IDEATION EXERCISES

Ideation Exercise: Rapid Brainstorming

This is something you should do in a group, so you can each present your ideas to the others. Before you
start, you need to set up the details for the ideation you are about to do. Platform, format, whether it’s a
board game or digital game, if it should use some specific intellectual property, and so on.

How?
1. Take five minutes to come up with a game idea. You can’t refer to other games in the description
of this idea.
2. One at a time, present these ideas to everyone in the group.
3. Do it again!

Why?
This exercise can be used in a classroom setting to effectively demonstrate that ideas are fairly easy to
come up with, while it’s quite hard to pinpoint which of the ideas you should turn into a game.

It’s important that you follow the directive not to refer to other games. If not, you will almost always get
ideas of the “GTA, but in space” variety.

Ideation Exercise: Opposites

Whenever you come up with an idea, there’s always another side to it. An opposite side. If you think
combat is a good idea, then maybe you should think about non-violent ways the player can engage with
your game. Or if you get inspired by the mechanic of worker placement, you could consider a worker
removal game and how that would affect your game.

How?
1. Narrow the conversation to a single subject. A verb, theme, character, mechanic; anything that
can be isolated.
2. Discuss what the opposite of the subject would be. Note each thing.
3. Discuss takeaways from each opposite and consider what consequences it has for the subject if
you would switch it on its head.
4. Decide whether each opposite is something you can use to inform your game design, or simply
reinforces the original idea.

Why?
This exercise serves to get you out of your comfort zone and to widen your frame of reference. It’s not
always easy to come up with direct opposites. But whole genres can be discovered using this exercise.
Like how a stealth game can be seen as a game about avoiding combat: the opposite of combat.
EXPLORATION EXERCISES
Exploration Exercise: Be the Enemy
One way to test ideas is to represent systems or other features with players and then allow those players
to speak for the systems in questions.

How?
1. Work up a number of situations where players will find themselves while playing the finished
game. Player scenarios.
2. Define the different systems in your game. Maybe you have a combat system, an enemy system,
a character movement system, or something like it.
3. Appoint one person to represent each system and provide them with the ideation notes for that
system.
4. Present the scenarios from the first point, one at a time, and have each person answer questions
related to the system they represent.

Why?
Many of the decision making processes involved in a game are complex and dynamic. It can take a long
time to build something like an enemy AI.

By having a person represent part of such a process, you make it possible to make decisions about it as if
you have a working version of it even when you don’t. The person representing the enemy AI may make
up things like taking cover, throwing grenades, or retreating. Suddenly you can point to specific activities
that you may want the enemy to engage in.
COMMITMENT EXERCISES
Commitment Exercise: The Seven Whys
Picture the caricature parent-child conversation. Yes, you must do this. Why? Because I say so. Why?
Because if you don’t, bad things happen. Why? Because those bad things are really really bad. Why? etc.

This exercise is about doing exactly this, but towards your game. Once your game survives this gauntlet,
this is a good indication that you’re ready to commit.

How?
1. Make a pitch for your game using the Commitment tools. This is what you will be moving
forward with.
2. Ask “Why?”, and for each answer, ask another “Why?” until you have asked seven times.
3. If you get stuck along the way, if anything doesn’t have a given answer, or if you feel that the
answers are inadequate, make a note of it for a future discussion and then continue.
4. Once you have asked the seven whys, you will have either a clear idea of your whole game or
you will have concrete questions that you need to resolve.

Why?
It’s easy to get stuck in your own head with a project and to forget the reasons you made certain
decisions. But even more than that, when you have all the answers this exercise will give you great
confidence and demonstrate maybe more clearly than anything else that you’re ready to move into
production.
PROBLEM-SOLVING EXERCISES
Problem-Solving Exercise: Skip Forward
Some problems with a game design are not with the game design itself but on a kind of insistence that it
needs to present a whole picture of something. Imagine the starting level in Super Mario Bros.—have
you ever wondered how Mario got there? Probably not.

This is what this exercise serves to do too: to move things forward to where it makes more sense as a
playable experience and skips forward through many of the (often) unnecessary exposition we often
include in our games.

How?
1. Start with a problem area in your game that you haven’t been able to resolve.
2. Identify three game “states” that occur five minutes, fifteen minutes, and thirty minutes forward
in the game experience.
3. For a very short game, try 30 seconds, one minute, and three minutes.
4. For a very long game, try one hour, five hours, ten hours.
5. Without changing anything else, play the game or at least discuss the game as if it was played
from one of the three new potential starts.
6. Evaluate if these new starting points resolve any of the problem areas you speak of. Evaluate this
purely from how the game plays.

Why?
It’s common that we insist on certain gameplay segments not because the game itself needs them but
because we think it needs them. This exercise will force you to try without these segments so that you
can look at them more critically.

The conclusion may very well be that these segments are indeed necessary, but more often than not it
will be that you are wasting the player’s time and that skipping forward helps the play experience.

Problem-Solving Exercise: Use It Again

Some game projects take several years to complete and will accumulate a whole library of design
solutions that see little or even no use in the finalized project. Some because their priority decreases or
because their part of the game gets cut; others because the direction changes or something else solves a
more immediate problem in a better way.

This exercise is an active attempt to make use of these valuable nuggets of buried game gold.

How?
1. Identify and list solutions that you have made very limited use of through your game. Maybe the
initial animation where you draw your gun, in the first level, or a drafting feature that was used
to determine initial cards.
 2. Identify and list content that you have made very limited use of through your game. This can be
an animation you have recorded for a certain scene, that only gets used once, for example. It can
be a sound effect, a certain card only used in setup, etc. It can also be an image that you have
cut in such a way that only a corner of the whole image is used. Maybe the “rappelling down
from the ceiling” animation that was made for just one cutscen.
3. Revisit a problem you are currently facing in your game design.
4. Refer to the lists from #1 and #2 and see if any of the solutions or pieces of content can be used
to resolve it.

Why?
In any game project above a certain size, there will be many smaller solutions and pieces of content that
are simply lost to time or context. Making sure to revisit them may save you some resources in the
longer run.

When used well, this exercise can resuscitate anything from forgotten mocap animations to underused
artwork and give them new life. It will also teach you the value of breadth and the recycling of ideas.
BALANCING EXERCISES
Balancing Exercise: Rule of Threes
You sometimes run into situations where something feels just a bit off. The feature is right, the gameplay
is fun, but something is simply missing. In this case you can try applying the rule of threes.

How?
1. Identify a thing you want to tweak in your game. Something that doesn’t feel quite right. It can
be the number of enemy types, number of active quests, variety of weapons, or really anything
else that the player engages with regularly.
2. If you have one thing: add two more.
3. If you have two things: add one more.
4. If you have more than three things: reduce them down to three.

Why?
It’s quite common for games to use multiples of three for various things. Three extra lives, three types of
ammo, three stages to the bossfight; you have probably seen this many times.

Balancing Exercise: Rock, Paper, Scissors

Anywhere there are threes you can make them each other’s opposites in order to make the game’s
possibility space more interesting. This exercise can help you see where different features should fit by
matching them against each other and having each one counteract exactly one other thing.

How?
1. See if you have areas of your game that are too simple, not challenging enough, or where one
strategy sees much more use than the available option. This doesn’t have to be strictly game
design; it can also be visual, or even narrative.
2. Draw three circles on a piece of paper or in your node editor of choice. Draw one arrow from
each circle pointing to the next circle.
3. Add the things you listed in #1 to the first, second, and third circles, depending on how many you
have.
4. With the circles and arrows, you can now see how these elements—guns, factions, ammo types,
whatever they may be—could work in a scenario where they counter each other out.

Why?
The reason game designers often talk about rock, paper, scissors as a kind of solution is because of the
elegance it offers. It’s a great way to add rough edges and to give all the pieces of your game a higher
degree of relevance.
TUNING EXERCISES
Tuning Exercise: Path of Most Fun
When players use cheap tactics or exploit rules loopholes or technology flaws, it’s often known as
“cheesing.” Let’s say that you run into an instance of said “cheesing” in your game. You can rarely ban it
outright and it may be too hard to change the game at that point. But what you can do is aim to make
the path of most fun the same as the path of least resistance.

How?
1. Identify the instance of cheesing and study how players interact with your game to make it
happen. If there are technical exploits, specific skills they must develop, or other circumstances
involved.
2. Discuss which of the things from #1 are simply bugs that should be fixed and features used
consistently with your systems but in unintended ways.
3. Fix bugs that should be fixed, but only fix them if they break the experiences for a significant
number of players. Plug the holes, as it were. Cheesing of the kind that uses exploits may ruin
whole communities; but some of these unintended effects may also create entire communities.
4. Reward players using features in the newly discovered way.

Why?
Players won’t play as you want them to. They will quickly find the path of least resistance, regardless of
whether you figured this out beforehand or not, and they may think less of your game because of it.
Embracing this phenomenon and adapting the game to present its best sides to players that find the
path of least resistance is a great way to think of the player’s ownership of their game experience as a
strength and not a liability.