Pitching Your Game Ideas Next Week:

The high concept pitch can be the make it or break moment for your idea. Since many of you may not go into the game industry, consider this a practice exercise for whatever ideas you will have to pitch in front of an overworked, exceedingly busy, idea saturated audience. This is the standard environment for the elevator pitch.

A few tips for creating a clear pitch:

These are the questions you must answer:

The TED Presentation style might help you, so you should watch this TED presenation on Video Games by David Perry.

According to Warren Spector, Deus Ex creator, these are the seven necessary questions you must answer when pitching a new game:

The Seven Questions are

  1. What are we trying to do? What’s the core idea?
  2. What’s the potential? Why do this game over all the others we could do?
  3. What are the development challenges? Really hard stuff is fine — impossible or unfundable? Not so good…
  4. Has anyone done this before? If so, what can we learn from them? If not, what does that tell us?
  5. How well-suited to games is the idea? There are some things we’re just not good at and shouldn’t even attempt. A love story, for example!(An aside: I'd encourage you to push the limits, that's what a prototype helps us explore)
  6. What’s the player fantasy and does that lead to good player goals? If the fantasy and the goals aren’t there, it’s a bad idea.
  7. What does the player do? What are the “verbs” of the game?”

This article on pitching, is more useful for industry professionals, but you may find it useful in understanding what you should be presenting.

For fun, you can watch this short vido from the 2007 GDC Game Pitch Contest (these are not professional pitches - just a fun activity at the conference)