|  |
|
I remember being a kid and sitting next to a stream or lying down in a big field looking at the sky and spacing out. During these "special moments," all manner of thoughts would flit through my brain, and looking back, I wish I had written them all down. Great ideas don't come around that often, but it's the people who take notice of them who end up making a difference in the world. Imagination is completely free of charge, but not just anyone has a gift for it. It takes a free thinker who is not constrained by stereotypes or by worrying about what everyone else is doing and thinking. Playing all the high-caliber games over this holiday season has made me realize that the things that separate the good games from the great games is imagination and hard work. And imagination isn't something that can be purchased.
 | 
Sports games have lacked imagination for years. |
As a kid I took my imagination for granted. I remember adults telling me how they were jealous of it and that as they had grown older, they'd lost the ability to think freely, which was far too much for me to comprehend at the time. But now that I'm getting up there in years myself, it's starting to become clear. The adults would often talk about how their jobs had beaten them down so far that they had turned into robots that simply repeated the same pattern with each passing day. If you take a close look at 80 percent of the video games available today, it appears as if most game designers have fallen into this same rift where they have become incapable of having interesting ideas. We've all sat around while playing a particular game and thought that we could have done a better job designing it. Of course, we don't take into account the grueling hours required to create a game and how they may wear on a person over time. Or how programmers may have been worked to the bone constantly under the threat of having the game completely cancelled by a publisher if it's not completed on time. No, all we think about is the end product. The final game. As you might imagine, situations such as these do not necessarily foster imagination, and consequently, the majority of games end up lacking it.
| 
Treasure seems to never run out of imaginative ideas. |
How much imagination does it take to add a few new features to a sports game? Not much. But at the same time, all the imagination in the world is worthless unless you have a means to put it into practice. It takes a development team that believes in your vision and is talented enough to see it through. Not every game designer has this luxury. Where would Shigeru Miyamoto be if he didn't have the strong internal teams at Nintendo making his visions come true? Or how about Hideo Kojima at Konami? Would we even know who Solid Snake is if Konami hadn't put its best teams on Kojima's projects? The video game industry is a strange entity full of visionaries, nepotism, hard workers, and people who are at the right place at the right time. Those with the most creative minds aren't necessarily the ones calling the shots as far as game design is concerned, so it's not surprising that so many games are sequels or carbon copies of each other. At the same time, there's someone who is completely brilliant hacking away at code in the dark basement of some small development house, just waiting for the chance to show his or her stuff.
| 
Was Pikmin really conceived in a backyard? |
So was Shigeru Miyamoto really in his garden when he came up with the idea for Pikmin? Or was he driving his car listening to music? I often wonder just what the setting was when an interesting concept was conceived for a game and often imagine the designer sitting on a cliff face, staring at the ocean. But chances are, he or she was picking up some Twinkies at the local convenience store. That's the funny thing about imagination. It can strike at any time. And when we try hard to find it, it becomes elusive. Sometimes we play games and we ask, what was the person who made this on? But truth be told, he or she just spent some time alone and took the time to catalog his or her thoughts. We all have interesting ideas worthy of investigation, but it's what you do with them that makes all the difference. If you truly look for the imagination in games, you'll find the true wonders of the industry. And if you take the time to find the imagination within yourself, you'll be surprised at what's there for the taking.
|
|
