Game Design

The first reading,  What is a game Anyway?  tells us the basics of what a game is exactly. From this reading I found that a definition of what a game is can differ depending on different people however the one referred to here is " a play activity with rules that involves conflict". 

This article shows how people can have entirely different perceptions of what a game is and tells us how we can begin creating our own games. It shows how you can create a very basic but playable game with nothing but a pen and paper, although yes this is very simple it allows us to begin thinking creatively about games. It gives us the basis of the process of forming our own ideas, how we can start small and build on it and make something more complicated. 

The second reading, The organic nature of game ideation teaches us more about the process of developing ideas. In this article 23 finnish game designers and professionals were interviewed and gave a great insight into how they come up with their ideas. There are different approaches mentioned in this article for example there are both informal and formal approaches, these can include seeking inspiration, purposeful activities and bouncing ideas or brainstorming. 

In the third reading we are given Four Basic Methods for Generating Ideas. The techniques mentioned in this article are :

• concentration 
• brainstorming
• scamper
• ramsey

Concentration and brainstorming are two things we are generally already very familiar with and do not need much explaining, concentrating is something we all do everyday without even thinking about it and brainstorming is "the most common and well known method in the industry". However, scamper is somewhat more elaborate, and the ramsey method even more so. Each of the letters in Scamper is reference to one of its methods of idea generation. The ramsey method is the most complicated of them all and requires quite a bit of reading to understand, thankfully the article goes into great detail on this. 

I found this image on pinterest of a design process and thought it seemed quite helpful 

(img from pinterest- https://pin.it/4fmCq2f )

Thanks for reading :)

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