Whilst thinking of a question to ask that will kick start my creative thinking and improve my capabilities I have looked back at what I have learned through my studies, the methods I have been taught, or the concepts I have discovered on my own. The goal of this pondering is to find a question that I have no immediate answer for, that I can use as a catalyst to force myself to look deeper into my creative genre and come out of the exercise with a new skill to bring to bear.
In the process of searching I originally thought of the question "Are there any creative methods in game design that are universally applicable and always result in a positive result? Should these methods/method be taught as a standard for game design practitioners?". I realised upon looking at this question that there are many layers involved, ranging from teaching to game design methodology, even needing to take into account the preference of each practitioner for their own methods.
With these thoughts in mind I have streamlined the question I actually want to ask myself and others to the following, "Are there methods of creation I do not employ that I can improve my own creative processes with?". This question is much more direct and even selfish in how it can be answered. At the root of the question is game design methodology, how we create a system, what makes it interesting, is the design viable with the tools available? Availability ties into the selfish aspect of the question, what methods am I capable of taking advantage of? Are they applicable to what I aim to design and how flexible is the method?
To answer this question I plan to look back at an interview done with a lecturer from Griffith Uni to find the methods he commonly uses and trial them, reflecting on how they compare to my own methods of ideation. Refining my answer I plan to look into research on uninhibited ideation as well as games designed to promote ideation - games designed to promote the design of games. Below is a short visual map of how the different components of the question interact as I see them.
The methods for designing games come from many many directions, either games found through imaginative means, games created due to access to a certain thing or games found whilst looking at a certain theme. Witt and Robra-Bissantz(2017) looked at how we go about creative processes and the methods used and came up with a concept where the game creators play a game designed to inspire creativity and prompt new ideas. The way in which we can create games is ever changing and growing, and I plan to embrace that and hopefully find new or unique chains of thought and creativity.
References:
Jamie Lack Interview (personal communication, 2020)
Kultima, A., Niemelä, J., Paavilainen, J., & Saarenpää, H. (2008, November). Designing game idea generation games. In Proceedings of the 2008 conference on future play: Research, play, share (pp. 137-144).
Nestok, B. R. (2016). Uninhibited Ideation: Childhood Games as Design Methods (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati).
Wetzel, R., Rodden, T., & Benford, S. (2017). Developing ideation cards for mixed reality game design. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 3(2).
Witt, M., & Robra-Bissantz, S. (2012). Sparking motivation and creativity with" online ideation games". INFORMATIK 2012.