On my hard drive, along with now over one hundred Game Ideas Unlimited articles, there’s a file in which I’ve got brief notes for future ideas.  At the moment there are twenty ideas noted there; they get added, and then as they get turned into articles I remove them.  Some that are there have been there long, and this is certainly one of those.  It is not the oldest on the list; it stands as number four, in a numbering system that automatically will collapse as I write this article and move another to that position.  In front of it are a note on Gardiner intelligence types which requires me to do a bit of research to revive my long-disused memories thereof, something on niche markets springing from my exposure to Christian jazz-fusion and avant garde, and something about things that aren’t what they appear, inspired by one of Seth Ben-Ezra’s Dreaming Out Loud columns.  That might perhaps give you some notion how long this idea has been simmering on the back burner.

  The note reads, You promised to do something sometime about assessing whether basic ideas were good before investing time in developing them.

  I did promise that; I did it back when I wrote Edison, the twenty-fourth article in this series, over one and a half years and exactly eighty-eight articles ago.  The reminder has been staring me in the face, every time I open the document to write a new article or drop another idea into it or muse on the ideas within it.

  The horror of it is that I have no more idea how to tell you to do that now than I did eighty-eight weeks ago when I made that promise.  How do you decide that something on which you’re working isn’t worth the effort?  How do you distinguish a good idea that just needs more work from a waste of your time and effort?  I can’t tell you; I don’t know.  I’ve certainly abandoned plenty of ideas after putting time into them, on the conclusion that they would not work, or at least that I could not find a way to make them do so.  I can suggest that there is a sense you have that something is not turning into something good, and you are wasting your time.  Yet this is a fickle sense at best.  Every time I come to a new review of Multiverser or more recently the novel Verse Three, Chapter One; every time I receive a letter about a web page or article I’ve written; there is a part of me that holds its breath, waiting for the bad news, wondering whether someone is finally going to prove that I’ve wasted all this time and effort because I don’t really have what it takes to do what I’ve attempted, or that my work is unoriginal or incorrect or worthless.  Thus far I’ve been encouraged.  All the reviews of the novel have been positive, most of the letters I receive are encouraging, and the few negative reviews of the game more reflect the reviewers’ biases than any flaw in what’s been written.  No one writes to me complaining that I’ve sold them a lousy game.  Very few people have called me a fraud or an idiot.  The ratings on these articles don’t always get perfect tens from the readers, but thus far none has dropped below five.  Yet there is still this seed of doubt somewhere that wonders whether I’ve deluded myself into thinking my work is good, and fed it with the praise of a few.  After all, they say that the Internet makes it possible for three like-minded nuts in the whole world to find each other and confirm their opinions into a political movement.  I can’t even be certain whether the things on which I’m spending my time now are good, even with trying them.  I only know that there have been ideas I’ve tossed aside, thinking that I can’t make them work and could do better with some other ideas.

  Maybe that’s not so bad, though.  I don’t think anyone really knows whether an idea is good or bad until they attempt it.  After all, these might not be as inspiring, incisive, or memorable as the most famous words Edison said (as quoted in the earlier column), but they are attributed to him as well:  Results!  Why man, I have gotten a lot of results.  I know several thousand things that won’t work.  So maybe you can’t know which are the bad ideas without testing them.  To quote someone else who has achieved a sort of greatness, the hockey player they call The Great One, Wayne Gretsky, is mentioned in uncounted high school assignment books for the words, You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.  So maybe when you’ve got an idea, you can’t know whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea until you’ve tried to make something more of it.  Even then, maybe it’s a good idea, but you just haven’t figured out what to do with it.  Maybe those snippets of music I’ve written and abandoned could have been great songs, but not for me.  Maybe those strange worlds people have submitted to me which are sitting on my hard drive, at which I screw up my face wondering how anyone could salvage them, could easily become worthy of publication if the right hand took control of them.  It happens that just last week I opened a file that has been mere notes E. R. Jones left in 1997 and turned it into text that may well appear in The Third Book of Worlds, if I can tweak just a few more points, and handed another that held some promise back to its author, my son Kyler, with a few notes on how to make it work for that same book.

  So maybe there are no bad ideas.  Maybe there are only bad combinations of ideas, poor executions, failed deliveries.  It might be that every shred of our creativity has value, if only we can find the right context.  Choosing the good might not be really so much the good as that which is most easily refined.  There are mines which have returned to value as the price of gold rose, gas and oil fields which became worth exploring as demand for the products climbed.  The idea for this article sat for eighty-eight weeks untouched until the new quote from Edison helped it coalesce.  Maybe the value of ideas is not in whether they are good or bad, but in whether we have the right context for them.

  Of course, maybe I just don’t know the answer.  Maybe there is a way to spot the bad ideas and weed them out, and I just haven’t figured out what it is.  If anyone has any secrets for this, please let me know.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.