The Idea Behind This
I came up with this idea of thinking about ideas when I was talking to my tutor at the Technical University Munich. In the introduction to informatics: games engineering we have the option to make our own game, in groups or solo. This project starts after getting tutoring in Unity with two example projects: A space shooter and a platformer. The discussion went about the topic of, while you can make any game project you want (no restrictions), most students do a space shooter or a platformer.This made sense to me, so I answered: "Of course!". If you do the space shooter and the platformer in the tutorial you will have these things on your mind as of the latest. You can imagine it like a stack. Whenever you experience something it's put on the stack and when thinking about ideas you take things off the stack going down to past experiences. By now thinking further about it you would also have to take in the consideration that a handful of people might actually go into the study with no idea or not even planning to make a game as of yet. On the opposite, you have those people who already have an idea of what they wanna make, and that might not and then won't be a space shooter or platformer.
Thinking Through This Further...
That was not the end of the discussion for me. Far from it. This actually created more questions. The biggest one: "Why?". Why do we take almost only recent memories into consideration? The only case where we take older memories or experiences into consideration for our ideas is when we get triggered. The second question is what actually lead to this post: "What if we actually purposely search older memories for our ideas?". Instead of waiting for some outer force or another person to pass us the ball or trigger us, we could try to trigger it ourselves, right?
The Idea of the Idea
So, ideas come from our experiences, life choices, the influence of others, our believes and what not. Every place we've been, everything we are or have been interested in and even the people we have had to contact with it all gets soaked up by our brain and then it's saved there sometimes filtered as unnecessary or uninteresting other times saved to never be accessed ever again or at least that's how I understood it. This also means that the only time when two people have literally the same idea is if they actually grew up in the same circumstances, with the same people around them, same hobbies, same interests, same experience, etc.. Is this the reason why some twins are thinking very alike? Could be. This also means that everyone is unique in their thinking and ideas. That's amazing! Another reason to use the full capacity and not just the most recent experiences piled on the stack.
Shout Out!
And with that, this is the shout out to everyone! Ponder over this, think about how your past experiences influence ideas further and... actually don't even stop there. You don't need to do this permanently but for the sake of experiencing this... focus around the now as well and how this influences your ideas and then look for the future. I know about game designers who are like "go outside, that's where the ideas come from" and I'm like "yeah, but watching other people's ideas, especially cartoon, anime, movie or reading books also lets you experience good material".
Decide for yourself what's best for you. Everything and anything you do matters here. It will all shape the person you are and the ideas you'll have and that's scary and empowering at the same time.
