3 Ways to Improve Your Next Brainstorming Session
When I think of brainstorming, I picture colorful bubble charts, fun diagrams, and exciting lists of filled endless possibilities. I see collaboration and working as a team to make your ideas as fleshed out and perfect as possible. The opportunities are everywhere and the sky is the limit.
This has not been my experience for brainstorming for the last few weeks. My teammates and I are entering into preproduction for our final games. It is a frenzy of preparation, rapidly put together presentations and one-hour flash hacks. We are working in teams of nine people and work together to find a game idea to pitch to the class. Ideas fly through our Zoom rooms until we finally lose steam and put it up for a vote. The game ideas range from mind-numbingly complicated to ridiculously hilarious.
In a place where there are so many talented people, it is easy to get lost in a brainstorming. Here are some of the strategies that my teams have implemented to help us get the most out of our brainstorming sessions.
1. Go Deep, Not Wide
During one brainstorming, my team generated over 30 ideas. They were varied and all had potential, but we didn’t dig beyond the surface level idea. We had no thought of the core loop for many of the ideas and just focused on the hight concept. When we did pick an idea, there were many team members that had different thoughts of what the game was. Since we had not explored the gameplay enough, there were a lot of unknowns.
To brainstorm effectively, go deep into just a few ideas rather than gathering a lot. Find the best ones and figure out what makes them the best ideas.
2. Stay on Track
When your team finds a really good idea, they’ll likely become attached to it and start planning the game already. This can be a great thing. It means they are invested in the seed of this idea and are excited about it, but it can also swerve the team off the task at hand.
Here is an example of a team that is invested in their idea in a good way: “We could have seasonally themed levels and have leave piles in the fall and snowmen in the winter!”
Here is an example of a team that is spinning their wheels and going off track: “We are going to map the melee attack to the A button and have the triple kill combo be up, down, left, left, right, B, say a prayer, and stomp your feet. We will have to make new controllers that recognize the sound of a hamster squealing but there’s absolutely no other option.”
During this brainstorming phase, teams should feel free to get excited and come up with exciting plans, but when they start committing too much they could miss out on a lot of great ideas for the game or other games. To avoid this, when you notice your team going off course, interject and push them toward another subject.
3. Provide Structure
Brainstorm is a free-flowing exercise of the mind, but putting constraints on yourself can give way to creativity. Teams can get lost trying to make sense of a menagerie of new and exciting concepts or some people might not know how to get the ball rolling. To help mitigate this, teams can follow mind mapping guides like the one above or make fun pros and cons lists to help narrow down on their ideas and dig to find what makes them good.
Brainstorming an invaluable and irreplaceable when developing new ideas. It needs to be practiced and refined like any other skill. Going deep into idea, staying on track, and provide structure will help any brainstorming session on the path to success. Try these 3 tips to help guide your team to success.
