I'm sure this is old hat to people who've gone far enough down the design road, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway.

QuoteThe truth about ideas

Ideas aren't that special.

Seriously, a cool idea isn't a game in and of itself. Antoine Bauza was recently awarded the Game of the Year award at the Essen game festival in Germany. He won it for the tiny cooperative card game Hanabit, in which players hold their cards backwards and rely on each other to get accurate information about their own hands. Now, he didn't just roll up and say, "Hey, I want to make a game where you hold your cards backwards and have to work together!" and get the Spiel de Jahres handed to him. No, there was a ton of work and two separate publications before Hanabi got recognized for its brilliance and became a commercial hit.

Ideas don't reveal emergence.

Even if your idea is 100% original, the idea alone isn't valuable, it's the work of revealing emergent properties that makes the idea valuable. Taking Bauza's Hanabi example again: For a game that elegant, you know there was a lot of time put into every design decision. With so few mechanics, everything becomes that much more important. How many suits should be in the deck? How many cards of each rank should be in the deck? What's an average score across one hundred games? How do people communicate with each other in play? None of these questions get answered unless the "idea" becomes a reality at the table. There are uncountable emergent properties that just don't reveal themselves until you playtest.

Your ideas are stolen... from someone else.

I've got a closet full of unfinished ideas that never made the final cut for whatever reason. Ideas everywhere! Seriously, here, have some, I have too many. We've all got them, and chances are that not one of them is at all original. Not mine, probably not yours. We can't escape the design milieu of our times, we can only respond to it, iterate it. We are adrift on the flow of style, whether we realize it or not. A simple example: Try thinking of a new chess piece. Go ahead, maybe it moves like a bishop, but limited to two spaces? Maybe it moves like a King, but two spaces if it moves forward, and can only capture diagonally? Okay, now take a look at the hundreds of chess pieces out there and see if you can find some empty space left to explore. Is this sobering? Yes. Is it discouraging? Hell no.

Your idea alone is not a game.

Let's get zen for a bit. If a game goes unplayed, is it still a game? Is it only a game while being played? These are the questions I have for you if you're more concerned about jealously guarding your precioussss instead of actually putting it in front of as many people as possible. Your idea is not a game. Only your game is a game. Even then, it's only a game if people are playing it. That means you have to actually make prototypes, write rules, and face the social awkwardness of asking strangers to play this thing with the added caveat that it may not even be fun. That is what will make your idea valuable. And guess what? When the game is fun, the victory will be so much sweeter.

Value takes a while. A long while.

All that to say... No, I'm not worried about someone stealing my ideas. Exactly the opposite, in fact. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't so open and public about my design process. I've been doing this in public for over a decade now. But when I started? Yeah, I was worried about it.

It started in 1999ish when I designed a fan-made World of Darkness RPG about sentient zombies, called Zombie: the Coil. There was a gap in the WoD mythos that I thought I could fill. And boy, did I fill it with every contrived faction, inconsistent mechanic, punk-rock posturing, and gothic whininess that I thought a proper RPG was supposed to have. I just copied the structures from existing White Wolf properties of the time and wrote within those constraints and posted the results on my crap website.

Then I got worried about White Wolf stealing my idea. I heard they were releasing Hunter: the Reckoning and that it featured zombies. Oh no, zombies in the World of Darkness? Crap! All my writing was for naught! Nevermind that I didn't even try properly pitching it to White Wolf in the first place. Can you imagine the naive audacity? I crib wholesale from White Wolf's books and then I get worried about them looking at my stuff? Get it together, teen Daniel. Zombie: the Coil sucks. But, keep at it, you'll find your design mode in about 15 years. (Also, teen Daniel, stop wearing a trench coat in Florida. You look like an idiot.) Needless to say, White Wolf did just fine for itself in the 90s without my tiny contribution. But working through that fear, just getting comfortable showing my work to other people and holding it up for critique: that was valuable. And, then I went on to design plenty more rubbish games.

No genius. No mystique. Only work.

Don't buy into the genius mystique. It is a mirage. Maybe there are geniuses out there, but you can't go assuming that you're one. That's like living as if you're going to win the lottery on a regular basis. No, the value comes from the work and no one's going to do more of it than you. Buy a pizza for your playtesters. Agonize over game terms. Completely scrap three prototypes in a row and start over again. That is the craft, the work, of game design. So get back to it!

tl;dr, don't worry about anyone stealing your great ideas, the real problem is making your ideas worth anything. Salty words of wisdom for would-be game designers!

Reminds me of my old art school teacher: " art is whatever you actually finish. Being an artist means getting paid for it. "

300 million dollars awarded in a settlement to Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra say otherwise.

Quote from: Rincewind1;686221300 million dollars awarded in a settlement to Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra say otherwise.

I'm not sure I'm seeing a relation.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686227I'm not sure I'm seeing a relation.

They hired Zuckerberg to do all the heavy lifting for them, but yet they were still reimbursed when he ran with their idea to create Facebook. Which points to prove that ideas themselves can be worth quite a wad, if you can prove someone stole yours.

Quote from: Rincewind1;686234They hired Zuckerberg to do all the heavy lifting for them, but yet they were still reimbursed when he ran with their idea to create Facebook. Which points to prove that ideas themselves can be worth quite a wad, if you can prove someone stole yours.

Ideas and stolen source code...

Reminds me of an old John Carmack quote.  Basically that sure, ideas are great, but really the level of 'idea' you need is what would fit on the back of a napkin.

After that, it's all about evaluating, changing, trying, and evolving the game.  That's where the real genius and design comes in.  The initial idea is one tenth of one percent.

It's a really cool quote.  I'll see if I can find a more accurate version.

This is kind of like saying "Oxygen plays no part in a happy fulfilling life."

Without the idea what is there to build?

True in games, particularly computer games, the idea might be worth less then say a new invention, but there's lot of games that carry million dollar price tags worth of execution that suck like Romero's fiasco while mini-indie games sell a million copies due to an innovative idea that simply works.

Quote from: CRKrueger;686240This is kind of like saying "Oxygen plays no part in a happy fulfilling life."

Without the idea what is there to build?

True in games, particularly computer games, the idea might be worth less then say a new invention, but there's lot of games that carry million dollar price tags worth of execution that suck like Romero's fiasco while mini-indie games sell a million copies due to an innovative idea that simply works.

Funny you should mention that, as Daikatana came about just as I got my first PC .



Of course, the gaming mags I have have the Polish translation.

Quote from: CRKrueger;686240This is kind of like saying "Oxygen plays no part in a happy fulfilling life."

Without the idea what is there to build?

True in games, particularly computer games, the idea might be worth less then say a new invention, but there's lot of games that carry million dollar price tags worth of execution that suck like Romero's fiasco while mini-indie games sell a million copies due to an innovative idea that simply works.

The idea is important.  But it's not the main thing.  It's the initial impulse, the thing that gets you started.  But it's not enough.  All the little decisions you make between the idea and the finished game, all the tweaks and modifications, *that's* what makes the game great.

Actually those mini-indie games probably revised and tweaked and re-evaluated *more* than the $100M titles.  Less oversight, political fighting, and people invested in "their" ideas makes it a lot easier to tweak and modify things.  Less complex games also make it faster to make those modifications, as the compile/run cycle is just faster and there's a lot smaller likelihood that you'll break existing content by tweaking the feel of a jump.

And if you think Daikatana executed well...  it didn't.

Hell, Daikatana is probably the poster boy for ideas not being worth as much as people think.  It had great ideas, and crap execution.

Even the "great ideas" in games, half of the time, are things that came up during the development cycle and aren't things that were part of some initial vision document.

Every team I've ever known that has made a really awesome game has sat there and taken their game, and tweaked and modified it, and gathered data on it, and had no sacred cows regarding it.  They playtest the hell out of it, find out what does and doesn't work, and then use that to make it better.  Over and over and over again.

Look at the tools that game devs use.  They can tell you exactly how people play the game in playtests (and in many cases, afterwards).  They can use metrics to tell you exactly where people get stuck, where they die, how long it takes them to figure these things out.  They can tell you how effective people are with different weapons.  And they take this information and they feed it back into the game to improve it.

I can think of exactly one game that was excellent that didn't do this, and even then I'd have to ask how much iteration really did end up getting done vs. the initial design.  But that team was seriously a "lightning strikes" chance of a lot of really excellent people landing on the same team at the same time, and all of the other factors lining up just so.

And even that game wasn't a huge commercial success.

Quote from: The Traveller;686196tl;dr, don't worry about anyone stealing your great ideas, the real problem is making your ideas worth anything. Salty words of wisdom for would-be game designers!

In fact, I post mine online hoping someone less lazy will take them and run.  Alas, not yet.

Ideas aren't worth that much, that's true. But then again, how often have you seen something really fresh come out of hollywood recently, and not a remake/reimagining/sequel/comic-to-movie/etc?

Quote from: Lynn;686290Ideas aren't worth that much, that's true. But then again, how often have you seen something really fresh come out of hollywood recently, and not a remake/reimagining/sequel/comic-to-movie/etc?

That is not about ideas though its about risk.
No doubt there are 1000s of original idea packs scripts out there but the studios won't take a punt because the risk is too high so they stick to known formula Comic book adaptations, sequals a Rom-com with 2 popular TV sitcom stars etc.

Some get made Inception, Cabin in the Woods, etc but they are usually backed by a big name or they are small scale indie movies.

Quote from: CRKrueger;686240This is kind of like saying "Oxygen plays no part in a happy fulfilling life."

Without the idea what is there to build?

I think what's being said is, without the building there's no value.

Or in fancy-talk, the idea is the prerequisite, but is not sufficient.

The idea is the sperm and egg, but someone has to grow it and bring it into the world. Many guys throw a lot of sperm in places they won't find an egg. So much for ideas.