Will Wright’s 4 Tips for Generating Video Game Concepts

Inspiration for the perfect video game concept can strike at any time so you need to be ready to write those ideas down. Whether you want to develop a narrative first-person shooter (FPS), or a battle royale-style massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, the following steps will help you streamline the process of creating your first game concept:

• Explore the genre. Pick a video game genre that interests you, like action-adventure or role-playing games (RPGs), and explore all the elements that go into developing the worlds and characters in those games. Write down a few video game ideas that fit within that genre to see if you have an angle that brings something new to the table.
• Pick a niche. Find a video game subgenre that piques your interest, and try to create a game concept for it. You can also try generating a concept that combines elements of different video game subgenres. While you should embrace all ideas during the brainstorming process, giving yourself a specific genre to work within can help produce new and innovative concepts.
• Ask around. Talk to your friends and fellow gamers to find out the type of game ideas that excite them. Understanding the type of gameplay others are looking for can help push you in the right direction for designing a good game concept. Though public opinion is important to an extent, remember that there is no such thing as a game concept that every player will love.
• Freewrite. Freewriting is the practice of writing without a prescribed structure, which means no outlines, cards, notes, or editorial oversight. In freewriting, the writer follows the impulses of their own mind, allowing thoughts and inspiration to appear to them without premeditation. Freewriting isn’t just for literature or scriptwriting, it can be useful for brainstorming new creative ideas as well. Allow yourself to write for a set amount of time and come up with as many game ideas as you can.
• Watch and read. In addition to gathering inspiration from other video games, watch television shows, movies, and read a variety of books. Note the most compelling or interesting parts of these storytelling mediums, and use those to inform your own concepts.

Successful game designer Will Wright has a few tips that can help you generate a great game concept:

1. 1. Always look for inspiration. Look for points of conflict or dynamic interaction everywhere you go. While the games that have paved the way for modern gaming evolution are ripe with inspiration, the natural and social worlds are a richer source of concepts than other games.”Being a game designer turned into a lifelong learning process where I can go off in any subject I want to,” Will says. “For me, it’s usually some kind of interesting about the world or in the world that, as I dig deeper, it gets more interesting. . . . A lot of the games I’ve done actually were based upon cool subjects, usually, books that I read. SimCity was very influenced by the work of a guy names Jay Forrester, who was the first person to actually mode cities on the early computers, back in the ‘50s.”
2. 2. Find new subjects through wide-ranging research. Don’t limit yourself to subjects that have already been explored in games. Seek out areas that are new to you and try to learn more about them, no matter how technical they might seem at first. “When I was starting out in game design, there wasn’t this thing around called the internet,” he says. “I actually had to go to this place they used to call libraries, where they had these things called books. And I would read these books, and learn about things that way. Nowadays it’s so low friction to go on the web and find anything you want to, antinally at all, about anything you want to. I think that now, designers, have so much less friction to do research around an idea that for me, it’s almost magical that I can kind of pick any topic and go down any little, weird path and find material about it. . . . As a designer, I don’t feel there are any meaningful limitations beyond my own imagination.”
3. 3. Analyze your subject. Once you have a general subject for a game, analyze it from every possible perspective. If you’re interested in air travel, for example, you might wonder how a pilot lives and works. However, consider the flight attendant or the air traffic controller, the plane itself, or the birds avoiding it during takeoff and landing. What about the clouds the plane cuts through during flight, or the weather gods who determine when a plane is grounded and when it can fly? Each of these perspectives can produce any number of game designs. All should be considered in equal detail. “Even when I’m kind of initally imagining, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a game about this thing,’ I don’t start by thinking, ‘What’s the game going to be,’ or ‘What’s the game going to be like?’ I just dive deeper and deeper into the subject and the research. I start trying to kind of look at the componenets. What are the different aspects of this that are interesting to me? It might be the process. It might be the structure. It might be the science behind it. From those things, I start imagining, okay, ‘How would I really like to kinda view this or manipulate it or play with it or create it?’ . . . I think the perspectives are far more valuable than particular solutions or approaches.”
4. 4. Listen to your instincts. When you face difficult design decisions, trust your gut. Sometimes you’ll have to make choices without clear data. Be confident in your instincts about what is fun. “I can’t always express exactly on what dimensions it’s going to be cool, but i hope that my instincts will bring me to a place where a wide range of people will enjoy it,” Will says. “I wasn’t always that way. . . . When I was working on SimCity by myself, I showed it to a few people, and they thought it was kind of cool. I showed it to my eventually partner, Jeff Braun, and he was like, ‘Oh yes. We have to do this. Let’s start a company.’ And we started Maxis and did SimCity. But in my mind, even at that point, I was thinking, ‘Okay, this is a game that maybe a few strategy gamers or architects maybe might enjoy.’ It didn’t occur to me that a wide range of people would enjoy that. To Jeff, it did. Jeff kind of understood that, I think, more than I did. After that, I started learning to trust my instincts.”

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