2. Problem Statements

A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.

—DOROTHEA BRANDE

Often, designers are working from a completely blank slate. What game do you make? When do you know you are done? How do you know if you have succeeded? One way is to make a problem statement. The problem statement is a simple way of asking what the designer or team is trying to do with the game. By identifying the design problem you are looking to solve, you eliminate situations in which you are simply copying the work of others and making something dull and uninspired. One way to formulate a design problem statement is by starting with “What if...?” This allows the design that follows to be an exploration of that question.

Defining the Problem

During the 2000s, Electronic Arts had a concept called “the X.” The X was a simple saying or slogan that helped the team “sell” the idea and understand what they were making. It was the problem statement. For instance, Madden NFL 2005’s X ended up being the back-of-the-box slogan that marketing used to sell the game: “Defense Wins Championships.” This three-word slogan told the team that Madden NFL 2005 was going to be about improving and polishing the defensive options in the game when compared to previous American football games.

Note that problem statements do not explain what the game is when it is finished. That would require prescient future prediction. Often, creative endeavors do not follow a predictable path. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton found that a kind of unpredictable search is involved in many successful creative efforts.¹ However, having no plan at all is not recommended. Instead, try to distill a game down to a fundamental core for which a new idea can be built. What makes it different? What makes it interesting? All games involve solving problems to some degree. What problems are posed to the player and under what context they appear are the designer’s decisions. You may have to change that core problem along the way, but that core focus gives you something from which to build.

¹ Simonton, D. K. (2010). “Creative thought as blind-variation and selective-retention: Combinatorial models of exceptional creativity.” Physics of Life Reviews, 7(2), 156–179.

The following sidebars include example problem statements for some released games, with a less effective (bad) version of the statement, a more effective (better) version, and an explanation of why the better statement is indeed better.

Poor problem statements don’t get at the heart of the game, are overly vague, are overly derivative, are only marketing statements, or don’t drive the design. For instance, “How do we make another Elder Scrolls game?” is a poor problem statement. It essentially directs the designers to make a copy of what they have already made.

The best problem statements get down to the concrete design goal so that the designer and team can follow up with effective tasks to create a unique and focused design.

Low-Hanging Fruit

After deciding at a high level what problem you want to solve, the next step is to figure out how to solve that problem. This is usually done by visualizing and describing what the game will look and play like. You can use this high-level sketch of your rules, mechanics, and/or theme in order to start building prototypes.

This process has a few danger areas. Let’s look at an example that illustrates these dangers.

Assume you are tasked to create a game that uses all four of the following elements:

• A standard 17-inch diameter car tire

• Six (three pairs) calf-height white cotton tube socks

• Five pounds of Florida navel oranges

• A 10-foot length of thick rope

You do not have to use all of the materials exhaustively (that is, you do not have to use all the oranges, all the socks, or all the rope), but you must use at least a portion of all four elements.

Before reading further, write down a one- or two-sentence description of the first game you envision. The game should be coherent and feasible, but it does not necessarily need to be fun or strategically fulfilling. Please come up with your idea before reading further... I’ll wait.

I have given this exercise to professional game designers, college professors, laypersons with no professional ties to games, and (many) students. Originally, I had planned to keep track of the results as a pseudo-scientific study. However, the first 20 results I received were nearly identical.

The easiest idea, the idea that sticks out the most, is the “low-hanging fruit.” This fruit is easy to pick and anyone can reach up and grab it. For the sake of consistency, let’s say your idea is like the first ones I received: Create a game where you throw an orange through the tire. This is usually done by putting an orange in the sock and using the sock as a sling. The rope is used to hang the tire from a tree or structure. As I said before, the first 20 people I gave this exercise to did roughly the same thing. There were some variations: Some used the rope to measure distance, some had the tire rolling instead of stationary. Yet the core of the game was the same: Throw oranges through the tire to win. Is this the idea you came up with?

Think of how limiting this is. Think of all the things you can do with an orange. Sure, you can throw oranges, but you can also juggle, balance, eat, squeeze, roll, peel, stack, hide, or catch them, among dozens of other things. A long list of verbs can be created for each of the four elements. Yet each of the first 20 people asked chose a similar set of verbs. These participants had a range of ages and game design experience. They did not choose the same actions because of a similar background; they chose them because it was the easiest solution to imagine.

When solving traditional problems, we often go for the simplest possible solution. But in efforts that require creativity, the simplest solution is the one everyone thinks of first. If an important part of design is the creativity of ideas, then stopping when you think of the first reasonable solution limits you to the most obvious conclusions.

Although students answered the same as the other participants in this exercise, the difference between them and design professionals is that the design professionals were willing to come back with better answers later. One of the professors I gave this exercise to came back to me the following day with a really innovative game idea for the materials that I had never heard before. Design professionals tend to keep digging away at the idea until they have explored all of its facets. And as a result, they can choose from a deep list of ideas. Students, however, tend to stop at the first idea that makes sense.

Functional Fixedness

German psychologist Karl Duncker studied a phenomenon related to how the preceding low-hanging fruit exercise produced similar answers from person to person.³ In a famous test, he asked participants who were given a candle, a box of matches, and a box of thumbtacks to figure out how to attach the candle to the wall so that the candle’s wax did not drip onto the table below when lit.

³ Duncker, K., & Lees, L. S. (1945). “On Problem-Solving.” Psychological Monographs, 58(5), i.

The solution is to use the tacks to affix the box that the tacks came in to the wall and to place the lit candle in the box. However, subjects found it hard to use the box as a tool to solve the problem because they focused on the use of the box as a container for matches. Duncker called this phenomenon functional fixedness. To them, the function of the box was fixed as being a container. They could imagine no other function. When designing games, it can be easy to assume that the uses of common objects or mechanics are fixed. In the low-hanging fruit game example, oranges look like baseballs or softballs, so the resulting games largely treated them as such.

Often, the most creative games break fundamental assumptions about genre. Divekick, for example, is a fighting game that eschews combos, complex control schemes, blocking, directional movement, and even life bars but still delivers a fun fighting game experience. Its designers took all the elements that most fighting game designers take as being fixed elements and simply threw them out. Shadow of the Colossus created a world right out of a Legend of Zelda–style adventure game and removed everything but the boss fights.

Brainstorming

One technique that studios tend to employ to find creative solutions to problems is brainstorming. In classic brainstorming, members from one or many disciplines who are stakeholders in the project get together in the same place to generate ideas. The brainstorm tends to have a theme or purpose; there is some kind of problem the brainstorm session tries to solve. Someone moderates the meeting, and members spout out possible solutions while someone else records the proceedings.

This technique was presented in the 1950s by Alex Osborn in his book Applied Imagination.⁴ In it, he coined the term “brainstorming” and its cardinal rules. The rules he created mostly carry over to properly run brainstorming meetings today:

⁴ Osborn, A. (1963). Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving. (3rd rev. ed.). New York: Scribner.

• QUANTITY, NOT QUALITY. Worry about “good” ideas later. In brainstorms, just come up with as many ideas as possible.

• BUILD ON IDEAS. The reason the brainstorm is a communal activity is that participants use other participants’ ideas to spur the creation of new ideas from different perspectives.

• ENCOURAGE “CRAZY” IDEAS. Anyone can come up with the obvious ideas. If the obvious ideas worked, the team would not be experiencing the problem that results in the brainstorm session in the first place! Even if the ideas presented are ridiculous, maybe a kernel of that idea will inspire some better and more feasible idea.

• NO CRITICISM. Not only do people self-censor, but when we hear ideas, our critical evaluation centers go active and we try to evaluate why the idea will not work. In corporate environments, there is often a political motive to stamp out competing ideas to develop one’s own standing. This is counter to the brainstorm’s goals.

Osborn found that when these rules were followed, idea generation was more productive than in a normal meeting situation.

Unfortunately, research on brainstorming versus other techniques in the corporate environment since Alex Osborn created his rules has not been so kind. In fact, research has clearly shown that using the brainstorming rules in an individual setting provides more (and higher quality) ideas per person than the traditional group brainstorming setting.⁵

⁵ Mullen, B., Johnson, C., & Salas, E. (1991). “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-analytic Integration.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 12, 3–23.

Researchers took a look at what was holding back group brainstorming and came up with some reasons for the discrepancy:⁶

⁶ Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497.

• EVALUATION APPREHENSION. Anyone with any sort of social anxiety understands this at heart. One of the rules of brainstorming is that quality does not matter. Yet in the corporate environment, workers are constantly being judged on the quality of their work. As a result many, even subconsciously, hold back and “test the waters” to see what kind of ideas are being received appropriately. They then use that as a guide for the risk level of other ideas, essentially turning off the “wild idea” center for fear of being judged. Simple body language cues such as frowns or raised eyebrows can turn us off and make us feel uncomfortable about delivering ideas.

• SOCIAL LOAFING. If you have ever ridden a tandem bike, the person in front can pedal, steer, and brake. The person in back can only pedal and pray. When you go up hills, you can split the work and pedal equally hard, or the person in the back can enjoy the breeze and let the person in the front do all the work. If your feet are moving around the pedals but not pushing, it looks to any outside observer like you are working just as hard. This is the concept of social loafing. In a brainstorm, you’ll usually find that a couple of people will provide the lion’s share of ideas. Sometimes these are Type-A personalities who compulsively dominate every meeting. Sometimes these are just naturally prolific idea generators. In practice, everyone else in the meeting sits back and lets these people take the helm. Maybe they don’t want to break the flow of ideas. Maybe they just want to be polite. In any case, they reduce the output ideas by not pedaling as hard as other members. Interestingly, when researchers conducted exit interviews in studies of social loafing, the loafers compared themselves to the least-producing member of the group, in effect saying, “Well, I didn’t do the least” or “I did almost as much as that guy” rather than comparing themselves to the highest producers of the group.⁷

⁷ Paulus, P. B., & Dzindolet, M. T. (1993). “Social Influence Processes in Group Brainstorming.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(4), 575.

• PRODUCTION BLOCKING. This is an unfortunate side effect of the human attention span. When you sit in a room with others and generate ideas, you have to wait for everyone else in the room to be silent before you can chime in and have your ideas heard. This pause is, in essence, limiting individuals from contributing as much as they could. In a brainstorm with only one individual, ideas are recorded as fast as they are generated; there is no pause.

Summary

• By being explicit about the design problem your game aims to solve, you can focus early design and development toward achieving a specific goal.

• The first answer you think of to a problem is likely a simple solution, but it isn’t often the best. Use brainstorming techniques to power past the low-hanging fruit.

• Functional fixedness causes us to solve problems in only traditional ways, whereas better or more original solutions may be possible.

• The focus of brainstorming is on the quantity of ideas. By using brainstorming rules, you can avoid editing that limits connection-building between ideas.

• Individual brainstorming may be more effective than group brainstorming.