The whole point is that emotion is all well and good, but it has to be tempered with intellect as well. Art may entail nothing but emotion, but entertainment has to also enlighten and stimulate the intellect.

Shirker - I asked the team producer if it was ok to release that information and he said it was. [smile] So for this particular team the winning gameplay genres were Real-Time Strategy, Turn-Based Tactical, and Sim, and the winning story settings were feudal and futuristic. (It was intended to be two of each but there was a tie for 2nd place between TBT and Sim.) One thing I realize afterward was that I should have asked "magic or no magic?" in the survey, and maybe also "human or non-human major characters?" But oh well, I can just collect that data in the next round of polling.

Interestingly, AbsoluteWrite, a writing forum I hang out at, is doing an activity this week which is basically the same as the next step of this design process. They let any registered member of the site submit an elevator pitch (3-4 sentences describing a story). There were 51 entries. Now it's the voting phase - any registered member of the site can see the pitches and vote for one, and anyone who wants to can comment/critique the pitches and post those responses in a forum thread. The one with the most votes at the end will basically be the most popular one (and will win a free book or something small like that). It's much the same as the way our team is going to be voting on concepts starting tomorrow, except I use a different voting process. I have people rate each idea as something they would be enthusiastic to make, satisfied but not enthusiastic to make, or would prefer not to make. Also in my teams case I will be providing several of the concepts being voted on based on the survey results, and will be rewriting any additional concepts submitted by team members to make the style and format match.

Actually steampunk was a setting category of its own, which lost. The winners were low fantasy (magic but no elves/dwarves/etc; less-cliched or original fantasy races and mages are ok) and science fiction ala star trek. Science fiction slightly beat fantasy.

The results surprised me a little, I was surprised the spellbar/cooldown type of combat MMOs usually use lost out hard, along with turn-based combat like in most single player RPGs and also solitaire and speedpuzzle/minigame type things. I was also surprised sims were so popular, yet adventure games were not, I would have expected the same people to mainly like those 2 genres. Adventure games came in third though so they weren't extremely unpopular. But RTS and sim are very similar so it makes sense that if one was popular the other was too.

The last time I did this sort of a poll science fantasy (as in high tech + magic) also won, but the winning gameplay genre was RPG with arcade-style combat.

The winner of the AbsoluteWrite concept contest was announced. It was a murder mystery which started with a powerful image of a puzzling and disturbing crime scene and personal involvement of the main character.

My concept came in somewhere in the middle, which I was happy with considering that I made a rather large error in how I pitched the concept (as did at least 1/3 of people who submitted pitches: the moral is, always get a second opinion on a piece of writing, no matter how small, before showing it to a publisher).