Game Industry Has Lost Its 'Spark'?

Gamasutra is running a short interview with game designer Chris Crawford. The discussion in the article centers around Crawford's assertion that the games industry is no longer a creative place. "I haven't even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren't even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore. I was appalled, for example, at the recent GDC. I looked over the games at the Independent Games Festival and they all looked completely derivative to me." I'm not sure I agree. What do you think? Is there anything creative left in the games industry, or are we going to be playing Halo 6 and Final Fantasy XVII ten years from now?

Comments

One word:

[MaggieL]

Spore.

I can think of a few

[Bastian]

Katamari Damacy, Uplink, Darwinia, Spore looks interesting. . .

I think that there might be a bit of "time compression" going on in this article. Original games were few and far between 10-20 years ago, too. I certainly remember back in the 8 and 16-bit era when it seemed like every single game put out by anybody for any system ever was a side scroller.

Besides, video gaming's youth is gone. I don't see why it's such a big deal that so many games resemble other games nowadays - it was easy to try new ideas in 1985 when not so many ideas had been tried. I'd like to see the people who whine about lack of originality try to spend some time coming up with a new idea that's good. Maybe folks could try harder, but (1)I seriously doubt that nobody is trying (2)trying to sell a formula that's known to sell is part of business, and it's not going to change. You might as well shake your fist at the sky for raining, it'd be just as useful.

  Of course, an article that says, "Gee, it's really hard to come up with novel games" probably wouldn't sell as well as yet another jaded guy bitching about how things were better in the past. (How original.)

Re:Perhaps...

[Das Modell]

Is it really a problem? The games seem to sell well enough, so clearly there must be a demand. I know I'd rather play the next Half-Life than some goddamn storytronics bullshit that will probably never see the light of day. What kind of "innovation" do people want? Some whacky game where you control a dishwasher and try to rape kittens on Mars?

If you want to look at this as a problem, then yes, it's clearly the fault of the consumers. People only buy FPS, RTS and MMORPG games, so that's exactly what they're going to get. Developers won't make games that won't sell. I don't know what you mean by the MGS2 outrage, but I can imagine what would have happened if Half-Life 2 would have been radically different from the first game... the fans would have probably been angry. They don't want change, yet at the same time they cry about the lack of innovation.

Chris Crawford seems like a person who contributes nothing, but complains a lot. He also has some very strange ideas about things:

Well basically, new ideas don't go anywhere. So the industry is just rehashing the same stuff over and over.

If new ideas don't go anywhere, what's the point of innovation?

During the 80s there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of new ideas being tried (many of them really bad) but there was at least experimentation. Now we don't see any experimentation whatsoever.

Well gee, let's think about this: during the 80s, the industry was pretty much getting started, and many of the genres we have today didn't even exist. Also, the primitive graphics required developers to come up with a solid gameplay idea. Nowadays you can easily get away with recycling an old idea, but repackacking it with good graphics and sound. Of course, it's not like they didn't recycle ideas in the 80s...

Has anybody noticed that we don't appeal to the general public? Has anybody thought that perhaps it might be a good thing? In fact, the industry has talked about reaching out to a broader audience for decades, but the industry is not willing to do anything about it. As long as you keep recycling the same product you're going to have the same markets.

Sims? World of Warcraft? Second Life? Sports games? Racing games? I should think that they reach out to the "general public" (what does this even mean, exactly?) well enough.

According to Mobygames, he hasn't done anything related to video games for fourteen years, except that storytronics stuff. Also, "innovation" is a retarded buzz word that doesn't mean anything, just like "next gen."

Re:Who cares what this guy thinks?

[masterzora]

I met this guy and talked to him in depth about video games and his ideas for new games and crap like that. I can tell you now: he is a veritable hack.

He was good in his day, but he just doesn't have it any more. His ideas for "innovation" are basically old style adventure games with dialogue trees. I apologize, he did have one idea that was more of the Sims than of an adventure game. At best, his ideas are TES4:Oblivion, but that's pushing it.

He's done, his day is over, but he just doesn't want to admit it.