Game Ideas Unlimited

M. Joseph Young

In June, 2001, Multiverser co-author M. Joseph Young began a weekly series about the creative process, in connection with designing and running role playing games.

The series ran for four years, covering many and varied areas of fiction, imagination, creativity, game mechanics, characters, and more.

Now Valdron Inc is pleased to be able to bring these articles to the wider audience in this series of eight volumes, available through partnership with Cafe Press.

The first volume includes all the articles from the first six months of the series:

1. Introduction, which gives the purpose of the series, the credentials of the author, and other valuable articles he has written.
2. An Amusing Dungeon, showing the use of juxtaposition of unrelated ideas to create something surprising and different.
3. Transmats, exploring the potential of all that must be assumed if matter transmission technology is to work.
4. My North Wall, finding inspiration in the ordinary and considering the concept of hiding something in plain sight.
5. Screen Wrap, using teleportation and similar techniques to create confusing maze-like scenarios.
6. Pay Attention, recommending the use of a notebook to capture at least some of what happens around you for later use in fictional creations.
7. Living in the Past, encouraging the discovery not merely of history but of personal and family history as a way of making the world come alive.
8. Snow Day, an example of good description.
9. Invisible Coins, which talks about how to use randomness to focus your hopes for a story.
10. Empiricism creates images of monsters by using ancient descriptive techniques.
11. Aptrusis is about kinds of puzzles and how to decide what kinds to use.
12. Monster Design examines qualities that make for good creature creations.
13. Over My Shoulder reviews the first three months of the series and talks about the value of anniversaries.
14. Who? asks how to create characters who do not know themselves so completely as we seem to know them.
15. Left Hand is an exploration of a spatial relations thought process.
16. Learning is about getting information and ideas from books and television.
17. Deceased examines the place death and memorial has in our games.
18. Left or Right? is a consideration of when player choice perhaps ought not to make a difference.
19. Embraces is about character romance within the context of gameplay.
20. Believable Nonsense is about superstitions, and how to make them work within fiction.
21. Stitches examines settings, how they change over time, and how to capture them in a moment.
22. Sentience is about the nature of intelligence, and how to create alien intelligences that seem entirely alien without seeming entirely random.
23. Motivation explores the reasons characters have for what they do, how these interact, and what happens when they lose these.
24. Edison is about the part of the task no one wants to do: the work.
25. Names speaks of the meanings names have and how they sometimes attach to people and places.
26. The Process reviews the second quarter of the series, and talks about how one learns creativity.