games, you can actually say a game is a genre. And usually you will be right. When we do see significant creative innovation in game mechanics, it tends to be down at the casual end and it tends to be at the abstract end. Okay, puzzle games for example. We're seeing an explosion of innovation today with indie games and with mobile games precisely because innovation is often very expensive and highly risky. So it flourishes at times when budgets are low, cost of entry is low and cost of failure is low, right? Because of that, we've had an amazing period of new mechanics being invented of creativity in the industry. As we're

seeing budgets rise, I would predict we see less creativity in the industry actually. Now, because of that, I want us to be realistic here. I'm going to talk a lot about creating brand new games from scratch. But the fact is the same tools, techniques, tips, tricks work for creating variants, work for extending a family or extending a genre. You don't have to necessarily be creating a game from scratch. You can still use these these tools in order to extend firstperson shooters in a new direction. So, one of the biggest things you need to do once you've gotten used to thinking that first person shooter is a game, you need to start learning how to really break down things and start looking them really atomically. And this is something that particularly for those of us who are wor more used to working in AAA, more used to working in large scale narrative constructs than anything else. This is often a skill that's a

little bit weird. Okay, we often tend to look more at the game surface than at the mathematics underneath the game. The thing is going back to the simple games of the 70s, the 80s or focusing a lot on the casual end of the spectrum like mobile is actually super valuable to you even if you tend to work at the large scale. And that is because mechanics are usually games. Games are built out of smaller games. And so you can take these mini games that might be an entire game down at the casual or mobile end of the spectrum and move them into being features and something that's larger scale. So super valuable to build up your mechanics library. The absolute best advice I can give everybody who is a working game designer in the video game business. First, obsessively play lots of board games. Second, obsessively play lots of mobile games. And third, get yourself a mim cabinet.

and play the games in chronological order. One of the big reasons to force yourself out of the narrative lens is in order to distance yourself from your usual modes of seeing. So let's give you here's an example. Let's say we take a deck of cards and we distribute it into four separate piles. We make sure that every pile has an ace in it. Okay? But other than that, the rest of the cards are random. And I'm going to say start on pile one and begin flipping cards over. When you find the ace, that unlocks the next pile and you can begin flipping over more cards. Anybody think this game sounds super fun? Anybody? This was game of the year last year. Okay. Mechanically that is all the rule set of gone home really implies. That is not a knock

against gone home. A mechanic can be very very simple. This mechanic here is called environmental storytelling. That is the name of the mechanic. And what is it? You find hotspots in an environment and you click on them. And at some point the hotspot unlocks a block of more hotspots. That's it. Okay. Learning to see things this abstractly is actually an enormous help. Okay? And it doesn't denigrate the story in any way, right? It doesn't denigrate the amazing value that the story provides. Instead, what it does is help you build a library like this. This is a random little subset off the top of my head of very common small game mechanics. It's far from being exhaustive and therefore I'm now going to pick on people. Uh we'll start with Ty. Give me one that isn't on here.

Actually, anybody start shouting them out if you want. Yes. In the green shirt. Item association. Item association. That's right. So, linking together items through shared qualities. Yes. That could be a form of set packing and it might not. Yep. That's a good one. somebody else. Collection absolutely just building collections. Again, that could be a form of set packing might not. One of the really interesting things about these, by the way, is that you you'll find that they're isomorphic to one another. What that means is sometimes the same mechanic can be described using completely different words as a different mathematical structure, but they work the same inside. Okay? Okay, so you can actually see Sudoku as being a fill the map problem. You can also see Sudoku as being a setpacking problem. And if you dig into the math of it,

those are different branches of mathematics. But that's okay because different branches of mathematics often tackle the same problem just using different tools and techniques. Can anybody think of a different one? You guys just aren't awake today. Laurelyn, I'm picking on you. uh one that's not mentioned on there. Yeah, I don't actually see much on there that's social. There are a lot of patterns in social interaction. There are huge number of game mechanic patterns that are social. That's right. Um probably one of the biggest and commonest is roles. Rolls is a fundamental pattern for all social games. Um, and it's a good indication of how abstract it is. In a social game on Facebook, you really have two roles, neighbor and player, and they're both vital to progressing, right? In a given playfield. On a soccer team, you have

goalie and you have striker and so on. and and we can extend this through any kind of team-based or even non-team-based multiplayer game. If you're in WoW, we have healers and tanks and nukers. So, roles is a great example of of a mechanic pattern. I don't think there's a good way to build an exhaustive list of this. So, for those of you who are happily, you know, photographing this, it's far from exhaustive. Um, game design patterns, super useful book. Uh, another one, advanced game mechanics, another super useful book. And these vary dramatically in the ways in which they describe these patterns, but they're just collections of mechanics, patterns like this that you can then use. And what you want to do is learn as many as you can because these are the tools on your workbench.

So, that was the substrate. Now, we talk about how you use them. You never I I'll just be blunt. Nobody ever comes up with something out of the blue. Life just doesn't work that way. In practice, most creativity is taking a pattern out of its comfy, recognizable context and moving it into a different one. That might seem boring. Okay. Just the other night, I was watching How We Got to Now, uh the new TV series on PBS by Steven Johnson. There was a glass maker in Venice who wanted to make clear glass. The only reason it happened is because he tried a plant, the ashes of a plant he imported from Turkey and mixed it into the glass and somehow that made it clear. I don't understand why that works, but it did. Somebody else entirely said, "You know what? If we

then grind these, we could make lenses and they invented spectacles." But it took a long time to pull that out into a different context and invent microscopes and telescopes. And it took a very long time to pull that into yet another context and invent fiber optics. Right? So moving a very simple idea from place to place and context to context and changing it in the process is actually your biggest tool for creativity. And it's the reason why scenes work, right? Desperate groups of people coming together in an environment in order to bounce ideas off of each other. It's why non-homogeneous teams tend to be more creative than homogeneous teams or teams that have worked together for a very long time. Here's an example of this. You are all familiar with the humble die. And when we use a die, we always think of it in the same way. It generates a random

number from 1 to six. But if you say here is a die and I'm not allowed to use it as a random number generator, you remove that from the table. It starts opening up all of these new kinds of contexts. So for example, you could use it as a hit point counter. After all, it's got a scale 1 to six. You can turn it. You could use it as a timer, right? It's got a scale. It moves up and down. You could use it to indicate state. Maybe six means I am knocked down and two means I am, you know, in aggressive mode. You could use it as an indicator of max. So instead of tracking things, it could be this is the max possible I could reach. And then I don't know how many of you have played the wonderful tabletop game blueprints. You literally use dice as building bricks in that game. The numbers matter, but you're literally building a little

building out of dice. I'm sure there are more ways to use dice. The point being, pull a simple tool out of its context, out of its assumptions, and move it into someplace else, and suddenly you might get a whole new fresh set of ideas. This is why if you're playing with cards and using cards for a prototyping tool, it's valuable to have a regular kind of deck and an Uno deck. They look so different. One uses colors, the other doesn't, and so on. It pushes you in different directions. Just the fact that Uno has four colors and a regular deck has two, even though mathematically they are basically identical. Okay. What else could we use cards for? You're looking at me, sir. So, you get picked. Pull cards out of the context. There's a classic example of what people use cards for. No, there are board games that use card

mechanics for what actions you can take. Sure. Library of actions. Yes. Library of Yep. What's the classic example? House of cards. Right. That's radically pulling the card out of context. What's another one? Right. Well, and also the root of tarot cards and standard deck are completely fortuneelling. Fortuneelling is a classic application for cards. That's right. Cards could be literally used just for the fact they are a convenient sized mat to cover stuff up. In fact, let's invent a game right now with that idea. Let's take a card. We lay it face up. I don't know what we got. Let's say it's the eight of diamonds. The game is about covering up the diamonds. So, every card is now a play field. And now we've got something else that we need to lay down

to cover up the diamonds. What cards you end up maybe the the pips on the card are actually the monsters in that dungeon room and that's their initial position, right? move the element out of its context and all of a sudden stuff just starts appearing completely new possibilities. The simplest way in which people try to affect game design changes and variance and so on is to extend a statistic. Let's add Fireball 6. This does not work. Not only is it not innovative, it's boring. It's boring because you are not offering the player anything new to learn. You're not offering the player anything new except an incremented number. Odds are an incremented number measured against another incremented number. I use fireball 6 on a bigger orc XP sack, which actually means my ratio

is still one one, right? Or whatever. That's just not interesting. Players see through the pattern CF my book theory of fun. A new stat though completely new statistical metric that can add a new rule. And if you add a new rule now you're in the realm of creating a variant. So if you add a time constraint on virtually any game, you might accidentally create a time attack mode. you might accidentally create speedruns. Time was always there probably, but it wasn't a formalized stat, right? You hadn't actually bothered to track it and display it. The minute you track it and display it, goals will be created around it. Rules might be created around it. If you track number of moves in virtually anything, let's try number of moves in an FPS. All of a sudden, we now have an accuracy meter. number of shots fired over number

that hit. Let's try it in an RPG. I've actually never seen it in an RPG. Is there such a thing as an efficiency meter in an RPG? There could be, right? And some players would probably find it a pretty interesting game. So adding a new statistic, if it adds a new rule and thereby creates a variant, can be pretty fruitful. Now, you have to watch out. a proliferation of statistics is not necessarily going to be the best thing. And so because of that, I would encourage you each time you explore adding a statistic, try taking a different one away and see what happens. Not all of them will work, but the permutation of it will probably lead you somewhere interesting. This one here is a classic way of of doing this. There have only been five fighting games in history. Everybody always gets really pissed off when I say that, especially because

Street Fighter is not on my list. Okay, but if you think about it, the fighting game is rock paper scissors. You've got three attacks, no defenses, and you can't move. That's it. Start adding attacks. That's just extending a statistic. But something like Karate Champ actually added defenses, a new statistic, a new move class, a new rule. And of course, they added the statistic of distance. And now all of a sudden, you have this game. Most fighting games to this day are still this game. They are rock paper scissors moving back and forth on an aligned axis, right? In fact, Virtua Fighter and so on, Street Fighter, there's still this. It doesn't matter if they're in 3D cuz the 3D is a narrative thing. It's an optical illusion, right? It's not real. Karatica created a whole new genre by changing the topology of the dimension, saying, "We're going to make that dimension infinite." And it created that

sidescrolling beat him up, and that's a whole family tree that grew off of it. But it wasn't until battle arena to shindan which added sidestep that a true new dimension was added into uh the fighting genre. And sidestep frankly was a pretty lame one. It it wasn't an intuitive control. It's still as far as most of the games have gone. Somebody did actually say let's extend the dimension one further all the way to a full 2D plane. That was Bashidto Blade. It turned out to be a bridge too far. To my knowledge, the last fighting game that did that was Bushidto Blade 2 and there it ended. Right? So adding a dimension is an incredibly common way to extend things. If you think about what happened with platformers, this is the technique that was used to extend 2D platforming. First we had screenbound, then we added the dimension of an infinite scroll. Then we added the third dimension and we

got Mario 64. And pretty much there it's stayed since then. Right? For those who are trying to be creative and working on these fundamental building blocks, I actually strongly urge you to think analog rather than digital. And there's a bunch of reasons for this. One is that if you step far enough back from digital, you realize that it's still turnbased. It's just that the turns are on a timer that expires 60 times a second. Okay? So you can still apply mechanics. These mechanics still work turnbased all the way down at that level, right? And so often you can prototype even action game mechanics digitally. This here is a highly processed photo of my analog game prototyping kit. And this is just a fraction of the crap that I have in there. I go to Michaels and I buy out chunks of the craft aisles. Okay. Incredibly useful. uh flat wooden

squares, random wooden shapes, a fellow because flipping binary state is super useful. They're the closest thing to a two-sided die that you can get. Random things like stars, chips, hex's, circles, go beads, a hex mat, you know, all of these things go into the mix. Why do they go into the mix? Because saying something like, "Could I stick a hex grid underneath a first person shooter?" is an interesting way to start mashing up contexts. Working analog, even for digital, is an interesting way to force you to step back and look at something very familiar, your shooter, your platformer, your farming game, your puzzle game, whatever, and make it unfamiliar to you again. And making things that you know very well unfamiliar to you again is a classic creative technique. And it's one of the reasons why the history of creativity is

littered with people getting stoned in various ways. Speaking of unfamiliar, the quick brown fox they claim jumped the lazy dogs over and more forever cycling mad her quoted alphabets leveling zip and indexed joker wild. Unlucky vixen pangram beast spending cues and hoarding jays. The thrifty ditzy wench. Why futs froen too? When flow tricks verbs and jokes, the cogs of status quo delights us so. Books bursting free. The japes, glyphs, queries, catalexis, zugmas woven from words quotidian to dazzle, vex, pry, illumin, beckon. Why judge letters equal? Math must be seizing Rainard's mind. values coughling, waxing, jabber, equations poking till nothing's left except a panggrammatic civ. Quibbling

Z's and K's hortatory, just and swift. I like sticking poetry in my game design talks just cuz I have an MFA in it. Can somebody tell me what the weird thing about this poem is? Every line has every letter of the alphabet. Every line has every letter of the alphabet. It is they are pen grammatic lines. That's right. This is an example of working with a constraint. Okay. Poetry is full of working with constraints on purpose. Giving yourself a an extremely limiting box to work in is a timehonored classic creative tool. Okay. One of the ways in which artists are trained is that they tell them, "Here's this gorgeous stilllife construction of stuff that you should go draw. You have 7 seconds. Go." And they make you do that over and over again.

It's called gestural drawing. And it's done to force you to stop looking at it familiarly by imposing a constraint, imposing a time constraint. Think about what you can do imposing constraints. If I'm designing board games, for example, I had a very successful uh design run with this board game. I took some of the pieces out of that kit and said, "I'm going to make a game using only these pieces." And you know what? I got a really good game out of it. Okay. Forcing constraints on yourself is incredibly valuable. Uh, somebody on that side of the room since I have picked on so many people here and who isn't Laurelyn, name a game genre. Tactical RPG. Tactical RPG. Okay, somebody over here name a constraint. Think about something that is like an impossibly tiny box for a tactical RPG. You have to work in a cube.

You have to work in a cube. In a cube. Okay. A tactical RPG that must fit inside a cube. How about another constraint? Nonviolent. A nonviolent tactical RPG. That's a great one. That's a really, really good one. Are you getting the idea here? You give yourself an impossible limit. Something that makes you go, there's no way to do that in there. And you know what? You'll probably start coming up with solutions. You'll probably start inventing new game mechanics. Adding a verb or goal. Now, you have to be careful adding goals. Players can't juggle too many at once. Really good games tend to have more than one goal operating at the moment to moment. Okay. Cause damage, not take damage. Great example. Two goals that might be in conflict. Attack and defend at the same time.

How was Defender created from lots of fairly boring shoot them ups? By adding this little extra goal. You have to protect the little people, right? That alone made the game dramatically deeper, dramatically more interesting. There had been games about just rescuing and there had been games about just shooting things. combining the two. Uh, choplifter, another example from the same time period, using the same mix of verbs, radically different games, of course, but you can see the the creativity that emerges from throwing in disperate ones. And in particular, they should be ones that are in competition with one another, ones where you go, "Oh crap, do I spend my time doing A or B?" Right? Force the players to have to make that decision moment to moment. Now, your overall game picture might have one of these as paramount, right? In defender, there's no question that defending is the core goal, right?

Because you lose if you don't. But at the moment to moment, defending and killing intertwine and balance each other really regularly. Same thing, speed. We talked about adding the speed statistic. players have added the do it fast goal to any number of games that we didn't think to do do it to. Okay, which was a failure on our part as designers perhaps. But today we have the speedun movement which is enormous from players imposing a new goal on games that had frankly been exhausted in terms of gameplay. If you add enough goals to something, you eventually end up with a sandbox game. It's dangerous to add lots of disparate goals that aren't balancing one another, right? But if you have a multiplayer environment, adding disperate goals per role is actually super critical. It's actually the thing that creates roles. So the goals of a goalie are radically different from the

goals of a striker. This one has been incredibly fruitful lately as we've moved to touch. Okay. A lot of people like to say the game is the interface. The interface is the game. And that isn't really accurate. Okay? And and I'll I'll diagram why, but it is a very fruitful way to think about things. If you How many of you have played soccer physics? Anybody? Go grab it on on your on your mobile device. It's on iOS. I know it's probably been cloned on Android also. You get one button that you can tap or hold and that's all the controls you get for a soccer game. Okay. Changing the number of axes of movement, the time duration of movement, breaking a simple control into a complex one, combining a complex control into a simple one, modifying your input. So now it's haptic, maybe it's buttons, maybe

it's joystick. No, let's move the joystick into twin joysticks. Right. I don't know how many of you have ever played Robbitron on the actual cabinet versus playing Robbitron with a single joystick and button. It's effectively a variant of the same game and it is a different game. Defender with the reverse button or with a joystick that is a four-way joystick is effectively a different game in the Defender family. Okay? And you can see this as it spreads across ports in on various devices. The reason why this works is because games are in fact made out of games. We usually think of a game this way, right? And that isn't necessarily wrong. It is good to think of this is still the game of Defender with different controls. That is a valid and valuable lens. But it's also good to think of the controls are a game and defender is a game and we master them separately. I might be great

at Defender on the Atari 2600 or something where it's one joystick and suck at the Defender with the up down and a reverse button in the arcades. Very easy to to fall into that trap. Believe me, I did. wasted a lot of quarters because effectively there's a whole new game buried in the controls. So it's false to just think of things in terms of this is what the game is. Games are made out of games and it's better to think about how can I take an entire game chunk of game you know subgame out of this game and replace it and inputs are one of the easiest things that you can do that with. Take defender, put it on a Wii mode. Ah, whole new game, right? Even if it is still defender on the other end, right? Swapping out inputs, incredibly useful. Changing topologies, the graph space. We often don't look at games in terms of

their graph. I've used this example so many times. Um, Asteroids is not played on a square. It's played on a donut, right? Pac-Man is also played on a on a donut or Mobius strip depending what level you're on. Um, Snakes and Ladders is played in non- uklitian geometry with wormholes, right? Learn to look at games that way in terms of their graphs, in terms of their topologies, and all of a sudden it opens up new things. In Space Invaders, we move side to side in a bounded way. The enemies wiggle side to side and they move outwards. Change the way in which they move outwards and you get Galaxian. But take that line and wrap it into a circle and you get Tempest or Gyrus. Okay? All you've done is change the graph topology by linking the ends of the line. You've changed what had been a line into a circle or, you know, an infinite loop.

And that radically changes things. It really does. The number of variations on Tetris with Tetris played with different shapes is insane. And there are versions of it where the playfield has a different uh topology and versions of it where the pieces use a different topology. You could take virtually any game. So, somebody name a game. Somebody in the back. I'll pick somebody if somebody doesn't raise their hand back there. Farmville. Farmville. Okay. Somebody pick a different topology. Farmville 3D space. Farmville in 3D. So to really do that, that means plants hanging in the air. Okay, think about that. That's actually kind of interesting. Orchid farming maybe, right? Plants might grow in any direction. Maybe they spread. How about another one? Some other game.

DDR. Okay. DDR with a different topology or graph. Mud rooms. Sorry. For muds. Mud room DDR. So that one's kind of interesting, but actually uh I was in Argentina not that long ago. Mudrooms are um they're hypertextual spaces. So that means they can have arbitrary graph shapes, nodes with arbitrary links. If you think about it, I'm walking down the street in Argentina and I found inlaid in the sidewalk the steps of the tango. The steps of the tango and in fact any given dance are in fact nodes in arbitrary graphs because every dance has a different pattern of steps. You just invented the dance teaching game. Right.

Brand new game. I told you we'd come up with new stuff here. What game is this? Out. Breakout. Space Invaders. Yes. Which one is it? Could be either one. It could be both. Right. When you take that step of abstracting, you suddenly go, "Oh, this could be either one." Which means you could do an A meets B. How cool would it be to play Space Invaders where your method of attack was Breakout and they shot back, right? That game probably exists actually cuz it's almost too obvious. Doing mashups of things that share underlying topologies is actually a really fruitful way to go. There's lots of possibilities there. DDR meets Simon says, right? That's kind of how DDR was born. That is what DDR is. that Simon says with your feet. Try doing this now with things that

don't seem like they have anything in common. Could you mash up Blackjack and Robbitron? I have no idea. But try see what comes out of it. If there's enough there shared in common, it might turn out that hey, shooting robots and push your luck is is a good technique. When we think about a game, we usually reach instinctively for the most straightforward simulation tool. And that might be a really big mistake. Think about it. Last year at GDC, I was in Saurin Johnson's talk and he was talking about uh mostly tabletop game design. was talking about RTS's and I was like, could you do an RTS where you don't have a map, where it's simulated with just cards? That's like probably a whole new genre of game, right? Because you're taking something that's poorly

suited for simulating one of the standard elements of RTS, the real time and the territory, right? But what else could you apply badly suited simulation techniques to? It's not that you're going to end up simulating the same thing. It's that you're going to find different ways to um enact the relationships between things. Could you simulate a firsterson shooter with only dice? There's probably something there. The die roll maybe is your field of view. Maybe it's actually, you know, you roll the dice in the direction, try to roll it along the table to hit somebody. You know, you start exploring these things by moving things out of their familiar context. Classic example of moving things out of context is by choosing a new metaphor. Now, this is not the same thing as just

a new skin. A skin is something like Lord of the Rings chess set on top of regular chess set. That's not that interesting. That's a little boring. But what happens if you literally change the metaphor? If we take a first-person shooter and say that it's about cameras, all of a sudden that says, wait, we could have depth of field in the game. We could have rule of threes in the game, right? We could have composition in the game. And we start inventing entire new fields for the game. So it's not just skinning. Look what happens when we change this which is just about visiting nodes on a graph from eating into painting girders. Painting girders all of a sudden we have to jump adds a new game into painting a house which adds the notion maybe you can paint over you can repaint. You can have other people competing which opens up Cubert which is the same game as Pac-Man. visit

every node on the graph. Right? But this isn't even not on a grid. It's actually a regular square grid turned this way and chopped in half because the relationship between the squares is still on a grid. What would happen if you actually use a triangular graph or a hexagonal graph? Things change pretty rapidly. So, are there other genres you can think of? Would you go, "Oh, I might be able to take that and radically alter it just by picking a new skin metaphor." An alternate way to describe the mechanical verb. This also works moving mechanics out. So, yes, Pac-Man is visit every node on the graph. But if you say, "I actually only want to visit certain nodes on the graph." Now it's picking up objects, right? And then if you say what if these nodes on the graph are hidden, it becomes a secrets system. Pac-Man was

mashed into Super Mario. And that is how we got Super Mario by mashing in the abstract mechanic of visiting particular nodes on a graph, visiting particular locations. So all of that is very mathy. That doesn't mean that math is the only area for innovation because you can innovate on the thematic side as well. There's really only a a couple of rules here and it's fairly straightforward. You want the mathematical underlying stuff to match up well with what you're trying to make the game be about. And frankly, the biggest problem with innovating in terms of games on the narrative artistic experience side is that we pick really boring familiar experiences to model when we should be asking ourselves what is this actually about? Because the vast majority of games are about becoming more powerful and nothing else, right? Which isn't a

particularly innovative or interesting idea, right? So if you want to innovate on that front, you should be asking yourself questions on a slightly deeper level. Even games, even films that are about the badass hero are very rarely about being a badass hero. Standard example I use is that Die Hard, you've all seen Die Hard. Die Hard is about a man trying to reconnect with his aranged wife. He is so willing to do this that he will literally walk on broken glass. That is what the movie's actually about. And yeah, there's terrorists and an exploding helicopter, but it's not where the emotional core of the movie resides. Now, you can approach solving this problem from either end. You might start at the experience end. Think of a cool, interesting, complex thing that you want to say from an experience point of view. That's a perfectly valid way to approach

it. It's actually a very common way to approach it these days. The risk here is that you then drill down into the same mechanics as always. Odds are that if you do that, you're going to undermine the point you were trying to make. You're going to undermine the message because the mechanics that you'll be using probably map to other things in people's minds already. If you want to be really successful at getting across a point, you want to find mechanics that cleave closely to the same point as your theme. One of the first steps is ask yourself, is there a story that literally hasn't been told? So, I threw up a bunch here, but again, somebody tell me a game about something that has literally never been seen on Earth. And the easiest way to do it is go back to your last vacation or a childhood experience. Think about a peak

emotional moment in your life and just tell me what that experience was. Learning to ride a bike. Learning to ride a bike. Great. I have never seen a game about learning to ride a bike ever. Fantastic. Great. Somebody else over here. Adopting a child. Adopting a child. Great. Right. It's actually trivially easy to come up with these, right? Super super easy. Our only failure here is complete lack of imagination. It's just because we haven't taken the step back. And you know what really does this? You know, I I get to judge games for awards at the end of the year. Getting all the games in one box and laying them all down with their covers face up on the carpet and realizing that every single one is a stubbly headshaved bearded dude with a giant gun really makes you realize how similar all of the stories are, right? So, you choose a

theme that's different. You can also start from underneath. If you come up with a new mathematical relationship, a new rule set, ask yourself, what does this mechanic mean? Does this mechanic imply teamwork? Does this mechanic imply persuasion? Does this mechanic imply radicalization? What what are the implications of this particular mechanical relationship? Systems fit inside one another. Since games are made out of games, you can ask yourself if this mechanic ends up being about friendship. Let's say I have two units that can only successfully move when they are near each other and linked. That's the core mechanic in eco, right? You ask yourself thematically, what does that mean? Oh, it's friendship. Then you ask yourself, what is the system in which friendship is a key ingredient? And what happens is you

start to converge your top and your bottom. Ask yourself, what is a story I could tell about friendship, right? Maybe I need to use that mechanic in the game where my parent teaches me to ride the bike. And suddenly you start meeting in the middle. So I'm not actually a huge fan of only coming at it from one end. And I think in AAA we tend to come at things just from the top. And I think down at the casual puzzle kind of end, we tend to come at things only from the bottom and then we slap whatever skin we want on there. But really interesting innovation is probably going to innovate on both levels at the same time. Right? So this game uh recently I was at a designer retreat and the question came up, how come there isn't a good romance game yet? Well, my wife has been trying to be a romance novelist. So it turns out they have like romance novels are down to a science. They they know exactly the steps, exactly what goes in there. And the core thing about romance

novels, what they are about is two people who have flaws and the other person helps them overcome them. They're about the gift of completion, right? And so I literally sat in this design group and I I was like scribbling that and then I would move down and go, what is a mechanic? Well, gifting obviously it has to be gifting, but they also have to get to know one another. So that means I need to be gifting them resources only I don't know how many they have. Then I move back up. What are these resources? Well, they're things like confidence. They're things like independence. They're things like commitment because those are the typical themes of romance novels. Then I move back down and I'm back down in the system. This game turned out fairly successful. I would have brought it with me, but unfortunately it was so successful that when they shipped it from the printer, they shipped it to Hawaii where I can only presume it was on honeymoon.

All right, those are all things that are very game-pecific. The rest of this is stuff you could pick up from any random self-help book. So, I'll just warn you right now. Creativity, since it is a skill, also needs to be a habit. do it habitually. I don't know how many of you have ever visited a game of.com, but you should go to a game of.com and feel utterly and completely inadequate as creatives. This guy puts out a new unique game a week. Excellent habit. Just like working songwriters try to write a song every day. They throw away almost all of them. It's a habit. Believe it or not, having a messy desk is a virtue. Why? Because a disordered environment forces you to make unique, rare connections. Remember, creativity is about making unusual connections between things. A very orderly desk is

not going to generate fresh connections. You want to accidentally spill your chocolate into your peanut butter, and the only way to do that is to have your working area be kind of messy. This is also why it has been shown that working in a noisy, slightly distractable environment and they actually know exactly how many decb it should be has been shown to increase the rate of idea generation. So you can actually visit this website. It'll generate coffee shop noises for you in the background at the right volume level. Exercise is extremely stimulating. Uh you should be doing it anyway. Clearly I'm not doing it enough. Um, stand up at least once every hour for at least five minutes. That kind of thing. Stasis is a bad thing. Um, don't do a kind of like not rock climbing where you might fall and die. Um, it needs to be something where you can let your mind wander. Get enough sleep. Probably all of you have a smartphone.

That means all of you have a sleep tracker. It's built into the motion detectors on your phones now. super useful particularly you want to pay attention to the amount of REMM sleep you're getting um worth a try you use your phone as an alarm clock it will actually wake you up when you're naturally waking up and then you won't feel as groggy in the morning take notes by hand not typing handwriting has been shown I don't know why maybe because it's slower maybe because it it incurs different cognitive loads For whatever reason, retention is better when you take notes by hand. Um, and it a lot of novelists to this day say, you know, I went back and I wrote that longhand and won an award for it. So, I personally use a stylus on my tablet rather than typing on my tablet.

Don't be afraid to completely fail and fall on your face. Okay, I don't know how many of you have been doing brainstorming meetings the classic way, but it's wrong. The classic way of doing brainstorming meetings is to say every idea is good. Nobody criticize anybody. That outputs two ideas per person per hour. If you allow the other people in the room to say, "No, that's a bad idea." And here's why. You get seven ideas per person per hour. Go figure. We were all taught incorrectly for a generation. It's incredibly important to be okay with failure. It's incredibly important to keep those failures around. Okay. I had a game that I designed. It was a tabletop game that used little round counters with colors on them arranged in circles where you were trying to do set packing to get certain patterns of colors into your hand. And it was so damn fiddly. It was a disaster. Didn't work at all. We kept trying to play it.

Just didn't work. I shoved it. Two years later, I come back to it and I go, "Wait, if I put those on cards so I could actually overlap the cards now that game is going to be published by Boing Boing and Cards Against Humanity, and the Kickstarter will be later this year." Keep your fails around because you never know when they're going to turn out moved into a new context to be really good ideas. The myth of the angsty, depressed artist is People are more creative when they're actually happy. This is why exercise works. Just relaxing works. High stress is a creativity killer. Just a warm shower helps, frankly. Right. Let yourself float in a swimming pool. Whatever it is that you do to relax. For me, often it's playing guitar. I can sit and zone out with a guitar and it doesn't matter what I'm playing and it will lead to ideas in new ways.

Play the movie to yourself in your head. This is a classic creative exercise. Close your eyes. All of you close them now. Quit reading the slide. I see you reading. Stop. And picture a wheelbarrow. Okay. Classic creative exercise. People who are more creative supposedly see things like the pattern of rust on the side of the wheelbarrow and they know what color it is. They can see the little pile of dirt and maybe a little bit of straw and that one brick that is nestled in the corner. They know the way in which the handle along the sides of the handle. It's actually that U-shaped curve of metal that then becomes round and the way the one screw always catches your hand. Being able to dive that deep is what drives the creativity. Play the movie in your head. You can open your eyes now. Okay. Supposedly those who are more creative are able to see more detail in those movies. It's one of the best ways of pushing yourself out of the context.

The world is full of systems and relationships. So read like crazy. You wouldn't know it, but something like the AI in early MMOs was partially inspired by the fact that at MIT they were putting little robots on roller skates. Ideas come from funny places, right? Read about every subject you can think of because that's where you start making connections that come out of context. Don't settle for the familiar. Don't settle for it among people. Mix up your teams. Don't settle for it among places. Try moving your desk every week to a different location. It will probably prompt ideas. explain things because it forces you to abstract. It forces you to reduce things back down into essence and look at things systemically. And then finally, realize that everything I said doesn't

mean you'll be successful. Creative leaders are usually perceived as being worse leaders than people who do things by the book. Usually the people who invent the new game are not the ones who make the big bucks off of it. So, if you're financially motivated, this is not the way to go. It's risky. Even if you do all of these things, you'll probably fail more often than not. So, why do it? Well, it opens up other doors for you. It's fun. It's how you leave a mark. And I assume all of us are in this because we wanted to do that. There are lots of ways to make money in more reliable ways than this. If you execute, you can in fact own a blue ocean. So there is a business reason to do it. And these days especially being creative in your particular way and everybody has a particular way builds your brand and that's incredibly important these days because marketing as we know it is dead.

So here's the takeaway. We're in a creative field. This is a creative business. Make it a habit. Make it a skill. And be practical about it. It's not rocket science. It's just hard. Thanks. [Applause] Um, we're supposed to move to the overflow room, but it is if we have questions, but it's lunchtime, so I'm not sure it matters. So, if anybody does have questions or you can all leave for lunch because you're hungry. Um, will you be posting these slides somewhere? I will post these slides on my website rafcoster.com at probably over lunch. Have you found a place to get like

blockus pieces without having to buy block like five times? I have not found a place where you can buy blockus pieces without having to buy blockus. Um that said, if I were prototyping that I would probably go buy wooden cubes, which are available pretty cheaply both online at a craft store. They add up. You can get cubes in various sizes. and I would glue them together. Okay. Way cheaper than buying block of sets. Just for fun, I have a glueon and all of my substrate is not in the pond. You can do an aquarium with no substrate in there. You move it all to a filter box that is connected into a singular ecosystem. So, yeah, you're cheating. That's fine. You have a sump tank. That's fine. You need to have a substrate or a sump here. Okay. If you don't have substrate, it won't work. Yeah. Any other questions?

I'm sorry, I didn't quite follow. Oh, an investor. Yeah. How do you find the proper If you're an investor, how do you find the right creative process for game? Are you looking for creative people or Yes. Um I would look for track record frankly. I would look for people that have done it before. I would also look at the exact opposite end at complete noviceses. Complete noviceses. Have you ever noticed that when you listen to bands who are putting out their first album, their first album is often startling and then their second and third are not as interesting? It's because people who don't yet know what everything is familiar often invent completely new things because they don't have the context and it's not yet you know and then when they settle in they just do things the way they always have and they get less interesting. So a team of veterans and noviceses might actually

be a more interesting thing to invest in than a team of you know well practiced people who've made exactly the kind of game that you've always made. You know that kind of thing. Try to find people who both have a track record of exploring new areas and find people who will just bring fresh ideas, people who just haven't done this, haven't done it that way to to force creative sparks. And if you're an investor, realize you'll probably be first mover and the second mover will eat your lunch, right? So Minecraft was built on Infin Miner. Blizzard was built on well literally a half dozen other games that they cloned and improved and polished the hell out of. Right? I don't know that Blizzard has ever invented a game in their entire existence. What they do is be second mover very very well. So if you're an investor, you might not want to do creativity at all. A lot of games companies just do fast

follow, right? They look for innovative new things and then they follow on it. Anybody else? All right. Thank you very much. [Applause]