Part II · Chapter 11

From Inspiration to Purpose

Purpose arises from needs#

So now it's clear how human beings work. It's all about human needs. A purpose shows up in one of two ways: as a problem that needs solving, or as an exciting new possibility that could make life wonderful in some way. In other words, purpose arises either from an unmet need that calls to be satisfied, or from a met need that calls to be celebrated.

This is where inspiration is born. Inspiration is a stimulus that draws your attention to a need and to a possible strategy for satisfying it. When it hits, a project gets created to fulfill that purpose. It's important to realize that any project is a strategy, to meet unmet needs or to celebrate met ones.

Every project ever conceived was spawned into existence by a purpose to meet or celebrate universal human needs. Every video game and every interactive tool ever created or in development is a strategy to meet needs.

If you already have a game project, finished or in progress, think back to the moment that pushed you to create it, or to what keeps you working on it today. Follow it far enough and you'll find a universal human need behind it all. Guaranteed.

If you don't have a game project yet, then either nothing has inspired you yet, or you haven't run into an unmet need that would be best solved by making a game.

Purpose finds you#

To find a purpose, something has to inspire you. More often than not, the purpose finds you instead: an event in your life, something that happened in your world that you saw a game in, or an existing project you felt would be better put together in a new way.

Unfortunately, this does mean it's impossible to pull a purpose out of nowhere. Unless something that already exists in the world stirs a need in you, met or unmet, and I mean that in every context you can think of, you can't find a purpose.

So if you don't have one, go and explore the world, again in every context: observe nature, consume art, games, events, information and documents, go on adventures, experiment. Eventually something will touch you and you'll want to react to it, whether the circumstances are negative or positive.

This is also why what looks like "procrastination" is often the opposite. The hours spent wandering, playing, reading and watching are how your mind fills its library of references. The robot game in Chapter 2 came from years of collecting things like that, until they connected by chance. You can't schedule that connection. You can only keep feeding the library.

Need, inspiration, dream#

When inspiration arrives, it's often vague. The finished product isn't comprehensible at first. Sometimes only small parts are unknown and the overall vision is clear. Sometimes major parts are unknown, and the picture of what the game is supposed to be is vague at best or completely missing at worst. That's normal. It helps to see the three layers that are always there:

First, there's a basic human need. Something a human wants and moves toward. It's the most basic operation of a human being, biologically and psychologically. This level is good to keep in mind to understand the motivation behind a project, but it's too deep to make game concepts from directly.
Second, there's an inspiration. An event that touches the need. Often it touches it in a negative sense: it shows the need isn't fulfilled, or takes you further from it. Sometimes in a traumatic "this must never happen" way, sometimes in a longing "I wish I had that" way, sometimes in a thoughtful "there needs to be a better solution" way, and sometimes in an unremarkable "I'm bored" or "something is missing from my life" way.
Third, there's a dream. The dream is a strategy to meet the need: to fill the void, fix the issue, make life better or give satisfaction for something that was lacking. This is where game ideas are made. The inspiration can give a direct idea for a concept, an indirect clue that hints toward one, or feelings that pull you in a certain direction. Any of these forms a dream.

A dream starts vague and matures into a clear vision over time, slowly or quickly depending on the inspiration. Maturing a dream means systemizing and clarifying it into a complete product, a real game, while also checking whether it's actually a good idea to begin with. To check the dream and guide its growth, you need the human needs behind it. That's what the process below gives you.

Translating inspiration into needs: five steps#

This process looks at the game as a whole, not at individual mechanics. (The same thinking applies to mechanics, and Part IV gets to them.) The purpose you find here then decides which method is best for fulfilling it, whether that's a game, an interactive tool or something else entirely.

An event happens in your life. It can repeat or happen once. It can be remarkable or unremarkable. It can be something you heard, saw, touched, smelled, thought of, felt or otherwise experienced. Whatever it was, it stimulated a fundamental human need in you. It surfaced the need and made you aware of it.
The event brings out inspiration, which is a natural willingness to satisfy that need. Through your feelings, the inspiration asks for a way to deal with it: a strategy to meet the need.
The strategy is your vision, your idea. It's one of infinitely many ways the inspiration could be realized. It's only a thought of one possible way to meet a need. It might be a continuous satisfier the player can return to again and again, or a one-time satisfier that works once in each person's lifetime. Sometimes it's so vague it's practically unknown, sometimes it's so clear it's obvious how it would all work.

There's no guarantee a strategy will succeed before you try it, but it's still a real clue. If there's no other way to find out whether it's good, such as existing examples, data or information, you'll need to experiment. You're always limited to what you presently know and have.
Identify the need. Using the NVC needs list or Max-Neef's matrix, pinpoint which need it is by process of elimination. Be aware that it might be several needs, not just one. Strategies can be synergistic and meet multiple needs at once, so a game can satisfy several needs at once too. But those needs have to be connected to each other. Otherwise the project isn't focused enough to have a clear purpose, and you're back to the "every need at once" failure from the previous chapter.
You've found the purpose. Once the needs are identified, the purpose is to satisfy those needs. Only that, and exactly that. The strategy/idea/vision is the method for fulfilling them.

A sentence to help: OFNR#

NVC has a process called OFNR: Observe something relevant to the situation without judgement, express how it makes you Feel, name the Need it's connected to, and finish with a clear, positive, doable Request, a strategy to make life more wonderful.

For a game idea, it turns into a sentence you can fill in:

"[This event] brought out an inspiration in me, which made me feel [these feelings] because I'm needing [these needs], and I think [my game idea] is a good strategy that might fulfill that need."

Filling it in honestly gets you closer to the right needs, and it gives hints about whether the game idea is a viable strategy for them at all. If the sentence sounds strange when you read it back ("...because I'm needing rest, and I think a hardcore competitive shooter is a good strategy..."), you've just found a problem with the idea before spending a single day building it.

The NVC lists of feelings and needs are useful here as a vocabulary, if you don't yet know all the feelings and needs that exist. They're also useful for finding out whether the feeling or need you had in mind was a misread one, with another feeling or need at its root. "Bored" can turn out to be "lonely". "I want more guns" can turn out to be "I want to feel capable".

The formula#

To put it simply:

Unmet needs + Strategy to meet those needs = Purpose of the project

With that revealed, it becomes easy to understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Motivation is no issue, since you can clearly see what's alive in you and how you could make life more wonderful. It becomes trivial to see where you are and how to get to your goal. Whenever you feel stuck, the purpose points to the next right action. Every design decision becomes easier to evaluate, showing which option is best at any time, in any situation. Even if you're trying something completely new and unknown, the purpose tells you which experiment to try next.

That's why purpose is the most important thing in game design. With this mindset, it isn't possible to become lost, demotivated or confused while developing a game or an interactive tool, provided that the purpose is transparently clear, the needs behind it are strong enough, and the strategy has even a little reasonable potential to meet those needs.

And it's possible to discover during development that a strategy for a purpose is a bad one. That's especially likely with the earliest visions and concepts that come straight out of an inspiration. The great thing about this method is that it lets you see through the vision to the needs behind it, which means you aren't stuck with the first idea. You can come up with new, better ways to fulfill the same need, without losing your motivation, because the motivation was never in the first idea. It was in the need.

Choose the right medium#

One thing before going further. This book is about game design specifically, and games are a medium. They're a platform for a certain type of experience: media combined with interactivity, to deliver a fantasy that would otherwise be impossible, improbable, or less efficient in any other form. A game is a specific tool for a specific result.

In other words, if something would work better as a film, a book, an application, a real-life activity, a movement, a company, an organization or anything else, don't force a game out of it. Choose the medium that best suits the purpose.

This matters because games as a medium have their own weaknesses as well as their strengths. A story that needs to be told exactly one way, with exact timing, will fight against a player who can wander off. An experience that needs real-world bodies in a real-world place will feel thin on a screen. Forcing such a purpose into a game means spending years fighting the medium, and the result will still be worse than the obvious alternative. The purpose always dictates which medium is best for a project, never the other way around.

Purposes can be many. Some serve the need for relaxation, play, self-improvement, power or meaning, in a space where the outcome isn't intended to affect real life at all. Others serve a serious real-world need, like education, awareness or understanding, and are meant to have real-life effects directly. Both are meeting fundamental human needs. But they lead to two very different kinds of project, and confusing them is one of the most destructive mistakes in the field. That's the next chapter.

Creativity is remix#

Two very important things to be aware of about innovation and creativity:

You can never know what the final result looks like until you get there.
You're always limited by what's available to you. Creativity is the remix of existing elements. In other words, it's taking old things and arranging, combining and presenting them in a new way. It isn't possible to come up with something new that hasn't existed before in one form or another.

These two points matter because they dispel a lot of false information about creativity: the idea that it's about creating something completely new out of nowhere. Everything always comes from somewhere. Something has to already exist for you to think of it. You have to already know of it to be able to consider it, let alone use it.

They also relieve a lot of anxiety. Every project has phases of chaos, confusion and uncertainty about what you're even creating and how it will look in the end. That's not a sign that you're failing. It's part of the process, every single time. If you know that going in, you won't panic and abandon a good project in the middle of its messiest phase.

And it's why the advice to "be original" in Popularity Is a Side Effect is so destructive. You can't be original by trying. You become original as a side effect of remixing what you know in service of a purpose nobody else had in quite the same way.

Good design takes time#

I also have to point out that good game design takes time, experimentation, testing, iteration, pondering, and time to research and analyze existing solutions and examples. You're unlikely to come up with the best solution to every design decision instantly. Often you'll only get a general feeling of the direction after connecting with the feelings and needs, and the actual best solution will need testing before you can conclude "this is the right one!".

That's fine. The purpose doesn't hand you answers. It hands you a way of checking answers, which is worth far more.