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Strange Attractor - On High Concepts For Games
Thanks to Scott Miller's Game Matters weblog for its article discussing how to design a game from the start with a 'winning concept'. Miller argues: "Too many games are sunk from day one because they lack a compelling concept. And even though these games may get made with the highest production values and polish, they will find only a small audience." He goes on to identify specific factors to follow, including uniqueness ("You should be able to say:'"Wow, why has anyone else thought of this?!'"), an easily conveyed premise ("e.g. Tomb Raider = female Indiana Jones"), and lack of obvious ancestry ("The concept is so distinctive that if anyone else does it after you, it'll be obvious where they got the idea from.")
How many times do you buy a game and get bored with it like after a week. Doom3 and manhunt are both examples of this. They are more worried about special effects rather than the backbone of the game i.e. the storyline. I find myself drawn to games i have played to death rather then new games that I buy. Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice city are both games I can play over and over while others such as Doom3 i get bored with. I guess the same can be said about the movie industry and lack of quality movies with poor storylines. I say if they spent less time on graphics and more on storyline then the problem will be less severe.
What baffles me is why there aren't more games out there that use traditional literary modes as bases for plot. I'm dying to play a good Raymond Chandler-esque game; imagine a game based on something by Kafka. A game based on Snow Crash would be killer, too. But what do they stick on the shelf? Deer Hunter XXIII and GenericFPS 12. Bah.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
One of these things is not like the others.
It's tragic. Laugh.
I think that there are also a lot of games out there which have good concepts but could become great games with more polishing. Example - Prince of Persia : The sands of time. It was a style of game that had seemingly been beaten to death, espically with the failure of Prince of Persia 3D, but the latest iteration was absolutely phenominal. Novel doesn't necessarily equal good, but because of all the crap that comes out that when something is different, that's considered good because it's not something that's disapointed us before.
The game players buy those same old (or atleast very similar) games again and again because they enjoy it. People who bought Doom 1 and enjoyed it will buy Doom 2 because they liked the first one, and want something a little new, perhaps some new weapons, monsters, and levels.
Not every game has to be extremely original and revolutionary. Many games do very well simply by being what the customers enjoy playing, even if they shamelessly copy a previous successful game.
Obviously in those cases, the games need to be built well (of course there were dozens of Doom 1 clones, but not many of them were created well enough to be as enjoyable as the Doom series).
Yes, it's a shame that very few publishing companies will go out on a limb for a new game concept, but it's not a terrible shame that game players are getting what they want from the same old games with new titles.
I sort of disagree with Scott Miller.
;)
If some gaming company came out with an X-Wing clone in which the gameplay mechanics were exactly the same as the original X-wing, with no gameplay enhancements or innovations, and yet the graphics and sound were out of this world, and there was a new and compelling plot, I would buy the shit out of it.
I don't think a game has to be innovative. Just really damn fun. I don't think Zelda: A Link To The Past was innovative. It was basically The Legend of Zelda with some graphical bells and whistles and a more cartoony/fun world. But damn if it wasn't fun.
Huh? All the truly original games that I've played recently have completely tanked, sales-wise. Ico, Rez, Noone Lives Forever, you name it.
For comparison's sake, let's take a look at some data on successful games. Top sellers of 2003, according to NPD.
1. Madden 2004
2. Pokemon Ruby
3. Pokemon Sapphire
4. Need for Speed Underground
5. Wind Waker
6. Vice City
7. Mario Kart: Double Dash
8. Tony Hawk's Underground
9. Enter The Matrix
10. Medal of Honor
Of these, I know that 7 are sequels -- some to strikingly original games, I must admit -- and 1 is a (bad) movie adaptation. Anyone want to weigh in on Medal of Honor and Need for Speed? As far as I know, they're respectively Just Another WWII shooter and Just Another Racing Title.
The 2002 Top Sellers:
1. Vice City
2. Metroid Prime
3. WWE: Shut Your Mouth
4. Tony Hawk 4
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! Eternal
6. Madden 2003
7. Splinter Cell
8. Lord of the Rings
9. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
10. Metroid Fusion
Six sequels, one movie adaptation, one original game (Splinter Cell) and again, two I'm unsure of, Yu-Gi-Oh and "Shut Your Mouth."
I'm not seeing a compelling case here for practically every top-selling game having a compelling and unique concept; I'm seeing the opposite.
Speaking as a content creator myself...
Simple and cool is the toughest thing to do in movies, music and video games. Hell, make that the toughest thing to find in *all* software, laws or even women. That's why if you succeed in finding that core concept of simple and cool, the rest is just getting out the games' way and not messing it up.
Everything is tied to everything else, so it's usually only with hindsight that you can see that, for example, GTA III is really very unlike any of the first person shooters, adventure games, or racers that it borrowed its' core concepts from.
This kind of transcendance isn't anything you can plan or control, either. They key, as with anything supposedly creative, is inspiration. An truly inspired effort will either produce a new kind of game like GTA 3 or Wolfenstein 3D, or games like Halo or Warcraft 3, old concepts but still a blast to play.
Ultimatley what shovelware, movie licenses and sequels tend to lack is a distinct sense of inspiration.
Occasionally though, an ambitious developer's reach exceeds their grasp. I've seen many underserving developers get alot of flak thrown their way, I wish that more gamers were aware of the big picture.
Yes, we all love seeing the paradigm shift, but let's face it, that's really rare. I'll take a great old game anyday.
The practice of successful innovative games show that it is other way around. Most of successful innovative games weren't designed with winning concept form start, but went through a lot of iterations during which the central concept changed a lot. IIRC first iteration of the Civilization design was a real-time game.
was the M*A*S*H game for the 2600, you had to go around rescuing falling patients from helicopters at first. Then after you were done with that, you had to go into the "operating room" and operate on terrified patients(well, that was the look in his mono-color body anyway) and remove a little pink thing. If you were successful, you went outside again. Good times....good times....
If you really want to make a lasting impression, you have two paths to choose.
1) Innovate, and develop a new genre of game. (Example: GTA series)
2) Bring an existing genre to a level of maturity previously unattained. (Example: Half-Life)
That being said, there is nothing wrong with doing "another FPS" as long as it brings something worthwile to the table. Half-Life is an excellent example of this. It pushed the FPS genre to a higher level of maturity without fundamentally changing the genre.
My god I loved that game, and the spectacular sequel. Fighting ninjas in a trailer park while a tornado carries your trailer into the sky? Exploding robot kitten anti-personnel mines? Schoolgirl-aged assasins talking about going shopping before they try to chop your head off? A getaway sequence on a tricycle shooting evil mimes? Man-cubes as furniture? It goes on and on. I have never laughed so hard in my life. I cannot recommend NOLF and NOLF 2 enough.