Thanks to having The Best Job In The World, I get to spend a fair bit of time brainstorming game pitches. These, I’ve noticed, fall into three categories. By far the most popular is the hybrid. ‘It’s Halo meets Cooking Mama!’ someone will declare, or reveal a sheaf of sketches demonstrating how Sid Meier’s Pirates! can be modded to work with the Wii Fit balance board. My experience of these is that the dumber the hybrids initially sound, the more fruitful the the design direction tends to be in the long run. Last week I sat in a room while someone explained a new project as ‘Mario Kart meets the single game in the entire world you’d think most unlikely to ever meet Mario Kart ever‘. I can’t tell you what that game was, because it’ll blow the team’s idea (feel free to barrage the comments with guesses, though), but I did have to grind the entire meeting to a point to vent my baffled scepticism. Three minutes later I was all smiles and nods. Obviously!

Then there is the blank sheet of paper. The actually new idea. These don’t come around nearly so often, and when they do they are brilliant and scary and hard. That initial blank sheet of paper soon becomes hundreds of pages of dense design doc, denied the pithy shorthands that more derivative ideas can take advantage of. Real, proper thinking has to be done. Imaginations are audibly stretched. Getting to be involved in projects like these is always a privilege but it’s a tiring, challenging and not infrequently demoralising one: actually new ideas have a scarily high failure rate.

But then there’s the anti-game. The deceptively simple process of taking an existing game and flipping its ideas - its rulesets, its assumptions, its goals, its resources and restrictions - and finding something new. I have one of those on my desk at the moment, which takes a gaming classic and adds one bit of red pen to the core design idea. And that little bit of red pen changes everything - it’s like in Saramago’s The History of the Siege Of Lisbon, where a proof-reader impulsively inserts a ‘not’ into a sentence in a history book and inadvertently remakes the entire world. I love working on anti-games; it turns game design into a game in itself, as the thought-experiment unravels and you have to jump ahead anticipating and extrapolating the consequences of that initial reversal.

Still not convinced? Then let me bring you today’s favourite anti-game. Yesterday I sent you off to Burn The Rope. Today, I invite you to solve a Fruit Mystery (sound required for both). It does exactly the opposite thing to YHTBTR, in exactly the opposite way, and yet made me exactly the same kind of happy, exactly as much. Good times, good times.