On Design And Ideas

After being in the game industry for mere months, I could begin to see the origins of the myriad problems I found in games nowadays. It is strange that, within a few short decades, games are thought to have “matured” and set into fixed formulae. It is disheartening to realize that, in the pressure to create a potentially profitable game within a short period of time, even I have found myself falling back onto those formulae to push a product out. The more radical and experimental ideas would have been rejected by the producer as unsuited to the target market, or simply found to be “not-fun”.

Fun is the buzzword and the lifeblood of the current industry. Without fun, there is no game. There may be a simulation being made, but it will never survive on the mass market. Instead, the storekeeps are increasingly becoming inundated by the latest and greatest fads in game types. Perhaps the flavour of the season was WWII, in which case WWII games would pop up like mushrooms. In fact, they would come in almost precisely two types: FPSs and RTS. Few are motivated to innovate.

In fact, what is yet more disturbing is seeing how I could not simply pull a fresh idea out of thin air without drawing on the norms of some other game type. Ideas created not supported by some established form turned out to be incomprehensible to everyone but the creator (namely me) and turned out to be hard to explain and learn.

Therein lies the crunch: I am probably not as original an idea generator as Will Wright, and I sure am not stubborn enough to really pull my weight to insist that they try the idea to the finish. Lots of newbie designers probably started off this way, being somewhat uncertain about ideas and/or having difficulty pitching them. But the scary bit is really that even good ideas like Will Wright’s would have likely fallen on the wayside had the designer not strongly lobbied for their conception.