On Pitching Radically New Ideas

This is the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea. When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head. You wrote the song. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years thinking about the idea. You’ve contemplated the problem, formulated the solution, and rehearsed the vision. You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it’s no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that’s listening to it for the first time. This explains why we often under-communicate our ideas.

• Adam Grant, Originals

As a product manager working on new projects at Pocket Gems, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to explore and communicate ideas. I have noticed a recurring miscommunication that is common when discussing new game concepts. It manifests as experienced, reasonable professionals disagreeing with one another about something the other isn’t talking about. In this post, I seek to put a name to this dynamic. And in so doing, we can recognize when it’s happening and work past it.

The problem is that the receiving person isn’t “hearing the song.” At Pocket Gems, it happens all the time during new game pitches, where radically complex concepts get lost in the process of reviewing the pitch, especially via asynchronously discussing it within Google Docs comments.

To further explain, let’s consider sheet music. If you weren’t familiar with the song above, could you hear it as Beethoven had it in his mind? Even if you can read sheet music, which Beethoven was highly skilled in writing, the final experience of hearing the piano solo in the echoes of a concert hall is quite different from the experience of imagining it beforehand. Could you tell that “Für Elise” would be one of Beethoven’s most popular compositions from reading the sheet music alone?

What if it wasn’t a piano solo, but an orchestral piece ultimately performed by dozens of instruments? What if Beethoven’s first draft had some mistakes or omissions? What if the music you were reading didn’t attempt to capture an auditory experience, but a brand new, free-to-play interactive game meant to be played both in brief moments and for hours of immersive gameplay?

My point is that pitching any new idea is difficult in a medium that’s short of the real thing, and this is exceptionally true for games. This is the reason playtests are such important milestones in our process. It’s just so hard to tell if a game feels good when assessing it on paper.

Yet, we must assess game ideas on paper. We have to be able to discuss and make informed judgements about which game ideas are more compelling in order to prioritize which game we choose to prototype. Step 1 is collectively agreeing on just what a given game idea is, and, even amongst professionals, this step is often missed. When pitchers and reviewers don’t have the same concept in mind, feedback will be misinformed, and good ideas will look like bad ones.

What follows are specific tips for pitching and reviewing. These are lessons learned in the gaming industry, but I believe these tips will apply to anyone pitching something new.

As you pitch, consider the following:

• Do you know when reviewers hear or do not hear your song? It’s important to identify when the idea is not being transmitted correctly versus when people are just not liking the idea. Negative feedback on a pitch could be because of either, so it’s important to make this distinction.
• Are you choosing an appropriate medium such that reviewers will hear your song? Very specifically, asynchronous text communication is not great at communicating nuanced ideas. Nothing beats one-on-one real-life conversations.
• Documents do, however, still serve an important purpose. When using a document, are you using proper techniques to illustrate your idea? Use visual supporting content where possible. Pictures are worth a thousand words; gifs are even better. “X statements” also help offer a strong cultural reference easy for everyone to understand.

Referencing inspirations like City Skylines in an embedded gif can be useful in communicating your vision.

When you’re reviewing a pitch, consider the following:

• Listen to your own reaction to the pitch. Separate where you are failing to hear the pitch from where you are simply disagreeing with what you are hearing.
• If you are not hearing the pitch, seek to understand it with clarifying questions. Try reiterating your understanding of what you think they’re selling.
• Form your initial reaction directly from the elements you hear most clearly. If you agree, then that helps to narrow the discussion to ideas you hear less clearly. If you disagree, then the other ideas might be moot.

We’ve named the problem! You will now be better equipped to identify when you’re not hearing the song as a reviewer and when you’re not singing the song as a pitcher.