Chris Crawford on Game Design

How to “Get Creative”

You can facilitate this process in a number of ways. The best strategy is to stuff your head full of concepts and all their associations. After all, the bigger the web of associations at your disposal, the greater the chance that you'll find some odd parallel between two ideas. Wouldn't it be great if you noticed a creatively useful connection between, say, dinosaur paleontology and Polynesian language structures? Of course, if you don't know much about dinosaur paleontology or Polynesian language structures, you'll never notice the connection, will you? You want to populate your mind with a wondrous and colorful diversity of ideas, a grand carnival of conceptual heterogeneity.

And how might you go about this task? Simple: ...