作者：Lewis Pulsipher

“严格来说，天底下并没有所谓的创新，只有那些根据原有事物改良的东西。”——-电影《蚊子海岸》主角Allie Fox（哈里森·福特扮演）

创意或者想法究竟有多重要？

许多新手游戏设计师都会认为自己的首要职责就是想出大量创意，他们觉得一个伟大的创意是游戏成型的必需条件。对他们而言，创意不但要别出心裁，而且还要很好很强大。

这类群体经常在网上论坛寻求将自己的创意变成游戏的帮助，但最终往往找不到一个合作者，因为只有创意并没有什么价值。

正如Allie Fox所言，“天底下没有所谓的创新”，只有包装旧创意的新办法。

再进一步说，就算真有人想出了什么创意，很可能早就有成百上千人想到了同一个主意。

就拿小说来举例。几乎所有的小说构思都是过去其他书籍或戏剧的变体，只是作者以自己独特的方式，外加一点运气成功表达了小说构思。美国畅销书作家丹·布朗所著的《达芬奇密码》并无新鲜想法，但这本书就是卖出了6000万册（游戏邦注：这是维基百科在2006年5月的数据）。根据该书拍摄的电影也同样如此——-几乎毫无新意可言。

那么在游戏领域中，我们能否时常想出独特的新创意呢？在非电子游戏领域，我们有Stalingrad、Afrika Korps和Waterloo这些由Avalon Hill公司推出的桌游，TSR推出的《龙与地下城》、Wizard of the Coast推出的《万智牌游戏》。而像《Trivial Pursuit》和《卡坦岛》这种成功游戏也同样是在前人创意的基础上衍生而来。

视频游戏领域虽然有许多技术进步，但却鲜有真正的新游戏问世。《模拟人生》虽然很不错，但其前身却是被Mobygames公司称为“《模拟人生》之母”的不知名游戏《Little Computer People》。新创意并非成功产品出炉的保证，而表现出色的游戏通常并无新意。

所以费力去想一个“伟大的创意”并没有多大意义。你想出一个伟大创意的机率很可能小于百万分之一，即使真让你想到了，你又怎么辨别它就是一个伟大的创意？

好创意需要千里挑一

创意本身的价值如此之小，发行商只要游戏不要创意。创意几乎是多得廉价，游戏行业中的每个人都有不少创意。所以必须清楚你的创意也许未必会比其他人更出色、更具独创性，或者更有趣。几乎每个人都会认为自己的游戏创意极其出众，但多数时候大家都想错了。

新手设计师可能很难承认这个事实，部分原因是他们很容易想出一些创意，他们认为只要想出一个伟大的创意就可以赚个钵满盆满。

但事实上，要制作一款成功的游戏需要投入大量工作，第一步就是产生成百上千的创意。你想出的创意越多，就越有可能得到一些真正具有可行性的出色创意。

这就是所谓的游戏创意的金字塔结构：

许多人提出创意；

其中一部分创意脱颖而出，成为制作游戏的备选创意；

仅有少部分被筛选出来的创意生成了具有可玩性的原型；

更少部分的原型成为设计完整的游戏；

仅有一小撮游戏真正完工。

以上所涉内容同时适用于电子和非电子游戏领域。

至于创意本身的价值，我们可以先看看Tom Sloper的说法。

设计师需要多少创意？

“人类的每个发明、工具、仪器、用具等为使用而设计的每件物品，其实都是由非常简单的开端演变而来的。”——Robert Collier（励志书作家）

如果你没有创意，那就不会做出一款游戏，那么开发游戏究竟需要多少创意？当然是越多越好。因为其中多数创意不会成为游戏，更别提是成为好游戏了。下图是游戏创意金字塔插图，实际过程更为复杂，但为简便起见，下图仅勾勒大概框架。

根据这种说法，你就明白自己需要产生大量创意才可能让其中一小部分转变为在市场上销售的游戏成品。记住一个公认的传统观点：90%以上原先投入生产的游戏，到最后都无法面世。它们在某些阶段就因项目被取消或者工作室因其他原因而夭折了。

据一位知名的成功桌游设计师所统计，他有60%完工的游戏最后都没有发行。每个足够转型成为游戏的创意，都要伴生大批因无法达标而未能面世的创意。

你总会产生丰富的创意，其数量远甚于成为游戏的创意。创意会萌生新创意，你积累得越多，就会得到越多灵感。正如小说家John Steinbeck所言，“创意就像兔子。你抓到一双知道怎么运用它们之后，很快就会有一大堆。”这意味着你首先要有大量创意作铺垫。

当然也有一些只写过一篇小说就打响名气，只唱过一首歌就走红，只发行一款游戏就成功的案例。在一些情况中，他们可能确实只需要一些创意就实现了梦想，但多数时候，他们很可能酝酿了无数创意，但只让其中一者见光。假如你想成为一名连续发行游戏并以此为生的专业电子游戏设计师，那你就需要同时在多款游戏上下功夫，这也就意味着你需要准备海量的创意。

灵感的来源

如何获取创意？

当人们问小说家“你从哪找到创意”时，得到的回答总是“随处都可以”。但他们没有明说的一点就是，他们之所以获得创意是因为他们一直在努力寻找创意。

这种说法确实有违人们通常的直觉——创意是“偶然而得”或者“它是艺术”、“它是灵感”。创意部分来源于个人本身想法，但多数时候只有努力追求才能获得创意。像莫扎特一样无需思考就能成曲的天才毕竟极为罕见，世上绝大多数杰出的作曲家都要靠勤奋才能获得创意，并对其修改润色后才能产生佳作。贝多芬有一个记事本写满了他的音乐创意。光是为了自己唯一的歌剧《费德里奥》就写了四个不同版本的序曲。但这两位作曲家都要靠音乐为生，而不是因为“艺术”或炫耀创意而作曲。

“莫扎特不为赚钱而创作的曲子，你掰着指头都能数得过来。”（语出Robert Greenberg教授《How to Listen to and Understand Great Music》演讲内容）如果连这种天才都要把创意当成工作，其他多数“天才”及凡人就更需要为创作而努力了。

从我个人经历来看，我曾经为游戏和游戏文章萌生许多创意和想法，其中多数也获得发布。有20多年时间我认为自己还有更重要的事情要做（例如学习计算机和网络知识，赚钱谋生），那些创意突然不再涌现。直到数年前我决定重返游戏设计领域，而不是继续编写计算机教材，所以现在我又有了大量创意，这是因为我现在一直在为抓取灵感和开发创意而努力。

换句话说，我们应该主动出击找创意，而不是坐等创意不请自来。不要再虚度时间了！这跟生活中其他事情一样，找到创意需要10%的灵感再加90%的汗水。

努力找创意

上述内容主要讲述“储备大量创意”的重要性，下文则侧重于寻找创意的过程。

你得让自己的头脑保持一种与搜索目标相关的状态，这样你更容易通过所见、所闻及所接触事物找到催生游戏创意的元素。你还可以坐下来静思，“我要想出更多创意”，或者“我要想出一款新游戏”，这种方法并非时时管用，但经常很灵验，你想得越多，创意就会越频繁地来访。

游戏创意通常还会来源于一些和游戏并不沾边的东西。这也正是为何知识广博、广泛阅读或者拥有多种兴趣的游戏设计师较占优势的原因，他们可涉猎多种领域，并不局限于与狭碍定义的“游戏玩家”打交道。

游戏创意产生于提问，博览群书（包括历史、科幻等类型），欣赏图画或看地图，与他人交流，甚至是每天使用的东西。游戏创意还可以来源于阅读游戏规则，玩游戏，查看游戏评论，阅读设计师的解析文章以及游戏设计书籍等等。没错，大量阅读颇为关键，因为读书可让你在短时间内接触许多思想，有助于脑中的创意成型。

最后，创意还可能来自你之前已有的创意。设计师通常会有一个卡在半途中，找不到解决对策的游戏创意，但数年之后却可以把它和另一个创意结合起来，找到解决方案使其成为游戏。几乎所有事物都可以成为创意来源，我开始设计桌游时脑袋中也只有一些零碎不成章的想法。

记录创意

“每个作曲家都清楚，自己没有及时记录而后忘却想法有多令人痛苦和绝望。”——《幻想交响曲》作曲家、法国音乐家Hector Berlioz

我深信有些创意只会光临一次，如果我不及时记录，就将永远与其失之交臂。就算你不相信这种说法，你也会承认有了一个想法，后来忘记了，然后就只能干等它重现，甚至是数年之后才回忆起来的这种不快之感。

好记性不如烂笔头。如果不采取这种做法，那只可能是因为你脑中的可行想法实在太少，不足以将其一一记录。

胸怀抱负的游戏设计师最好随身携带记事本或其他记录设备，灵光乍现时就可以随时随地将它写下来，或者通过语音将其录制下来。我常带着一个惠普PAD，它有一个录音按钮，我可以在开车的时候摁下按钮，口述脑中的想法和创意，松开按钮就完成了录音——这不失为一种开车时的安全做法。我的手机也可以录音，但它的录音操作步骤过于繁琐，我可不想让自己在开车的时候分心。这个PDA的另一个好处就是它可以自动将我的声音传送到家里和办公室的台式电脑，这样我一下子就有三个拷贝文件了。我听自己的语音记录内容时，很容易就能把想法和创意输入主要的创意库中。

学生们觉得我在上课期间不时停下来跟自己的PDA说话的样子很异常，但他们后来就知道我这么做的原因了。我把它称为“我的内存”。

不要只保存创意的声音文件。写下这些创意可以驱使你去想象和理解自己的想法。设计新手通常更习惯将“创意”保存在大脑中，但如果要他们表达自己的创意时，他们就会发现自己还有好多细节没想透（或者根本就不记得了）。

除了PDA之外，我的“游戏箱”（用于保存自己测试过的游戏）中还有一个纸制记事本。当我参加游戏会议的时候，还可以在笔记本上随意写下更多想到的创意（如果忘了带录音设备，至少手头上还有其他可用的工具）。

最后，我还有一个轻薄的笔记本/平板电脑，以及一台更轻，拥有3个续航能力达到700小时AA电池的专用文字处理器（AIphasmart Neo，在开会时可以记录内容）。我就是这种不愿错过任何想法的人。

我在半夜时还会在床边放一个录音机（例如Olympus录音机），但为了不吵醒妻子，我还准备了一个剪贴板。很多人知道我常在半夜起床在电脑前写下创意的相关细节。

在七八十年代，人们总是用记事本或纸片记录想法，有时候也会将其打印备份。在21世纪，虽然记事本还没退休，但人们比较喜欢使用文字处理软件，或者专用的记录程序（游戏邦注：例如Info Select或OneNote）或者声音信息等电子手段记录想法。但是要确保这些内容方便检索和备份。

现在的电脑都很便宜普遍了，我强烈推荐使用一些自由文本数据库。自由文本数据库并没有微软Access、Oracle或dBase这种程序的定义字段，你可以输入自己喜欢的数据，然后把剩下的工作交给自由文本数据库的搜索功能来处理。任何一种文字处理器都可以提供这种操作方式，但专业应用程序处理速度会更快。一些设计师喜欢使用电子表格，但我更青睐专业程序的超级组织及检索功能。

我从80年代就开始使用的第一种自由文本数据库程序是Info Select（www.miclog.com），它的处理速度很快，可轻松地分门别类，提供多种检索途径（它还可以发挥文字处理器、电子邮件、网页浏览器等功能）。我不但可以用它来管理信息，还可以在眨眼的功夫中搜索到整个文本（因为所有的存储信息都已载入内存）。不幸的是，这种程序很贵。

微软One-Note是此类程序的另一典型，除非你挂靠那些注册了微软开发者网络教育联盟的学校（这类学校可免费使用该程序），不然它的价格也不划算。还有一个非常简单的程序是Memento，其作用相当于便利贴，此外还有许多免费软件可供选择。

你也可以使用文字处理器或者电子表格将自己的创意以文件形式保存起来。多数电脑操作系统都支持用户通过关键字搜索文件，或者文字处理器本身就具备这种功能。关键就在于这些文本含有你所输入的一些关键字。假如你要搜索的是一款纸牌游戏，那就要确保文件中含有“纸牌游戏”，否则你在搜索内容的时候可能就会徒劳无果。

你可能会认为这种做法会占用电脑大量的内存，但事实并非如此。整部小说的文本也才占据1兆的内存，只要你不保存图片，这些内容不会占用太多的RAM，更不用说是硬盘空间了。

假如你不太方便使用电脑，那就打印出这些内容，将它们整理到一个活页夹中，或者将它们整理成册，定期浏览之前的创意和想法，因为这是获取新创意的最佳方式。

需要注意的是，如果存储太多图片内容，会拖延搜索速度，因为图片比文字内容更占空间。程序一般只搜索文件名称，所以你得使用更长的描述性名称。可以使用照片管理程序，例如Picasa，或者使用可妥善处理图像的数据库程序。

如果你作为教师或者游戏倡导者在众人面前发言，要记得录下自己的演讲内容。使用具有录音功能的MP3（例如Sansa e250）就可以轻松实现，再用Audacity等免费软件就可以将自己的演讲内容转变成播客文件。

总之，一定要记得备份。

假如你的硬盘崩溃，或者你弄丢了唯一的记事本，那就等于前功尽弃了。假如你认为自己保存的创意和想法有价值，那就不要忘了备份。

游戏邦注：原文发表于2008年9月23日，所涉事件及数据以当时为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Idea is Not the Game

Lewis Pulsipher

“Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as invention, you know. It’s only magnifying what already exists.”

Allie Fox (played by Harrison Ford)，The Mosquito Coast

How important are ideas?

Most novice game designers think that their main task is to come up with a great new idea. They think a great new idea will necessarily become a great game. Also, to them an idea must be new to be great.

Folks like this are forever asking in online forums for help turning their idea into a game; and they almost never find a collaborator, because ideas alone are nearly worthless.

As Allie Fox says, the reality is that there is hardly ever a new idea — “nothing new under the sun.” Rather, there are new ways to use old ideas.

Furthermore, for every person who gets an idea, there are usually dozens or hundreds of others with the same idea.

Think about novels. Almost all novels are variations of ideas used in books or plays published in the past. It’s how the writer presents the ideas that counts, plus a dollop of luck. There is nothing notably new in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but it has sold more than 60 million copies (according to Wikipedia as of May 2006). The same can be said about movies: Hardly anything is new.

How often do we get an extraordinary and new idea in games? In non-video gaming, we have Stalingrad, Afrika Korps, and Waterloo (all three by Avalon Hill), TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons, Wizard of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering. A game as successful as Trivial Pursuit or Settlers of Catan is a simple variation on games that came before.

In video games, there have been many technical advances, but few really new games. The Sims comes to mind, but it was preceded by a game called Little Computer People, which Mobygames calls “the mother of The Sims”; have you ever heard of it? A new idea does not guarantee a highly successful product, and highly successful games usually have no new ideas.

It doesn’t make sense to try to come up with “a great idea.” Your chances of coming up with one are worse than one in a million. And if you did, would you recognize it as a great idea?

A Thousand Eggs, A Hundred Caterpillars, A Handful of Butterflies

Because ideas on their own count for so little, publishers want games, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen. Everyone in the game industry has ideas. Recognize that your great idea is probably not that great, not that original, and not that interesting to others. Virtually everyone thinks his or her game idea is extraordinarily good, and everyone is wrong almost all the time.

This is hard for beginners to accept, partly because it’s easy to come up with a few ideas, so it’s nice to think that you only need to come up with one great one to make a lot of money.

However, a lot of work goes into making a successful game, beginning with generating hundreds of ideas. The more ideas you have, the more likely you’ll have a few really good ones that can become really good games.

There’s a “pyramid” of game design that goes like this:

Lots of people get ideas.

Fewer of those ideas successfully go from general idea to a specific game idea.

Even fewer produce a prototype.

Even fewer yet produce a decently playable prototype.

Very few produce a completely designed game.

And very, very few produce a really good complete game.

Everything I’ll be saying as we go along applies equally to video games and non-electronic games.

For more about the worth of ideas alone, see Tom Sloper’s advice.

How Many Ideas?

“Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning.”

Robert Collier

If you have no ideas, you’ll never have a game. How many ideas do you need? The more the better. Most of them will never become games, let alone good games. It’s another sub-pyramid as shown in the accompanying illustration (which ought to be much wider than it is tall, but is a conventional pyramid for the sake of clarity).

If all this is true, then you know you need to generate a great many ideas in order to have a few that might ultimately reach retail shelves. Remember the conventional wisdom that upwards of 90 percent of the video games that are initially funded — that is, the plans are good enough for someone to be willing to pay to have them developed — never reach the public. At some stage they’re canceled or the studio fails for other reasons.

A relatively well-known and successful board game designer has estimated that 60 percent of his completed games will not be published. For every idea that is good enough to warrant someone trying to turn it into a game, there are many, many ideas that don’t make it much farther than that mark.

You want to get to a point where you have far more fruitful ideas than you can possibly turn into games even if you live to be a hundred. Ideas beget ideas, so the more you come up with, the more you get. As novelist John Steinbeck said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” But this means you need a great many ideas.

There are creators who write just one novel, have just one hit song, publish just one game. In a few cases, they may have had just a few ideas, though more likely, they had oodles of ideas but only one that panned out. If you want to be a professional video game designer who publishes game after game and makes a career out of it, you need to be working on many games at once, and that means a very high volume of ideas.

Source of Inspiration

How do you get ideas?

When novelists are asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” the answer is usually, “Everywhere.” But what they don’t think to say is that they come up with ideas because they work at getting them.

This is exactly the opposite of the common notion of creativity as “it just happens” or “it’s art” or “it’s inspiration.” Creativity is partly inside a person, but most of it comes from working at it. For every genius like Mozart, who wrote music without thinking about it (“I write music like cows piss”) there are dozens of outstanding and great composers who work hard at getting ideas and revising them. Beethoven filled notebooks with musical ideas. He wrote four different versions of the overture to his only opera, Fidelio. Yet both of these composers wrote music to make a living, not because of “art” or a highfalutin notion of creativity.

“You can, for example, count on the fingers of both hands the number of musical compositions Mozart didn’t write for money, and negotiating with Beethoven was like

trying to take a steak away from a hyena.” (Prof. Robert Greenberg in the recorded lecture, “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music,” 3rd Edition, Teaching Company.) If even the extraordinary genius treated his creativity as work, most other “geniuses” as well as ordinary mortals must work at creativity.

In my own experience, I used to come up with many ideas for games and game articles, and much was published. Then for 20 years, I decided there were more important things to do (learning computing and networking, and making a living), and those ideas stopped coming. Several years ago I decided to get back into game design rather than write computer textbooks, and now I have a vast collection of ideas — many more than I have time for. That’s because now I work at getting ideas and developing them.

In other words, there’s a way to push forward with ideas, rather than wait for them to come to you. Don’t waste your time! Like many other things in life, getting ideas is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

The Toil

Hence, the number two lesson in ideas (the first lesson being “You need a lot of ideas”) is you have to work at getting them.

You have to keep part of your mind aware of your search for ideas at all times, so that everything you see and hear and smell and touch is examined as a stimulus for game ideas. You may even sit down and say, “I’m going to come up with more ideas,” or “I’m going to think up a new game.” It won’t always happen, but often it will, and the more often you do it, the more often the ideas will come.

Game ideas are often generated by association with something that isn’t obviously about games. This is why game designers benefit from a broad education, diverse reading, and having multiple interests: They have more to associate with than the narrowly-defined “gamer” (or “fanboy/girl”).

Game ideas come from asking questions. They come from reading all kinds of history, fiction, science, and so forth. They come from looking at pictures and maps. They come from talking with other people, even from using everyday things. They come from reading game rules, from playing games, from reading game reviews, from reading postmortems by game designers, from reading books about game design. Yes, there’s a lot of reading there, because when you read, you’re often exposed to a lot of ideas in a short time, and the association may generate game ideas in your mind.

Finally, ideas come from thinking about the ideas you’ve already had. Often a designer will have an idea for a game, get stuck on some problem for which there’s no evident solution, and years later associate that idea with another one generated at another time. These will combine to solve the problem and push the game forward.

Almost anything can give you ideas. I’ve designed board games by starting with nothing more than a particular kind of game piece in mind.

Record Ideas

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”

Hector Berlioz, composer of Symphony Fantastique

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
Howard Aiken

I firmly believe that some ideas will come to me only once, and if I don’t record them, I’ll never get them again. Even if you don’t believe something similar, you’ll admit the inconvenience of having an idea, forgetting it, and having to wait until it comes to you again, perhaps years later.

Trying to keep all your ideas in your head is a fool’s errand. The only way you can do it is if you have so few ideas that you’re unlikely to be productive.

Aspiring game designers should carry a notebook or other recording device with them almost everywhere. When an idea comes, you want to be able to write it down or record it by voice no matter where you are. I carry an HP PDA that has one-button voice recording function (not all PDAs do). I can record while driving because all I need is that single button on the side of the device. I press the button, talk, and when I release the button, it stops recording — a reasonably safe way to record thoughts while driving. My cell phone can record, but using it requires several steps, and I won’t divert my attention like that while driving. Moreover, my PDA goes into a cradle that automatically transfers my voice notes to my desktops at home and work, so soon I have three copies. It’s easy to type the idea into my main idea database as I listen to my voice notes.

Students think I’m strange to occasionally talk into my PDA in the middle of class, but they soon realize the purpose. I call it “my memory.”

Don’t leave an idea as a voice file. Writing down ideas forces you to actually figure out and understand what you mean. Novice designers are prone to having “ideas” that are only in their heads, and when asked to articulate them, they find out that there’s a lot they haven’t figured out (or have forgotten).

Aside from the PDA, I have a paper notebook in my “game box,” a box where I keep games that I’m play testing. When I’m at game sessions, I can write more extensively in the notebook than I would record on the PDA. (Plus, if I forget one recording device, I’m likely to have on hand the other).

Finally, I have a light laptop/tablet computer, and an even lighter, 700-hours on three AA batteries, solid-state storage, specialized word processor (an Alphasmart Neo) for note-taking when at game meetings. (You can’t type on a PDA, not with speed.) I for one don’t intend to lose any ideas.

I could keep a voice recorder (such as my Olympus voice recorder) by my bedside for middle-of-the-night ideas, but I don’t want to wake my wife with my talking; so I have a clipboard. And I’ve been known to get up in the middle of the night to write idea details into my computer.

In the 1970s and 80s the “data store” for ideas was notebooks and pieces of paper, sometimes typed (with carbon copies, if you were smart, as a backup). In the 21st century, the data store may still be notebooks, but preferably it is electronic, whether word processing, or a specialist note program such as Info Select or OneNote, or voice messages to yourself. But it’s got to be something that can easily be searched electronically and copied (backed up).

Computers are cheap and plentiful. I highly recommend using some kind of free text database. A free text database has no fields such as you define in Microsoft Access or Oracle or (in older days) dBase. You type data in however you like, and the search facility of the free text database does the rest. Any word processor can be used this way, but specialized programs will be faster. Some designers prefer to use a spreadsheet program extensively, but I prefer the superior organization and search-ability of a specialized program.

I have used one of the first free text database programs, called Info Select (www.miclog.com), since the 1980s. It is my “desert isle” program, the one I’d use if I could only have one piece of software. It is fast, easily allows subcategories, and offers many ways to search. (It can also be a word processor, email program, Web browser, etc.) It allows me to not only organize information, but do a full text search in the blink of an eye (because all the stored information is loaded into memory). Unfortunately, it is pretty expensive.

Microsoft One-Note is another program of this type, and it’s somewhat expensive unless you’re properly associated with a school that subscribes to Microsoft Developers

Network Academic Alliance (which makes it free). A very simple free program is Memento, the equivalent of Post-It notes, and there are many other freeware programs.

Or you can use a word processor or spreadsheet and organize your ideas by file. Most computer operating systems allow you to search through files for particular keywords, or the word processor itself may do this. The trick in any of these programs is to have those keywords in the notes you’ve typed. If you have an idea for a first person shooter, be sure “FPS” is there with the details of your idea. If you have an idea for a card game, be sure “card game” is in the file. Otherwise, when you try to find ideas, you won’t find all that you should.

You might think this would take a lot of memory, but it doesn’t. An entire novel is roughly one megabyte of text, so as long as you don’t store a lot of graphics, it won’t put much of a dent in your RAM, let alone your disk space.

If you don’t work well from a computer screen, you can print out your ideas and put them in a binder using sheet protectors. Or just have them in a pile. Just be sure

to periodically look through your old ideas, as this is one of the best ways to get new ideas.

Another word on images: Storing drawings and pictures results in slower searches because graphics take so much more space than words. Often a program will only search

the name of the file, so you need to use long descriptive names. You can use a photo-organizing program such as Picasa (free from Google), or use a database program that handles graphics well.

If you speak to groups, as a teacher or as a proponent of games, be sure to record yourself. An MP3 player with voice recording, such as the Sansa e250, makes this easy to do, and with free software such as Audacity you can turn your talk into a podcast.

In any case, back it up.

All your work will do you no good if your hard drive crashes or you lose a notebook that is your only copy. If ideas are worth generating, they’re worth backing up.（source:gamecareerguide）