Game Idea Jamming

On the 7th we had two sessions with our tutor George, this session was called "Design Jam", the idea was for us to be given a card with a completely random word or sentence on it and create an idea for a game within 10 minutes, and then present the game with a 30 second pitch to the group for crits and compliments. My two were "Zombie Hypnosis" and "Asteroid Tickler"

With fantastic idea drawings ;)

I found this session very good and gave me a lot of ideas on how to develop my concept for the project, and also made me think that coming up with an original idea is hard work!

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For our next session that day we were just coming up with ideas for the design and watching/listening to a video called "Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)." spoken at a conference by Brenda Romero neeBrathwaite.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train-%28or-How-I-Dumped

 Initially (I am a little shamed to say) I wasnt paying too much attention to the video as I was trying to think of which idea to go with for my design, but once she started talking about her personal projects my attention was suddenly pricked up. and then "Train" was talked about, and I just couldn't look away.

Train explores complicity within systems. It also asks two questions, “Will people blindly follow the rules?” and “Will people stand by and watch?” - Brenda Romero

The game is a one off boardgame which is about the Holocaust and the trains that sent people to the death camps, people take instructions written up from a Nazi typewriter, and put little yellow counters into trains, the counters are slightly too big for the compartments and each piece represents 100.000 Jewish people. I've never seen anything like Train before ... I had only really thought of games for entertainment whether it was for fear or humour before. I'd never really had a game that made me think the way Train has. One of the things I learned from this video was that games don't have to be fun, they can make people cry, they can make people angry. I want to take what I have learned from 'Train' and apply it to my ideas.