Jesse Schell has written what I still think is the best book on the subject, uh, The Art of Game Design, and he spends a lot of time talking about drawing inspiration from everything in your life, you know, from seeing a bird fly by, or a ballerina dancing, and not simply from playing other games, and feeding back on, you know, making games based on previous games. Those of us who had the-the luck of starting in games as early as I did, we weren’t constrained by what had been done before, because there really wasn’t much of anything done before. The limited stuff that had been done in pinball and some of the earliest video games didn’t apply as the technology got better and the scope got wider. And that gave us a huge amount of freedom to draw from every part of our experience. So these days, I-I-I try and really encourage people to do that, to think beyond just the games that they played, to look for inspiration, to look for regeneration, and combine specifically things that don’t seem to fit very well, because often the most creative and exciting ideas come from two or three or four things that don’t have any good reason to be put together in the first place at all, but when you do, sometimes even as a joke, you suddenly realize that your subconscious has figured out that there’s some connection between those seemingly disparate things that just works really well together.
