Part II: Speed
PRACTICE Makes Better: Self-Improvement Through Game Design Posted on November 21, 2013 by Ben
[Time 2]
“How do you let people betray each other?” “How do you handle gay marriage?” “How do you get people to want to play?” No, the above aren’t results from a Google auto-complete gone wrong. These were just a few of the questions posed at the Open Problems session at PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail, the NYU Game Center’s annual game design conference held last week. Now in its third year, the weekend conference brings together game designers working in digital games, analog games, and other disciplines of design for a series of in-depth discussions about game design.
Despite talks by name-brand designers like Warren Spector, Michael Brough and Sean Vanaman on emergent narrative, designing experimental games and postmortems on past successes, it was the Open Problems session that truly made the event special.
Between sessions, conference staff set up games referred to in the talks so attendees could contrast the actual game with the speakers’ thoughts. At Open Problems, designers bring design issues they’re wrestling with to the assembled brain trust for on-the-spot input, and it was at this year’s session that I realized a core truth: Much more so than other mediums, the practice of game design is about relentless, accelerated self-improvement.
Where the writer might have an editor or a group of readers, the sculptor might show works-in-progress to a select few, and the filmmaker might screen a rough cut for production staff, the game designer aims to get a project in front of as many people as possible as soon as possible to test his or her assumptions against reality. Less subjective than most authored media, the interactive nature of games helps illustrate objective truths through testing.
For example: If players keep running by the exit door and missing it, it’s highly likely that you need to make a change to make the door stand out more.
Only by embracing these truths and changing, bit by bit, can a game improve enough to fulfill its intended function better than it did before.
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[Time 3]
The Truths Are Out There Of course, the search for ways to improve the self-improvement process is not limited to game design and development. The opening talk of the conference, “B-boy Jams: The History and Organization of Breakdance Competitions,” gave attendees a crash course in the history of Hip Hop with regard to breakdancing as well as a new lens through which to consider issues of design. Yes, the struggling NYC breakdance scene is kind of similar to the equally-small competitive fighting game circuit, as one attendee pointed out. Yes, rule variants for breakdance battles inherently involve aspects of design that aren’t common to video games – like the skill of the contenders, the high level of braggadocious posturing inherent to the activity and the need to keep spectators entertained. Yes, the design of the events themselves may be a way to enable faster growth for the breakdancing scene – and yes, this would be game design at work.
At the conference’s closing session, involving a – you guessed it – group feedback dialog on what attendees liked, didn’t like, and would like to see next year, there was a clear push for more outside perspectives. The crowd called for theatrical designers, breakdancers, urban planners, industrial designers and more voices outside traditional game design to share their experiences. Of how they can touch people in their own disciplines, even if they share little in common with traditional games. The suggestions went on and on. As if by unspoken consensus, the group made it clear: they were hungry for more perspectives than what games themselves had to offer. Hungry to become more informed in what the world had for them. “Theme park designer,” someone said. “Playground designer,” someone else said. How many more occupations could we name? How many other perspectives would we want to hear from? It was almost as if the search for self-improvement, itself, had become a game.
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Source: dashjump
http://www.dashjump.com/practice-self-improvement-game-design/
75 Creativity Quotes by MARELISA
[Time 4]
Creativity quotes can inspire us to get started on our creative endeavors, whether it’s writing a screen play, putting together a presentation for a client, or simply being more creative in everyday life. Here, then, are 75 creativity quotes to get your creative juices flowing. 1. “There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” — Edward de Bono 2. “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” — Martha Graham 3. “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” — Theodore Levitt 4. “A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” — Charles Brower 5. “When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.” – Linda Naiman 6. “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” — Alan Alda 7. “It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” — Edward de Bono 8. “A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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[Time 5]
9. “Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” — William James 10. “The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally 11. “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” — Mary Lou Cook 12. “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London 13. “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” — Henry Ward Beecher 14. “The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.” — Abraham Maslow 15. “Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn’t written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn’t in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.” — Lincoln Steffens
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16. “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau 17. “We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.” — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy 18. “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” — Brenda Ueland 19. “Creativity is… seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.” — Michele Shea 20. “The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”
– Stephen Nachmanovitch 21. “As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems” — Edward de Bono 22. “Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it may sound at first. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.” — William McKnight, 3M President 23. “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.” — Nolan Bushnell 24. “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” — Albert Camus 25. “You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.” — Sean Connery 26. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney 27. “God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.” — Pablo Picasso
28. “To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.” — Pablo Picasso 29. “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 30. “The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.” — Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Check the rest from the website below
Source: daringtolivefully
http://daringtolivefully.com/creativity-quotes
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