Man, it’s busy around here all of a sudden!

Most of you have probably already seen this in Kevan’s pseudoblog: the Experimental Game Project postmortem, talking mostly about the methods that produced the best results in their quest to create a game a week for one semester. I wish I’d done that in grad school. Instead I mostly scribbled notes for Ninja Golf and pouted.

This was a computer game project, of course, but there’s a lot of interesting fodder about group creativity, notably in the sections about constraints (my personal fetish) and brainstorming. The participants found that brainstorming was useless for coming up with new ideas, but powerful as a tool for enhancing and streamlining an existing idea. I think that’s a model we’ve followed intuitively here, and I think it explains why the game seed posts have been more successful than the lonely mechanics. (But lonely mechanics are still fun to play with, so no need to refrain there.)