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Strange Attractor - On High Concepts For Games

Posted by simoniker on from the duke-of-earl dept.

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.")

11 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Its all the same by Schwing84 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Its all the same by DeadboltX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      so you're saying gta has an awsome storyline and that is why you play it over and over again? I have a feeling it is more because it is open ended and you can run around doing whatever you want to kill time I played doom1 and doom2 over and over again relentlessly as many people did, and it wasn't because it had an awesome storyline, it was because the gameplay was fun I think storyline actually kills replay value. Take a look at max payne 1 and 2, sure they were fun games and were packed full of story, but The last thing I want to do is play the game over again when I beat it. It may take a year or longer before I feel like playing the game again.

  2. Obviously, game companies don't get it... by Txiasaeia · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...nor do game players. Why else would they release game after game that are basically the same (i.e. sports, racing, even FPS shooters)? And we, the customer, support this by buying crap, time and time again. The last decent PC game I bought was the two-pack Fallout/Fallout 2; that's not to say that everything after it has been completely worthless, but Fallout brought two distinct tropes (the RPG and post-apocalyptic fiction) together in such a way that it completely overshadowed earlier such games (i.e. Wasteland).

    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.
    1. Re:Obviously, game companies don't get it... by FLAGGR · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Google defines "game" as "an amusement or pastime; "they played word games"; "he thought of his painting as a game that filled his empty time"; "his life was all fun and games"" (Well thats the first suiting definition) If the players enjoy playing Deer Hunter XXIII and GenericFPS 12 then who are you to say they dont get it? They're playing a game for fun, and just because you (rightly or wrongly) want more uniqueness in your game does not mean that it isn't fun to them (as fun is a completly relative term) Just for the record, I too get bored of the same old thing, just trying to get it from a different POV :)

    2. Re:Obviously, game companies don't get it... by Cecil · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's definitely the game players that "don't get it". Although saying that your target audience "doesn't get it" because they want something you view as inferior is a tough argument to support.

      In any case, it's certainly true: People (and as a subset of people, gamers) have a marked affinity for rehashes, sequels, and clones. For the most part, they display aversion to anything new or innovative. We humans are strange that way, we find comfort in familiarity. I'm very much guilty of this myself. Rather than an innovative new game I'd much rather play a remake of one of my old favourites, whether that be X-COM, Master of Magic/Orion, Doom, Diablo, whatever, it doesn't matter.

      And, regarding your last question, literary devices rarely translate well to a game, just as movie devices rarely translate well to a game. It can be done, but it's a delicate process, and will require changes to be made the literary devices to make it work.

      --
      Random and weird software I've written.
  3. Polish is good to... by MagicDude · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. No, you don't get it. by Hamled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. me = devil's advocate? by TheAdventurer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Concept gaming by oskillator · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the article:
    If you think about the best selling games in recent years, practically all of them have a compelling, unique concept.

    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.

    ... Madden 2004, Christ.

    1. Re:Concept gaming by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Medal of Honor is, from a technological standpoint, nothing that new. It's just quite polished, has high production values, and tons and tons of scripting.

      Need For Speed Underground is another game in a long series (at least four titles, now).

      To be fair, you are skipping over a few points -- just because something is a sequel does not mean that it is not original. Metroid Prime, at least, while it is just another first person shooter, did some reasonably unusual things for the genre. It's no Rez, but it's got more than the typical degree of evolution in a game (that being said, I think that it was a lousy game, but still more unique than the average game).

      A lot of games that people play *years* after their release didn't necessarily sell well. This guy is giving a recipe for cult classics, and for the sort of thing that a game reviewer, weary of the "same game" over and over, would like. You're right that this is probably not the ideal thing to do for financial success. Among other things:

      * A game reviewer probably views a franchise tie-in (such as a movie) as a bad thing, as it limits content, plot, development time, and has had a bad history. Traditionally, franchise games have sold well.

      * A game reviewer puts more emphasis on new and unique gameplay. He's played all of the dozen FPSes released in the last twelve months. If I buy two games a year, however, I'm quite happy getting vanilla examples of a game, because all the new things are interesting.

      * A game reviewer gets more out of homage to other games than a light gamer.

      * A game reviewer is going to generally be more willing to learn rules (especially since he may already know the rules of a genre) than a light gamer. Things like tutorials, unless very clever and unusual, are unlikely to interest a game reviewer much, but may matter very much to someone who is not familiar with the latest-and-greatest in the genre.

      * A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of high hardware demands than a light gamer. Most people out there do not have high-end machines. This is generally not an issue for a game reviewer.

      * A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of patches than a light gamer. Most people out there do not want to screw around with seeing whether patches are coming out and running patches, if they even know what to do and how to do it.

      --
      May we never see th
  7. It's the inspirado by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.