The world seems full of great ideas, but none come from you.

Your game ideas have nothing new, and you feel creatively stagnant. That’s perfectly normal, and the reason is simple: you’re not nurturing your Multimedia Cultural Background. Taking care of it daily means getting inspired by the world around you to unlock your creativity and make it flow like never before. This week I’ll show you 3 Reasons Why You Should Boost Your Multimedia Cultural Background to lead yourself toward designing meaningful game experiences.

A Modern Game Designer knows how to fuel up his Creative Engine.

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Here they are:

• Creative Output Needs Cultural Input
• Games Are Strictly Tight To Culture
• You Need Raw Material To Create Meaning

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: Creative Output Needs Cultural Input

Originality is fake; you create nothing from nothing.

This is not a mindset thing. It's rooted in hard sciences, and you can find it in the common form: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed".

Here's a task to show it in practice: "Think about something you don't know". If you can't do it, that's exactly the point (if you can tell me how, please!). So what's this Originality that everyone strives for? Originality is a perception that people have of other people's actions. When you link two or more things far apart (e.i. you're being creative) and someone understanding that link says, "Wow, that's genius!".

We'll touch on this topic more in-depth in the future, but I find the term "innovation" much more helpful regarding creative endeavors. To innovate means to take something that exists and give a different take on it, which could make it better or just different.

And, when it comes to innovation, nurturing your Cultural Background gives you a superpower.

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You know that diversified inspiration is the key to Innovation.

Being inspired means understanding something and adapting it to your cultural background to create something different linked to the source. Sounds like innovating, isn’t it?

But, for some people could also sound like copying (actually, those people would be surprised how Imitation leads to Innovation). That’s where the keyword “diversified” comes in.

Taking inspiration from many cultural sources gives you 2 possibilities:

• Cite: You use the source material as it is.
• Innovate: You elaborate on it and integrate it before use.

There’s no right or wrong; they’re just different paths you can take.

When you bring multiple Cultural Inputs together, your possibility of Creative Output skyrockets. And you can create that “Originality Perception” we’ve talked about before.

So, as Austin Kleon says in his book title: “Steal Like An Artist”!

Expanding your Cultural Background highs your chance to innovate.

#2: Games Are Strictly Tight To Culture

Games are interactive experiences of interesting pieces of reality.

By "reality", I don't only mean what's real but also what we (human beings) know. When you design a game, you can't help but do it from your perspective.

And that's a good thing because people want to be surprised, and if your perspective is interesting enough, they will. However, to build an interesting perspective, you need to collect other people's perspectives to enrich yours. Many designers often say that games are communication, and that's true for this reason.

A game (like any art form) is a representation of reality filtered through the lens of the Author. Whether the Author is a Game Director or a group of people, he's injecting his point of view of the world around him into the game.

So expanding your Multimedia Cultural Background gives you an unfair advantage.

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You design games that make people think.

People say they want to play games “to relax” or “to shut down their brains”. Laughing, we could say that your brain doesn’t want to shut itself down EVER; otherwise, you’ll be dead.

But, joking aside, when players say that, they mean they want to immerse in something they’re passionate about. Because doing so, they won’t feel the effort of doing something they don’t like; that’s what makes them mentally tired. When someone asks about your passions, you (like anyone else) answer with a list of topics. Therefore you can leverage those topics in your Game Design process.

If you create a game that intentionally draws a perspective about a topic, you’re creating a game based on a Theme. A game with a Theme (and a Message related to it) resonates with players making them think about something they’re interested in.

This works because a vast Multimedia Cultural Background generates a crucial ingredient for Player Resonance: Meaning.

And this brings us to the last reason.

#3: You Need Raw Material To Create Meaning

Meaning generates at the intersection between your mind and the world around you.

Literally speaking, “generating meaning” is trivial because it’s inevitable. No matter what you do, you will always generate meaning (even farting can have dark and unpleasant meanings).

What a Modern Game Designer should strive for are Interesting Meanings. You might ask: “Interesting to who?”. This is where many people fall short by revolving around trends and researching what people like. The only interesting thing in those perspectives is the money you can get from selling a game about them. “Interesting” means that interests you (a.k.a. the Author of the game).

That’s where the Multimedia Cultural Background comes in handy. By feeding on the meaning of other Authors, you can elaborate all your Cultural Inputs in another (innovative) meaning.

Drawing different perspectives from the world around you make players emotionally resonate with your game.

The benefit here is not always clear, so let me phrase it another way…

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Your game will outlive the “Quit Game” button.

If I say that a game like Tetris doesn’t outlive itself, you could call me crazy, but let me explain. You rarely think about Tetris aside from, for example, someone saying its name, you playing it, hearing the soundtrack, etc.

These situations are “Mental Anchors” that trigger your brain into thinking about the game. But if every “Mental Anchor” is about the game content, the game doesn’t outlive itself since it has no link to your daily life. That’s why companies use merchandise, cross-media products, etc.; they need to create other anchors (they’re still “inside the game” though).

Meaning is the most powerful “Mental Anchor” because it injects directly into players’ life. I’m sure you’ve happened to do or see something and say: “Oh, this reminds me of that game event!”. This is Player Resonance.

It’s a complex and multifacet concept we’ll deeply explore in the future; I just wanted you to understand its power.

Your Multimedia Cultural Background provides the soil from which Meaning can flourish.

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Key Takeaways:

• Originality is fake; seek Innovation through Diversified Inspiration.
• Your game is your perspective enriched with other people’s perspective.
• Meaning gives your game eternal life through Player Resonance.