Ideas Via Mike Bambury

A while ago, Mike Bambury (Art Director at Sony's London Studio) game a guest lecture on creating ideas - New or unique ideas rather than the reprocessed or influenced ideas we often see around us. It was a simple lecture but yet it was very interesting and useful.

Mike covered three ways of creating or processing ideas;

"Random Entry"
Mike explained random entry as thinking of a selection of random words and then somehow linking them (apparently something our brains are pretty good at doing).
For instance - 'Castle', 'Clouds', 'Rocket Propelled Grenade' could come up with lots of very random or interesting situations; A castle in the clouds, shooting RPG's into clouds, a rocket propelled castle, Evil clouds holding a castle to siege?
One of the examples which were given (amongst other things) was the moon - and yet somebody linked the moon with cheese - for belief that the moon itself is made of cheese, which displays the point that the human mind can link almost anything with something else.

Using this method is quick, and a few simple links can soon be expand upon in order to make concepts or stories to kick start an idea.

Concept Extraction

The easiest way of describing concept extraction is thinking of the world as a hierarchy - concept extraction is basically getting a bunch of ideas and finding a common factor and taking it up a notch in that hierarchy.

for example - Goblin, Griffin, Fairy, Minotaur would all fit into the category 'mythical creatures' whereas pogo stick, car, aeroplane, penny-farthing would all fit into the category of transport or methods of travel.

this method not only helps separate completely unrelated, unusable ideas from a main concept, but it also helps find other things which are related to your current ideas by backtracking; for instance, if you backtrack from transport you will also get boats, hovercraft, rockets scooters and trains.

Provocation

Provocation is the last way of generating ideas that mike talked about - Provocation is basically taking what we expect, or the norm, and switching it on its head. For instance - we expect a FPS to have guns and enemies and we expect a racing game to have a track and finish gates - So if we took one or more of these aspects of game play away, we would have done this method justice.

For instance, 'Upgrade complete' is a flash shooting game, however - It doesn't have any of the expected parts which are usually required in such a game - you have to upgrade and buy all of the parts of the game in order to play it. (Not the best example of provocation, but a good start).

http://armorgames.com/play/3955/upgrade-complete

http://armorgames.com/play/11028/upgrade-complete-2

So - In conclusion, a pretty interesting and useful lecture really!