Weird Dream About Game Design
Dec. 18th, 2002 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aLast night I had a weird dream about work and about game design. I very rarely recall my dreams when I wake up in the morning, so when I do, I try and write them down. The dream was all broken and fragmented already, when I woke up, but in the hour since, it's taken on some shape and consistency that doesn't necessarily reflect its original form.
My dream was about designing a new game, which somehow involved diverting a river. So, the boss and I went up into the mountains to change the path of a river that began there. I don't recall anything about this diverting work; it was apparently the easy part, the initial, simple creative spark as it were.
The rest of the dream was spent walking along this river we had created, or observing it from some nebulous, omniscient point. At various points the river ran through jungle, forest, a flea market, and through the rooms of a house. Not in sequence, mind you; rather, each of these locales was solely true as was convenient for the logic of the dream.
Looking at our "game" (the river) I was puzzling over a game design problem--the fact that the river was moving too quickly for people to stop at the flea market stalls on the sides. But then I had an epiphany. If we widened the river, it would slow down, and people could stop their boats.
I talked to the boss about this, very pleased with my new design, and he liked it too until he spotted a flaw, which was this: the flea market stalls were narrow enough that if we made the river larger there'd be less than half the stall left, and thus nothing really to stop t.
After a few minutes, though, the boss came up with an alternative use for slowing the river down by widening it. People could dock to the trees growing up in the middle of the river, which was something he had always wanted to do!
I also remember being concerned at one point in the dream about the results of our diverting the river. Originally it had fed two tributaries (no, that's not usually how rivers work), but now it only fed one. What would that mean for the tributary we'd dried up? I was worried, but my boss wasn't.
What's it all mean? I'm usually of the belief that dreams are symbolic of something in our lives, and that our brain is just placing elements iconic of recent events upon more deeply rooted problems that are being worked through.
I know the back and forth with my boss is reminescent of how my job actually works. We have lots of intelligent people there, always coming up with great ideas. Sometimes they don't work out how we expected them to, but there's enough back and forth that we often discover other cool uses.
The river could easily be representative of the rushing pressures that I feel in the job, as we have a constant flow of maintenance requirements--plunging down from the mountain as it were; if there were a way to slow them down, that would be great. And, when I have too much work backed up I do often describe it as being "under water", just like those flea market stalls.
Most directly I'd say that the dream wasn't about game design at all, but rather a marketing idea I came up with last night, just before bed. It could help the company achieve more success, maybe, and that would in turn lead to controlling the river that we're riding down. But it's a bit wacky, and would take some real time to implement (putting my under water), before we could see if it would have real effects (allow us to stop at trees in the path). And there's always the concern about what diverting our efforts (the river) to this new task would result in.
And now, having written about it, I need to get in to said work.
My dream was about designing a new game, which somehow involved diverting a river. So, the boss and I went up into the mountains to change the path of a river that began there. I don't recall anything about this diverting work; it was apparently the easy part, the initial, simple creative spark as it were.
The rest of the dream was spent walking along this river we had created, or observing it from some nebulous, omniscient point. At various points the river ran through jungle, forest, a flea market, and through the rooms of a house. Not in sequence, mind you; rather, each of these locales was solely true as was convenient for the logic of the dream.
Looking at our "game" (the river) I was puzzling over a game design problem--the fact that the river was moving too quickly for people to stop at the flea market stalls on the sides. But then I had an epiphany. If we widened the river, it would slow down, and people could stop their boats.
I talked to the boss about this, very pleased with my new design, and he liked it too until he spotted a flaw, which was this: the flea market stalls were narrow enough that if we made the river larger there'd be less than half the stall left, and thus nothing really to stop t.
After a few minutes, though, the boss came up with an alternative use for slowing the river down by widening it. People could dock to the trees growing up in the middle of the river, which was something he had always wanted to do!
I also remember being concerned at one point in the dream about the results of our diverting the river. Originally it had fed two tributaries (no, that's not usually how rivers work), but now it only fed one. What would that mean for the tributary we'd dried up? I was worried, but my boss wasn't.
What's it all mean? I'm usually of the belief that dreams are symbolic of something in our lives, and that our brain is just placing elements iconic of recent events upon more deeply rooted problems that are being worked through.
I know the back and forth with my boss is reminescent of how my job actually works. We have lots of intelligent people there, always coming up with great ideas. Sometimes they don't work out how we expected them to, but there's enough back and forth that we often discover other cool uses.
The river could easily be representative of the rushing pressures that I feel in the job, as we have a constant flow of maintenance requirements--plunging down from the mountain as it were; if there were a way to slow them down, that would be great. And, when I have too much work backed up I do often describe it as being "under water", just like those flea market stalls.
Most directly I'd say that the dream wasn't about game design at all, but rather a marketing idea I came up with last night, just before bed. It could help the company achieve more success, maybe, and that would in turn lead to controlling the river that we're riding down. But it's a bit wacky, and would take some real time to implement (putting my under water), before we could see if it would have real effects (allow us to stop at trees in the path). And there's always the concern about what diverting our efforts (the river) to this new task would result in.
And now, having written about it, I need to get in to said work.
