Recently, The Marketing Store’s digital team attended the Engage! Expo in New York. The kick-off keynote was given by Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, and his presentation was titled,  Designing Games for Maximum Appeal: How Zynga Engages 60 Million Players a Day. For those of you unfamiliar with his company, Zynga is the developer of Farmville, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, CaféWorld and a number of other social games that have captured the imaginations (and seemingly endless free time) of large swaths of Facebook’s 500 million users. You’ve likely seen bits of his wor k in your Faceb ook newsfeed from time to time. 

            Reynolds was there to talk about how to design successful social gaming programs, looking at key measurements such as activation numbers and monetization, and to share some of his happy accidents: the a-ha moments that grew their success. But, the a-ha moment for me in his overall presentation was found in his advice to would-be developers. He beautifully delineated the creative process, in general, and I would argue his stages bear repeating for creative professionals across the board. 

Here are seven points he articulated that I believe apply to the game of creativity as a whole:

1)    Prototype your idea. In other words, create a crappy first draft.Whether it’s a game, an invention, a story, or the idea for a song—create a prototype. Build something. Write it down, sketch it out—create something to build from. A blank screen can’t be revised.

2)    Allow yourself to hate it. You’re going to hate it a lot because, frankly, it’s awful. Embarrassingly so. But, that’s okay, because over time, it will get better.

3)    It’s okay to play. In fact, play with it over and over. Stew on it. Turn it on its side. Study it. Give it its identity. Nothing is perfect the first time around. Trying new things and experimenting is key. Pump up what is working.

4)    If it’s not working—take it out. At the very least, set it aside—even if you love a part of it, but it’s spoiling the core piece. You might be able to use it somewhere else later. Or, perhaps it’s just the seedling for another idea.

5)    If you love it, keep it. No matter what, keep your passion and your heart in it. If you lose that, it will fall flat. You have to live with this a long time, make sure you want to.

6)    Show it to people you trust. Get input of a handful of the core people whose opinions you most value. Let them weigh in—noodle on their remarks—use what you want, be choosy, file the rest away.

7)    Revise. Hone. Research. Revise. Keep playing and editing until it stands on its own. If you get stuck, get out of your own head—go outside of yourself. And revise-revise-revise until you can live with it. Until you’re excited to send it into the world.

    
Whether a developer or a painter, a writer or musician, a toy maker, a chef, an inventor or an engineer, these creative tenets are guideposts that can serve creatives in all professions as they move from the seedling of an idea to their final finished piece.

Heather Gately is the Director of Marketing and Communications for The Marketing Store Worldwide and can be reached at heather.gately@tmsw.com. You can follow The Marketing Store at Twitter at: @marketingstore