I've told this story many times over the years, and I suspect that some folks don't believe it really happened. But I swear it's true.

My first industry contact was a programmer named Troy Lyndon. We were pretty good friends for many years so I wasn't surprised when he invited my wife and I to dinner so we could meet his new girlfriend.

I called his apartment to finalize our dinner plans and I apparently caught him in the middle of an argument with his roommate. I can only guess that the phone got knocked off its base before it had a chance to ring, because no one picked it up but I could hear the ENTIRE fight.

Troy was complaining that the rent check was late, his roommate was complaining that Troy owed him money for the phone bill. Then the subject changed to dirty dishes and laundry all over the floor. They were really screaming at each other and almost coming to blows.

Someone stormed off to a different room and then I heard someone else hang up the phone.

I'm not sure what gave me the idea, but an evil plan began to form in my mind.  I waited a few minutes and called Troy back. He picked up the phone and the conversation went like this: (did I mention that I minored in Theater?)

That night at dinner it was REALLY hard for me to keep a straight face, but our conversation was dominated by talk about ESP, paranormal phenomenon and the untapped potential of the human brain. Troy kept saying, "I never believed in this stuff before, but how else can you explain it?" He was so excited.

I feel kind of guilty that I never told him the truth.

I had a sort of interesting mini-revelation about ten years ago. It relates to creativity and my personal approach to game design.

I'm a pretty collaborative guy, so when I'm working on a new design idea I talk to my friends, my family, and other designers. I pepper them with questions. 

Most of the designers I know, or have worked with, tend to keep their new ideas to themselves, which made me wonder if my approach was a knock on my creativity? In a moment of self-doubt I wondered: Why do I ask so many questions? Am I relying on other people to help me design my games for me?

I thought about these questions for awhile and here's what I discovered about myself. I'm a very creative problem solver. If you give me a crayon and a piece of paper and ask me to come up with something cool, I'll be kind of lost. Won't even know where to start. But if you give me the same mission with a shoe box, a paperclip, and a piece of string, I'll immediately start to generate crazy ideas.

What this made me realize is that when I'm asking all my design questions I'm really just defining parameters... I'm building myself a puzzle to solve!

This is how I design games. If I am making a casual RPG, for example, I play the top games in the genre and do a bunch of research. From this I learn that there are certain core staples that players expect. Then I ask friends, family, and colleagues, "What do you like and dislike about the casual RPGs you have played?"

When I have enough information I filter out the noise and anything that goes against my own design sensibilities and that leaves me with a core set of features that I MUST include, and a bunch of design goals that sometimes conflict with those core features, or even with each other. This all becomes the puzzle that I must then try to solve. 

Fortunately, I'm pretty good at solving puzzles, especially those that force me to "think outside the box". And that's how I design games.

My first week at Dynamix, Jeff Tunnel asked me what kind of game I wanted to design.  (Those were the days, huh?)  Hedging my bets I asked, "What kind of game do you WANT me to design?"  He said I could do anything and he sent me off to be creative. 

I spent the next week cooking up an adventure game proposal that I absolutely loved.  Jeff wasn't in his office so I triumphantly dropped the 5 page proposal document on his desk.  On the way back to my office I ran into an old friend and after a few minutes of polite conversation I told him about my game concept.  He got a strange look and asked, "An adventure game about a tabloid reporter? That sounds exactly like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders." 

Sure enough, when I glanced at the door Jeff was standing there with a very concerned look on his face.  I still had a stack of his papers clutched in my hand but I couldn't put them down.  In fact, I couldn't move at all for five or six seconds as my brain comprehended the compromising gravity of my situation. It was a quintessential deer caught in headlights scenario, and my worst nightmare.

I made up a weak excuse, grabbed the document (which he was holding in his hand), and slunk out of the room, quite red in the face. I'm sort of surprised he didn't fire me.

<sigh>

I hear a lot of game design pitches and my feedback is often a shrug of the shoulders. A few ideas are clearly superior and I get very excited about them, and a few are SO bad that I can easily shake my head and say, "No, that is a terrible game concept." But often I just shrug my shoulders, because great concepts and terrible concepts all require one thing to be successful: execution.

I sometimes use the original "Diablo" to explain my position on this topic. Before I learned the importance of execution I honestly believe that I would NOT have approved that pitch. I think the conversation would have gone like this:

My point is, the game was so well executed the pitch was kind of irrelevant. But stories like that make it difficult for me to judge other games, because there are lots of really horrible game concepts out there, but many of them could be successful, possibly hugely successful, with the proper execution by a talented individual or team.

I'm often asked about my favorite game of all time. If I had to single out just one title my choice would probably be: M.U.L.E.  This is the game that convinced my father that I had picked a viable career path. 

Dad always thought games were a big waste of time and he strongly urged me to find something else to get excited about.  During my senior year at Pepperdine my folks visited from Colorado. It was Christmastime and that year my wife gave me a copy of M.U.L.E.  After a little badgering Mom and Dad said they would try it and the four of us sat on the couch and played that game for HOURS.  Mom wasn't very good with a controller so she always had trouble getting her mule back into the pub.  With the timer ticking down she'd miss on the left, then on the right, all the while shouting "Ooh", "Oooh", "OOOH!" as the rest of us laughed til tears ran down our cheeks. 

After that visit Dad never said another bad thing about games, and now he and my Mom play them all the time.  In fact, "Fairway Solitaire" is one of their favorite titles!