Where Do Game Design Ideas Come From? Invention and Recycling in Games Developed in Sweden Ulf Hagen Södertörns University 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
[email protected] ABSTRACT sequels and licensed games. In this paper I will try to The game industry is often accused for not being original contribute to the discussion by examining the design ideas and inventive enough, making sequels and transmediations behind the games. instead of creating new game concepts and genres. Idea creation in game development has not been studied much In media studies many scholars have observed that the by scholars. This paper explores the origin of game design media landscape of today is characterized by a flow of ideas, with the purpose of creating a classification of the content in between different media forms and individual domains the ideas are drawn from. Design ideas in 25 works. Intertextuality and transmediation are terms that games, developed by the four main game developers in describe aspects of this phenomenon, which Jenkins [11] Sweden, have been collected mainly through interviews sees as a sign of a “convergence culture”. Bolter & Grusin’s with the designers and through artifact analyses of the [3] concept remediation describes how not only content, but games. A grounded theory approach was then used to also representational approaches and styles are used, develop categories “bottom-up” from the collected data. borrowed, reshaped, adapted, and recycled all over the This resulted in four main categories and a number of sub media landscape. They even propose that in contemporary categories, describing different domains that game design culture “all mediation is remediation” [3].