Designing From Desperation
The other day I was present during a workshop in one of Brenda’s courses, in which students have to design a game using six object selected from the aptly-named “Box of Crap:” a largely random collection of dice, toys, and miscellaneous junk on the order of the sort you’d find in a vending machine or a Happy Meal. Not only do the students have to design incorporating all the objects they’ve chosen, but they have about fifteen minutes to construct a prototype and start playtesting. That is what I call designing from desperation. 
The funny thing is, there’s always something really interesting that shows up from this exercise. It seems paradoxical to think that an activity so contrived and absurd can consistently produce both amazingly bad and startlingly good game designs, but it never fails.
I think the kernel of genius in the workshop is that it so translates the process of design that participants cannot help but be innovative. When no recognizable path or procedure is possible, what else can you do but charge blindly into unknown territory? And when the constraints are so bizarre that failure is a foregone conclusion, the fear of failure is alleviated and that unknown territory doesn’t look so scary anymore. When I tried it, last quarter, my team dove into the challenge with uncommon fervor, and even though our design failed utterly, I still remember that project as clearly as I remember some of my most successful traditional designs. It’s in the mindset — that desperate mania drives away all trivial concerns of appropriateness, marketability, even consistent playability, and leaves only the nucleus of creative inspiration.
In a way, I feel it is kin to the core idea of agile development: to blow past all the documentation and oversight and analysis and criticism and simply allow the mind to create. Watching the students turn that Box of Crap into genuine inspiration, I can see why the agile method has caught on the way it has.
Yes, that is a strange excercise that is very memorable.
The most interesting part for me though was that I had given it as an exercise to students of my own, in a slightly different form, before having to have done it myself in Brenda’s class!
I liken this effect to a similar phenomenon where it’s easier to begin a drawing once the surface has already been marked.