Ideas and imaginations in Games

During my middle school days, I used to think a lot about creating something interesting. In my playful mind, a lot of things, like starting an electronics company, or an airline company (my biggest dream), or thinking like a government and creating a city, circulated in my mind and I used to jot them all in papers. I also used to plan on making different games, create artworks and blueprints. I was notorious to make a mess of many stack of notebook with all these weird plans that I make. Sometimes my mom used to scold me that I wasted papers a lot. I don’t know whether these plans will ever become practical but still it used to make my days during my mandatory gaming breaks imposed by my parents.

 

Let me take an example of a now defunct series that I used to play. It was the Strike series from EA, which included Desert Strike, Jungle Strike, Urban Strike, Soviet Strike and Nuclear Strike). These games were simply awesome and also had pretty good storyline for a Genesis, SNES era military game. I was so impressed with the structure and the planning of the game more than the gameplay itself that during my pastime I used to extend the series with some of my plans. I thought if there is any other future game coming from Strike series, then I wonder what it would be like. I made paper plans making games like Mountain Strike, Sea Strike, Snow Strike or even Future Strike and how the missions would be allocated. Its like making pen and paper versions of Dungeons and Dragons or make a board game (I will try to write something about the importance board games in my future blog). The plans were somewhat immature. Still I am trying to tell myself that this thing or that thing could be implemented to make the game more interesting or a new game could have been released. I guess this is how the customer feedaback are prioritized to make the games more interesting and fun and also keep customers happy and at the end result get more money from sales.  As days passed, I got busier than ever and reduced this activity. At one time I even stopped. Now the ideas that were made by me were written in so many stacks of notebooks, all of which are gone.

 

Few weeks before I came to BD, I applied to some gaming related jobs mostly as producer because I am specialized in the field of project management. When I was applying for NC Soft, I came across a job opening which says Game Planner. I immediately applied for the job since I knew that I can do this type of job very easily provided I used to spend hours thinking and planning for games. 2 weeks gone and did not get any reply. Maybe I got rejected; maybe I am not a strong contender. Now I started to think I should have kept all those hundreds of notebooks of plans from my childhood days, so I could show them as part of my portfolio. Well the opportunity missed out. Maybe I should start making more plans and build up more stacks of notebooks but alas its hard to get pastimes. I should have thought of this long time back that there is something called game planning. Maybe I was a kid and I didn’t think broad at that time.

 

So what we can learn from this? Everything we do has more or less some form of importance. It takes a bit of realization to find out these importances. Encouragement is necessary so that people can get motivation to use a lot of imaginative thinking and create something innovative. It might not be exclusive to games only. Maybe we can let our future kids use imagination to its fullest. Kids are always adventurous, curious and can imagine a lot. Getting involved in these sort of activities can help build up their creativity and imagination power and thus kids can be successful with their thinking power when they become adults. Its important to save what we all make in our past time cause we never know that our work may come handy one day. Its just like how Anne Frank got famous since she jotted down her whole story in her diary and kept it safe.