In a recent game design challenge you were asked to come up with 10 ideas for a new crate object in a video game, only you had almost no information about what the game would be.

Analysis
Though seemingly simple, this challenge asked you to take on a lot. Let's consider for a moment, piece-by-piece, all the things that made up this challenge:

1. You had to consider what might happen when you're trying to network with professional developers and they tell you "I'm under NDA." How can you continue the conversation in a way that you can both participate in and that's still useful to you?
2. Having only one idea is more often than not insufficient when designing games. You have to be ready to dig up 10, 20, or 50 ideas quickly and still be prepared for none of them to stick.
3. When working on a team, for a publisher's approval, or for a mass consumer audience, one of the tricks to being a creative thinker is being able to come up with a wide variety of ideas, not all of will suit your personal taste, but ones that others will find appealing.
4. There are many hackneyed objects, actions, and characters in video games. On one hand, wouldn't it be nice to do away with them in favor of something totally new? On the other hand, they are time-tested, so players know what to expect of them. When thinking up a new idea for a "crate," is it better to reinvent what it does or simply reskin how it looks?

Observations
Who knew there was such a demand for crates made out of corpses? I certainly would have never guessed that.

Crates made out of bones were equally popular. Here are some other ideas that recurred over several submissions:

• Expandable or collapsible crate
• Robot(s) as crate
• Crates as pets
• Crates made out of plants or organic matter
• Hovercraft crate
• Garbage cans or recycling bins
• Container or shipping container
• Crates as dice
  

I think this has been said before, but it's worth repeating. When we come up with these challenges, we have no idea how you will solve them. We don't have a predisposed idea of what the winning submissions should be.

In this challenge -- and as you noted on the forum -- we would have to reconsider how to choose the three winners. Should the winners be the people with the three best lists? Or should the winners be the people who had, somewhere in their list of 10, the three most inventive and usable solutions? Or is there yet another way to choose the best submissions?

Going into the challenge, we had no idea how we would pick the winners. We figured we would have to wait and see how you solved the challenge first. The fact of the matter is, there were so many great submissions that instead of calling out three winners, we've decided to highlight the best of the bunch and look at how different people interpreted the same idea. The real "challenge" of this challenge was to think through all the problems above, and everyone succeeded in doing that, so it's probably more insightful (and entertaining) to look at the best of the bunch, collectively, which in a few cases, will let us see how different people interpreted the same idea.

We also have to give a walloping word of gratitude to the artists who sketched their ideas: Marcela Roberts (see page 4), John Pile Jr. (see page 5), Matthew Leach (see page 6), Max Michaud-Shields (see page 7), and Sharon Hoosein (see page 8).