Game Originality: Any Left?

Kamalot writes "In a world where 85% of games are solved with a gun, where are the original and innovative ideas? Adrenaline Vault has a telling editorial about the state of creativity in the game industry, the constant re-hashing of sequels, and a look into the future when technical achievements are no longer the driving force. What happens when every game follows a tried and true formula? Where do the new ideas go if we can't have games like Viewtiful Joe, Shenmue, and Jet Grind Radio? Did innovative, rather than mainstream, games send the Dreamcast to an early grave rather than the PS2's more bland, yet conforming, lineup of titles?"

Comments

Stop Complaining

[rwiedower]

I'm always wary about comments that seem to reflect the "why aren't things better?" mold of thought. Obviously, there are impediments to producing a novel game concept, but if someone came up with a really catchy idea, I think game execs would sign on.

What if Miramax had told filmmaker Kevin Smith that no one would watch "Clerks" and suggested he develop a marketable teen sex comedy instead?

This is a red herring. Clerks pushed boundaries in several directions. If game designers have not done so, perhaps it's simply because there aren't enough people out there pushing the envelope. Time and patience will result in more games. Complaining won't.

Re:Stop Complaining

[Alkaiser]

Wrong.

"but if someone came up with a really catchy idea, I think game execs would sign on."

I was working for a game review website a couple years back, and my boss said something during a "lack of originality" conversation that sticks with me to this day.

"Nobody ever gets fired for making the same game."

However, you DO get fired for making a stupid original game. *cough* Viewtiful Joe *cough* So what do people do? Make crappy remakes.

Here's the other reason why no catchy ideas get made into games. The game industry is the biggest "incestuous" industry out there. By this I mean that if you have a job in the industy doing something, you getting fired, only means you work somewhere else doing the same job within 3 weeks.

Look at the requirements for Game Designers. *ALL* of them require 3-5 titles shipped. Nobody cares that they sucked, they think the experience is more valuable than the talent. Every one who's ever picked up a controller thinks they can design the Next Big Thing(TM).

The problem is that there are several people in design positions now who couldn't design the Next Big Thing(TM) unless it involved them taking a photocopier and someone else's design of The Next Big Thing(TM).

Since they're in the industry now, they'll be there forever, or until they get tired of it. Where complaining about the lack of creativity MAY not get results, it's been fairly obvious these past few years that sitting there and doing nothing DEFINITELY won't get results.

Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads. Truth is, there aren't enough people left in the industry who actually care about making a good game anymore.

If you don't believe me, walk into a store and try and count the number of games that you wouldn't be personally embarrassed of. Ask any tester you know how many games they tested that tehy wouldn't play again to save their lives. The industry is stagnant...sitting on your ass and letting them try and figure that out isn't going to solve crap.

There's always originality.

[JKConsult]

You just have to look for it. I'm not going to post a long list of original games, for a few reasons. One: the list will be nit-picked incessantly, and that's not really the piont, and Two: What I consider original, you may not. The point is that just like buying a car, or watching a movie, or choosing a book, you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Is there less originality in games now than there was X number of years ago? Yes. It's a fact of any developing system. Stephen Jay Gould says (paraphrase) that "As a system matures, it becomes harder to stand out."

The longer we go, the more things that will be done, the more games will have been done before. It's like the Southpark episode where Butters tries to come up with a scheme for chaos. "Simpsons did it!" The conclusion: Of course the Simpsons did it. They've been around forever. And as Chef points out, the Simpsons stole some of their stuff from others before them. It's not necessarily about doing new things. It's about applying your (hopefully good and sensible) take on those "tired" ways of doing things to put them into new light.

News?

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

In every field of human endeavor the work done is 99% derivative, and it has always been that way. Look at writing, music, film, science, hell, look at software in general. The truly original works stand out, so we tend to think they are more common than they actually are.

Derivative isn't bad. There are games that are derivative, but a hell of a lot of fun (Civ 2, for example). Games that are derivative crap would have been crap even if they were the first in their fields.

Quantity

[stratjakt]

The Dreamcast didnt die because gamers dont like innovative games. Some chalk it up to its easy no-mod-needed piracy, though I doubt even that had much of an effect, being prohibitave to the mainstream non-techie gamer.

The Dreamcast died because Sega chalked up a laundry list of abandoned systems (32x, SegaCD, Saturn), and customers didnt want anything to do with it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

I bought a Dreamcast on release day (9-9-99), and was an idiot for doing so. Sega wasnt in any position to back up another console, and to weather the financial drought before it turned profitable. EA's refusal to create titles for it didnt help either.

It was dead before it hit store shelves. And 85% of its library was indeed mainstream boring crap.

Everyone rants about the unoriginality in gameplay. But what do we hype up and get all excited over? Doom 3. Yay now we run around and shoot prettier monsters.

Fun innovative games do come out, and will continue to. And the bulk of the shelves will always be mainstream type stuff.

Thats the way it always has been - just look at the line up for your favorite nostalgia system (c64, NES, atari, genesis). For every standout there were 100 crapfests.

Nothing new here. Just nerd elitism. Sometimes those mainstream trigger finger games are just plain fun.

Re:Dreamcast

[Babbster]

Also done in by the fact that people weren't buying games for the system, instead doing things with NES emulators, Sega Master System emulators, VCD playing and game piracy.

Re:If only a few people like your game...

[Mac Degger]

It's more the complexity and cost that is the barrier to entree and the damper on innovation.

But personally I think that this is just a short dip in the curve; at the moment, it just takes a lot of time and effort to create content and a feature rich enough engine to make a game which is polished enough to be sold.

However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done (subtle distinction, but very important).

Every itteration of game engines makes more possible: automatic, procedural and easier content generation and integration; more transparent game rule changing...thgis is being worked on right now. Look at Deus Ex 2 and Halflife 2...the lipsyncing-tech in HL2 and the attribute-techture-tech in Deus Ex make life so much easier...it takes out a chunk of grunt work (which is exactly what automation and computers should be doing).

So while at the moment it takes huge sums of money and years of manyears(?) to create a game, in the future engine licensing will be more and more frequent. And as engines get more and more userfriendly and take more and more of the grunt work out of gamedev'ing, more and more time will be available to play around with game ideas and styles.

And that also means that modders will have an easier time doing the same. And that is, nowadays, where the real innovation in gameplay experiences come from.

Re:If only a few people like your game...

[iocat]

Actually things *aren't* like Hollywood in that respect. Right now, there is a market for AAA games, which correspond to Hollywood blockbusters. And there are markets for B games (think Trailer Park Tycoon, etc), kids games, and very niche games (thing hex-based, turn-based war games), which correspond to Hollywood B movies, Hollywood kids' movies, and Hollywood niche movies.

But there is really no "art house" business model for games. Instead, you see "art house" games, like Rez, or Shenmue, produced and marketed as AAA games, and then failing in the marketplace. This is a major bummer, and if someone does develop an art house model, where a high concept game can be made relatively cheaply, and designed to break even on relatively modest sales, I hope they become stinking rich billionaires, because it would be rad.

That all said, that doesn't mean there isn't innovation in the AAA, B, kids, and niche catagories. The fact that art house games don't succeed commercially doesn't mean innovation doesn't exist.

Put another way, just because a game is from EA and has super high production values doesn't mean that it isn't innovative, or can't be innovative. And just because Rez and Shenmue didn't sell 10 milion units doesn't mean innovation isn't appreciated.

Games that make you smarter

[Phoenix666]

I have thought about this a lot, being horribly addicted to video games and having woken up at the end of many a fourteen hour binge feeling empty like I had wasted precious life. Boy wouldn't it be great to become completely immersed in a game at the end of which you wound up speaking fluent Chinese or having acquired some other skill useful in the real world? I know that there are plenty of kids' learning games out there to teach phonics and stuff like that, but that's not what I'm talking about. Those are too pedantic.

What I had in mind was something more in the direction of Cyberchase, were the skill being learned was important, but almost incidental to the game play. For example, take all those Everquest-y RPG-y games out there where you're an ancient Greek warrior or a spy or something, and gradually require the player to understand what the characters are saying in their native tongue in order to advance, and after that require the player to speak back in the language. Presto at the end of the game you come out with basic understanding of French grammar and a vocabulary of 1000 words.

I know it wouldn't be easy to walk the line between educational and fun, but if someone managed it I'd be a slavishly devoted fan.