One of my favorite assignments in Game Design was building the Toolbox. We had to think of games we’d played from every year starting when we were 5 years old, and jot down a useful memory about the game. Useful in terms of something we learned from it game-design-wise. It was a very useful tool, and I’m always adding onto it.
However, I wanted to do two things: 1) Put the toolbox in a format that would be easily categorized, searchable, and easy to add on to, and 2) A format that was easy to share with others.
As such, I’ve started a new blog: Wertle’s Game Design Toolbox
I’ve already copied over the information from the original toolbox, but there is still MUCH to add. For example, as a preliminary exercise, I made a list of every video game I can ever remember having played EVER. Now I have to add each one to the toolbox with a corresponding memory.
I have about 200 entries to add, and that’s just video games. I haven’t even started a list for other types of games!
This is a huge project, but I intend to catch up, so that eventually adding new entries will be gradual. I also intend to make lots of tags, so that I can look up entries by system, by genre, or by insight.
How long do you think it’ll take me to add all my games?
You REALLY have one heck of a desirable job for a gamer! I think it would take me a whole month to remember and describe every single game I’ve played this far. Come to think of the C64-Era, the “remembering” part would be the harder one. x3
Just a minor thought on this topic, but: have you also considered using a wiki for collecting your thoughts? I always thought that those would be easier to search, categorize and edit when it comes to collecting wisdom.
Thanks! And yeah, it took me ages to even make the initial list (and it only goes up to the beginning of 2009, so it’s still incomplete). My plan is to once a year keep adding to it. I have an excel doc for that for my own organization.
I did consider a wiki when I was trying to figure out how to display this (also google sites, which is essentially a wiki), but I am a horrible keeper of wikis. I always start out on them with grand visions of organization, but I never follow through, so all my wiki projects end up half complete and only halfway useful.
Plus, a blog format is easier for a visitor to peruse if they just want to casually read through a list of things, rather than go hunting around on a wiki.