We need to fail to do good games

Written by Pelle Sten | April 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the process that creates the game. The game industry need more ideas so that they can discard more of them. That was Jason Della Rocca’s key takeaway in his talk at Nordic Game today.

Jason Della Rocca is a consultant at Perimeter Partners that works with creating game industry clusters and he agrees with Playfish’s Kristian Segerstråle that there is too much money wasted in game development. And the reason is that there are too few ideas. The idea become to precious. Makes you care too much. He made a comparison with the Hollywood model where tons of scripts and ideas are tried and tested before a movie or tv-show is ordered.

But there is, of course, people in the game industry trying to create more structured idea work. A couple of examples from the talk:

• It’s better to have ten teams building a concept each and then killing all but a couple than take a few teams and start building games. The concept phase is cheap and the build phase is expensive. So do lots of concepts and fail fast where it’s least expensive.
• Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie and later Wideload, Games bought donuts for the whole team and had idea meetings every friday morning.
• Another way is to do like the team behind Tower of Goo and set up very strict rules just to produce lots of games. Their rules where:
  1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
  2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
  3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. “gravity”, “vegetation”, “swarms”, etc.

But what I was most fascinated by in his presentation was his use of Sketchbook Pro as a presentation tool. It looked like it would give him a more natural way of presenting and a more improvised feel of the talk. I have embedded a short recording I did at the talk earlier today.

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