Idea Practices and Attitudes towards Innovation in Game Development - A Snapshot from the 2010 Mobile Games Era Annakaisa Kultima University of Tampere Kanslerinrinne 1 33014 University of Tampere, Finland Annakaisa.Kultima@uta.fi Juho Karvinen University of Tampere Kanslerinrinne 1 33014 University of Tampere, Finland Juho.Karvinen@uta.fi ABSTRACT This article is exploring the results of an online survey directed at game developers and their innovation practices in 2010. Game idea generation is not the only idea-related activity that game developers conduct: ideas are recorded and stored in various ways, they are shared and re-used with different tools, and the attitudes towards innovation vary from one creator to another. According to our findings, practices for idea generation and idea management varies at different companies and also among individuals in 2010, right at the brink of a shift from casual games to service paradigm. We are arguing that in order to understand games industry more thoroughly, similar accounts on creative practices should be conducted systematically and always connected to the era and context of the creation. CCS Concepts • Applied computing➝ Computer games Keywords Games; innovation; game idea; idea management; creativity; game developers; game development. 1. INTRODUCTION Kerr (2006) identifies digital games industry as part of the creative industries sharing characteristics with other cultural productions. According to her, just like on the other digital entertainment industries, on the game industry the high risk and high production costs are combined with low reproduction costs. Furthermore, only a small number of products make a profit covering the costs of a large number of products that fail to generate enough income [22]. The volatile nature of game industry and the reliance on ‘hit’ games emphasizes the importance of innovation. Game industry is therefore in constant need for creative approaches and new games [22]. It is also personally important for the game developers themselves to be innovative: some game professionals have chosen their path because of the prospect of being part of an industry that is about creating something new [29]. In general, the ability to generate ideas has been considered to be one of the characteristics of successful business ventures [33]. Studies also indicate a strong relationship between the number of idea generation techniques and the number of successful products [40, 42] as well as training [4]. Crilly [5] identifies creativity techniques as one of the solutions in avoiding design fixation. According to Crilly, using suitable approaches one can improve the dominance of precedents and conventions of a design domain [5]. However, the role of a single idea is not dominant in game creation in a way the general research might suggest. The actual practice of making games is iterative and the ideas are added, worked on, discarded and changed within the development of a game – sometimes even at the last moments of the production [26]. Game developers also do not only create ideas for the purpose of one project, but recording and storing ideas for future projects is part of the creative process. Despite the amount of game culture and player studies, less academic attention has been given to the practice of the creators [27, 6, 34]. While for instance International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has conducted regular studies on the industry demographics and job satisfaction [9] and some studies have concentrated on the work culture and industry development [e.g. 48, 37, 22, 45, 46], the innovation and idea practices of game developers has not been studied systematically. Few scholars have had an interest towards the creativity of the game makers, especially in terms of the idea practices. For instance Kultima [30] concluded in her interview study from 2009 that while game ideas are created in solitude, “bouncing” ideas with others is an important part of the process. Hagen [15] has mapped out the ideation practices in commercial AAA videogames productions in Sweden in 2009-2010. His main contribution is an observation that the game studios have moved away from "big design up front" and are instead using a variety of verbal, visual and audial tools to communicate their visions. Based on Kultima [30], these practices are widely varied among different companies and creating one big picture such as Hagen is suggesting is very hard. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. AcademicMindtrek'16, October 17 - 18, 2016, Tampere, Finland Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-4367-1/16/10…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2994310.2994359