Money for "The Ideas Guy"

This article’s a shorty but I have been thinking about something. A short while ago, I was typing away some game documents, Wikis and toying with some programs when I had a small conversation with software engineer at Scottish and Southern Energy:

“What are you doing?”
“Just typing some ideas for games.”
“Cool, can you make money off of that?”
“Well I suppose, but in order to make the game I’d need to program, design some art as-“
“No no, I mean can you make money off of just the ideas?”

Aaaaaaaaaaand that got me thinking. Of course making me think is hardly a challenge due to my tendency to be highly critical; just ask me my opinion of Man of Steel if you want proof of that! Anyway, I ended up recalling back to the words of an old mentor of mine…

“…kick, punch, it’s all in the mind…”

…wrong mentor.

“No one in the [games] industry is looking for an ideas guy.”

How come? Ok, employing a guy whose sole use is to spark game ideas is rather impractical when you have a whole host of programmers, artists and janitors who could easily give you an idea.

Scruffy had an idea for a game: a world of blocks. Scruffy got paid not to mention that by Mojang.

But what about teams that want an idea and want it quickly? Sure, Scruffy could give you one randomly, but you have no guarantee as to when or if the idea is any good. You might get some silly idea like a tongue-in-cheek platformer held in dark mines that make fun of conventional games of the platformer renaissance.

Now, in our modern world, we have the odd case of people calling out for programmers, artists and typists to do a singular task for a sum of money, be it commissions on deviantArt or several different forums hosting threads of programmers opening their services (and some more threads of clients requesting said service) and so on. So is there a space for an equivalent of, say, game design for document people?

Imagine a simple website where you can just buy a document and the rights to use its content as your own I.P., allowing for companies to keep their “no ideas guys” employment whilst helping to promote a standard convention when it comes to video game documentation (something that the industry is yet to truly obtain where its ancestry have). Is this going to make several positions redundant? I highly doubt it seeing as most ideas present in the industry come from talented artists or programmers or the heads of the development team. And assuming you are one of those “ideas guys” that managed to be in the games industry, you have to be very talented to have gotten in there and have kept it this far. There’d be no point in my mind to make you redundant now.

Could this database of ideas be exploited as a sustainable job? Perhaps, although judging by the boom in “review shows” on the internet versus how many of said “reviewers” are successful and use said show as their exclusive income, I am highly sceptical that this would be a big concern. More likely, this will probably just be source for short-term money between jobs whilst honing their game development and documentation skills.

And hey, it could pad out the C.V and make for an interesting talking point in an interview surely!

Of course, this idea is hardly flawless. A definitive standard would have to be set to make crystal clear how much of the idea is owned by the client after purchase and how much is still owned by the seller (and seeing that there is still debates over the ownership of software, the “fun and games” that could stem from future court cases over so-and-so not supposedly paying for such-and-such use of an idea and…). There is also the balance between security of the idea versus knowledge for the consumer that their purchase is worthwhile, after all you can’t exactly have copies of the idea strewn around the place for people to review for obvious reasons and you can’t just show the title and then ask for money before showing more, so many fraud documents can arise from that.

Guess that’s where Pitch Documents come in huh?

Reckon this is the point where I open up the discussion. Chances are, this idea will likely spark some buzz here at the Amber Glass Broadcast Headquarters (a fictional building that I think barely fits Andrew’s ego) but what about the higher ups? Would freelance idea guys be welcome to our industry? What work do you think would be needed, if any?

Greg Baxter

Amber Glass Broadcast