“I’ve got a great idea for a game. I think I’d be a good ideas person.”

I’ve heard that countless times when people find out what I do for a living. The conversation is usually along the lines of:

“So what do you do?”

I’m an artist.

“Ah, so do you get to design the games?”

No, I’m an artist, I make art. (I don’t try to explain that I’m a technical artist.)

Then the person decides that I must be rich, and games are easy work, and that they could make games for a living – except that they have no programming or art skills. So what does that leave (apart from producing, sound, localisation, testing, HR and PR (all of which require their own skillsets))?

Designing. They are an ideas person. Good at stories. And they have an idea – although generally I find that a lot of people mistake an idea for a design. I’d surmise that there are three levels: The Idea, the Concept and the Design, all of which rise in complexity and detail. Anyone can have an idea but very few people have a design.

…but back to The Idea.

I hate to burst anyones bubble, but games companies up and down the land are not gnashing their teeth and beating their breasts due to lack of ideas. Hell, ask any one person in a games company for 5 ideas and you’ll have them in 5 minutes. As someone who has never worked in games you are not going to walk into a company and have them proclaim ‘Hallelujah! We are saved! We had no ideas before and now we have thanks to you!’.

Putting it simply – games companies don’t need ideas.

The personal sounding title of this post is down to the fact that I don’t need your idea either. I’ve already got ideas, and they’ve already been refined over time. I don’t care about your idea, I care about mine because I want my game to get made before yours.

I’m not even talking about the ideas we have together when working together – there are hundreds of ideas from dozens of people all of which go together to make a game (a game design doc is rarley the be-all-and-end-all). In that situation you listen to every persons ideas and try to make the best game you can. I’m talking about the idea you try to pitch to me in the pub.

Oh, and one final point – I legally don’t want to hear your idea.

Let’s say that the place I worked for was making a game where you were a dinosaur that transformed into a spaceship to track down evil magic cowboys, and you told me in the pub that you had an idea where you were a magic cowboy hunting dinosaurs. The two are unrelated, but you could claim when the game was released that it had been your idea. This is not uncommon, and I’ve worked for a company where this happened – two guys claimed that we overheard them talking in a pub and stole their idea (when in fact the game idea had come from a few years previously in a city a few hundred miles away). They tried to sue – and whilst they lost, they had to be taken seriously.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under Article, Games Industry, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.