I’d made a note to myself a few weeks back that it might be interesting to start the third year of this series with an article on perseverance.  It comes to me that two years ago, on June 1, 2001, when Game Ideas Unlimited launched with a column inauspiciously entitled Introduction, it was the first of five weekly columns by various authors anchoring the new Gaming Outpost site.  Today it is the only one of these which remains (although I am encouraged to see new weekly columns springing up from new contributors, giving hope for the future of the site).  A recent site survey suggested that it is still worth reading, and thus worth writing and posting here.  Certainly, one of those long gone other columns came to the end of its purpose, and quietly said goodbye; and none was obliged to stay so long as this.  That this column should still be here, though, says something about staying on task.  It reminds me of several stories and phrases, including Edison’s words, Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

  And then my mind halts.  I wrote this column already.  Number twenty-four in the series was entitled Edison, and talked about the importance of keeping to the task, of putting in the effort to bring a good idea to fruition.  It reminded us that the world will never know how many people failed because they did not know how close they were to success when they gave up.  To persevere is to succeed, it said, and told the story of the New Zealand man who penned those words as he spent ten years perfecting refrigeration so he could ship mutton to the hungry markets in Great Britain.  I can’t really write that column again; what else could be said about it?

  Then I remember Brett Bloczynski’s fascinating concept for a column, Expanding an Idea.  Whatever I write, he looks at it and finds something else to say about it.  In one thousand to two thousand words (the originally agreed length of the columns in this series, although it’s been outside those limits a couple of times), no one can exhaust a subject.  Certainly I could find more to say about perseverance; in fact, there’s probably more that I could say about any one of the columns I’ve written.  Forum discussions point to that, as many times others have brought out new aspects of a posted article that could be articles on their own–again, as Brett has shown.

  Besides, it’s not as if my life has been static.  Edison was published eighteen months ago.  Since then, I’ve managed to finish and publish my first novel, Verse Three, Chapter One, and that took a lot of work and a lot of perseverance.  I’ve probably got some stories I could tell about that, some lessons learned along the way, some ideas that I could share on the subject.  I recently copied down a relevant quote from author William Feather, Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.  I’m still learning; I’m still running games, experimenting with ideas, creating scenarios, writing books, watching the world go by.  There are new facets to old ideas, waiting for me to uncover them and see them in the new light.

  That’s the note on which this new year begins:  the thought of going back to what you’ve done before, and doing it again, adding the new ideas and insights and angles that you’ve found since then.  We’ve all pulled out our old scenarios and adventures, and thought, gee, did I really write this?  What was I thinking?  Yet within those old things, even if they are incredibly bad (and maybe especially so), there were things that were good.  Take the good things, and rebuild the old into something new, something better.

  Composers often take a theme from something they wrote and use it in something else, taking the core ideas of a piano concerto as the foundation for a symphony, or revamping a movement from a symphony into a chorus in an oratorio.  Painters will go back to a landscape or model they’ve presented before, and do a new and different treatment.  M. C. Escher’s work is filled with new approaches to old ideas.  It once was that authors wrote sequels in large part because they wanted to do more with the character or the setting than they’d done before (although particularly in literature, there has long been the pressure to write what people want to read).  Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There was penned by Lewis Carroll because he had more nonsense to expound after he finished Alice in Wonderland; he later declined to do another Alice book precisely because the style had gotten so popular that there were many imitators, and he wanted to do something different–yet after writing one Bruno and Sylvie story, he wrote a sequel to that as well.  Old ideas always contain the seeds for new ideas.

  Put another way, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.  Just because you did this idea once or twice before doesn’t mean there isn’t a new way to approach it now, a new twist to the old idea, another angle to exploit.  You’ve got an old castle that the players had to attack; can you recycle it so that now they have to defend it?  There was that derelict spaceship that the insane computer was running and the players all thought there was a real person somewhere; what if this time it really was a person at the helm?  If you changed one bit, how would that impact the rest?  Before you know it, what was an old dusty adventure you’re almost embarrassed to admit you wrote becomes a new idea ready for the next game.  All you had to do was recognize how to take the good and make it better, how to apply your new experiences and all that you’ve learned to something you did long ago.

  For my part, I’ll be going back to the beginning.  Valdron Inc has decided to run the series, now free, two years behind the original publication dates.  Thus this weekend, Game Ideas Unlimited starts a new run in a new home, and week by week I’ll be reading over the old articles as they become the new ones there, stirring thoughts and memories, and maybe finding new ideas in what I wrote before.

  Next week, something different.

—–

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.