Where Do Game Design Ideas Come From? Invention and Recycling in Games Developed in Sweden

The game industry is often accused for not being original and inventive enough, making sequels and transmediations instead of creating new game concepts and genres. Idea creation in game development has not been studied much by scholars. This paper explores the origin of game design ideas, with the purpose of creating a classification of the domains the ideas are drawn from. Design ideas in 25 games, developed by the four main game developers in Sweden, have been collected mainly through interviews with the designers and through artifact analyses of the games. A grounded theory approach was then used to develop categories “bottom-up” from the collected data. This resulted in four main categories and a number of sub categories, describing different domains that game design ideas are drawn from. The analysis of the game design ideas also showed that all games consist of a recycled part and an inventive part, and that the ideas in the recycled part mainly come from domains that are closely related to games. This indicates that games perhaps would be more inventive if design ideas were drawn from more distant domains.