Blog #35

 Creative

Today I tried out a classic creative thinking exercise called "Exaggeration Game"—and wow, it’s way more effective than it sounds. The goal here is simple: take an ordinary object, action, or concept… and crank it up to absurd levels. Like, cartoonishly exaggerated. Then, explore how those over-the-top traits could inspire new ideas or storytelling elements.

For this session, I picked something super normal: a backpack.

Then I exaggerated the heck out of it. Here’s what I came up with:

• It holds an infinite number of items — but at the cost of randomly giving you something you don’t want every tenth time you open it.

• It talks — constantly. Has opinions on everything you pack. It's basically your sassy inventory manager.

• It grows legs and follows you — no need to carry it anymore, but now it's your clingy sidekick.

• It can only be opened when you’re upside down — which creates a whole parkour-based inventory system for a game.

• It absorbs memories from items you store — meaning it could become a walking archive of a person’s past.

This exercise is honestly kind of addicting. The more ridiculous you let your ideas get, the more original and weirdly useful they start to feel. I even started thinking about how these exaggerated traits could work in a game mechanic or as part of a quirky DND campaign.

If you’re ever feeling creatively blocked or stuck in the realm of “normal,” try this one. Pick something basic, make it wild, and see where the chaos leads you. You’ll be surprised at what your brain throws at you when the rules go out the window.