17 - Creativity Techniques for Game Design and Game Idea Generation
by Lennart Nacke
Annakaisa Kultima is a game designer, game researcher, and very creative person, who works at the Game Research Lab of the Finnish University of Tampere. She focuses among other things on game idea generation with digital games. She uses general lateral thinking and idea engineering approaches to develop game specific ideas (similar to the German company called Zephram run by a former student colleague of mine). As with many idea engineering techniques, it is important to stimulate one’s creativity first, given a question or topic that people start thinking about. In a process of iterative refinement the large array of collected ideas is then filtered according to the more specific application area as in this case, digital games. Annakaisa’s slides themselves are a stimulating, colorful collection of interesting points, which I hope will inspire you as well.
More Links
Kultima, A., Niemelä, J., Paavilainen, J., and Saarenpää, H. 2008. Designing game idea generation games. In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 03 — 05, 2008). Future Play ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 137–144. DOI= 10.1145/1496984.1497007
Kultima, A. 2009. Casual game design values. In Proceedings of the 13th international Mindtrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (Tampere, Finland, September 30 — October 02, 2009). MindTrek ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 58–65. DOI= 10.1145/1621841.1621854
Kultima, A. and Paavilainen, J. 2007. Creativity techniques in game design. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Future Play (Toronto, Canada, November 14 — 17, 2007). Future Play ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 243–244. DOI= 10.1145/1328202.1328251