Game design is plagued by game designers with no influences

[ZeroAX]

Anyone else noticed how stale the industry has become? Anyone else noticed that when in the 80s/90s any crazy concept could become the basis of a game, today we get the same games again and again?

Of course you have, this is racketboy. But here is my theory:

I believe game design has become so stale cause the vast majority of people working in the industry are boring. They don't have unique interests, unique influences. They all grew up watching Star Wars, playing Final Fantasy, doing the same "geeky" stuff as we all do and they allow those things to be their only influence.

I mean for a niche hobby, I am amazed by how many "niche" interests I have for a gamer. And I am sure many gamers out there are like me. People who love video games, but find a lot of other things in life amazing too.

But for some reason when someone becomes a game designer, 95% of the time he won't want to bring his unique interests into the hobby. He will want to make the new GTA, new Final Fantasy, new Super Mario.

Here is the thing though: we don't need new people to make the same games again and again. It gets stale and it gets bad. Look at Final Fantasy. A series that used to change so much is stuck trying to replicate the success of Final Fantasy VII and it has NO idea how to do it. FF VII was amazing for the time cause it was so unique. Anime spiky hair was new, steam punk sci-fi was new to mainstream gamers and people fell in love with it (mind you I still think VI is way better, but the sales have spoken when it comes to mainstream popularity).

But just taking the games the game designers loved playing and trying to make something like them will end up in bad imitations.



Why don't they try to bring their less "nerd" hobbies into their games? Yu Suzuki was inspired for outrun from a driving movie. Miyamoto made pikmin cause of him taking up gardening. Why can't we have more things like that? Why must all game designers be inspired by Star Wars, LoTR and of course past video games. Why can't they take something completely random from their lives which they find fun and/or interesting and try to bring it into gaming?


Basically what I am saying is that game designers need to get out more and explore the world for unique things to bring into gaming. Instead of playing all the newest games in the genre you are developing a game in, to copy ideas, go out into the world and come up with your own unique ideas.



What do you guys think?

[dsheinem]

What do you guys think?

http://www.igf.com/index.html

^^^The list on the far right of 10+ years suggests a very different state of innovation and inspiration

Also see many of our thoughts here: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... ilit=indie

[Erik_Twice]

Note that this is not a thread about the industry itself, but about game designers and influences.


After reading some of John K's thoughts on the topic, I wondered why having influences are so important to him. Sure, he raves about how he likes this actor and this cartoonist and he points out how bland copies are made but I didn't get to understand why they were important but I now realize why.

Art is all about abstractive thought. When you play Chess you soon realize that you can't plan in advance. There are too many moves, too many possibilities, it's impossible to know what will happen twenty full moves from now. It's overwhelming and this kind of thought doesn't take you far. Rather, good players of Chess don't try to brute-force the game, they try to understand it, to abstract tactics so their moves are always sound. Instead of relying on numbers they create a theory so they can make good moves following principles. Art is kind of like that, there are no hard rules about what can work and what can't, but there are many principles and laws you can use to create good art.

A person with a wide array of influences will be able to understand art better because he is shown wildly different examples of good so his grasp of the topic is wider than someone who has very few influences. Or even worse, someone with few influences will focus himself on the inmediate instead of the abstract and that spells doom for him. This leads to copying and accepting flaws instead of extracting the good of the original.

Take Star Wars. The good things of it are the execution and the streamlining of B serials of the 50s. The bad things are the predictable plot, clichéd characters and pretentiousness of the premise. Star Wars is good because Lucas cut down the boring parts of a soap opera and focused on the interesting aspects. He abstracted out the good ideas.

Now people drol over Darth Vader or Leia, which are the most uninteresting parts of Star Wars. They don't see the frame, the 50s looks or anything, they just see a small part of what is in the screen.

Yu Suzuki's OutRun is a good example of this. One of his influences is "The Cannonball Run" which as far as I was told, is a terrible movie. He also made Space Harrier after taking out all the overwrought crap that the Jules Verne with superpoweres shounen comics he liked. In both cases he abstracted the fun (Driving, landscape, existentialist themes, for OutRun) and cut down the bad (Characters, plot, not-driving).

Now people take OutRun and think it's all about driving a ferrari and having a beach, without noticing the hand-made traffic patterns, sorrowful music and that when Suzuki noticed that basing the game on the US wouldn't be good enough he went to Europe to drive for days to get more influences.


Most problems game designers have nowadays can be boiled at a lack of abstraction. Or lack of influences causing lack of abstraction, it's a self-reinforcing problem.

Games have influences that look more like second-hand smoke:

Dungeons and Dragons "culture" (But very few have actually roleplayed!)
Final Fantasy VII (But very few notice that it's a Dragon Quest clone)
Star Wars
Hollywood Blockbusters (But Contra has more soul than Call of Duty has! Abstract the good!)
Teenager Fantasy books, of the "I NOW HAVE SUPERPOWERS" kind (Tough often, not even this, it's just more Final Fantasy)
Obvious game of the same genre that everyone has played (Zelda, Mario, RPG Castlevania, GTA, Need for Speed, Final Fantasy VII)
More Final Fantasy VII. Really, it's very bad.

This is all very bad. Note the obvious lack of The Lord of the Rings. While the movies have probably brought it to light, most of it's influence is second-hand smoke through D&D, not because they read it. And being such a complex, biblical story, often you see it misunderstood, with the bad parts (Wizards! Battles!) being hailed and copied while the good (Corruption themes, bravery, epicness) is ignored.


When you see old videogame designers talk, it's all so magical. A bug going from side to side of a cable, nightmares, Popeye, caves, the past, little trains and ants. It's beauty in raw form, and being able to see it in such mundane things says a lot about how good those developers are at their job.

[AppleQueso]

Dungeons and Dragons "culture" (But very few have actually roleplayed!)
Final Fantasy VII (But very few notice that it's a Dragon Quest clone)
Star Wars
Hollywood Blockbusters (But Contra has more soul than Call of Duty has! Abstract the good!)
Teenager Fantasy books, of the "I NOW HAVE SUPERPOWERS" kind (Tough often, not even this, it's just more Final Fantasy)
Obvious game of the same genre that everyone has played (Zelda, Mario, RPG Castlevania, GTA, Need for Speed, Final Fantasy VII)
More Final Fantasy VII. Really, it's very bad..

Don't forget movies like Aliens and Starship Troopers! Just about every modern gaming sci-fi universe imaginable can be traced back to those films.

...Yeah I'm not even sure what to respond with. It's an interesting point to bring up, for sure, but I struggle to imagine what can come from this thread besides a bunch of lengthy "I agree designers need a wider variety of influences" posts. I'd like to be wrong though...

[TEKTORO]

I agree,with games nowadays requiring 37 fingers to operate,the golden days of 2-4 buttons are pretty much long gone.

Then developers needed to use game design and mechanics to work around the limited buttons,now theres a button for everything and with the the idea of rushing games to make a dead line to compete in sales has took away from all that.The big wigs are simply not open to taking chances anymore since they overcomplicated the idea of how to maximize sales instead of creating unique ones.

[J T]

I agree,with games nowadays requiring 37 fingers to operate,the golden days of 2-4 buttons are pretty much long gone.

Have a breath of fresh air.

[ZeroAX]

I agree,with games nowadays requiring 37 fingers to operate,the golden days of 2-4 buttons are pretty much long gone.

Then developers needed to use game design and mechanics to work around the limited buttons,now theres a button for everything and with the the idea of rushing games to make a dead line to compete in sales has took away from all that.The big wigs are simply not open to taking chances anymore since they overcomplicated the idea of how to maximize sales instead of creating unique ones.

Off topic much?


Perhaps a better question would be, will gamers accept something that is so different? I mean have games in unique settings (let's not talk gameplay for now, it complicates things) been rewarded for their originality? Would Super Mario work today? I mean think about it. Nintendo released a trailer of a game set in the "Mushroom Kingdom"......how long till all the "what kind of mushrooms have THEY been consuming" jokes start popping up?



And another thing, where do you guys think game designers should look for influence? Art is a good idea in my opinion. Modern surreal art gives my imagination so much food for thought.

How about hobbies? For some reason all I keep coming up with is sports. Bah....this is the bad thing about being a geek, when you hear the word hobby, the first thing that comes into your mind are ALL the geekish hobbies. (games, board games, movies, comics, ect.)

[Cronozilla]

I think because we started moving towards genres it just naturally stifles that crazy sort of envisioning.

If you look at 2600 and NES titles, a lot of them could be considered part of genres that didn't really exist prior to that point. There were just "styles" (It happened again with 3D, but maybe not as profound). People modified concepts to suit what they wanted in a game ... now it's sort of like, oh, because this is a hack and slash game, it needs to have X, Y, and Z and games that stray from genre definitions are classified as "strange".

The same thing happened in film, for the most part. It's those movies that defy genre-categorization that are the real gems.

[BoringSupreez]

I think "inspiration" would be a better word to describe the problem than "influences."

[GigaPepsiMan]

Actually General_Norris has got me thinking, when it comes to inspiration and influence, people only look at the stuff they though was good, of course they would, they want to make something good so they look at things that are considered good, there are very few people out there who do things the other way round and look at bad things for inspiration and influence.

If anything the latter method is better because you are looking at something that didn't work, you are breaking down and finding out why it didn't work and then you turn it into the piece of greatness that you thought it should have been.

With say Final Fantasy 7 the issue is people just want to use it for ideas, there are some great things in final fantasy 7 but there is also a lot of bad ideas which either get ignored or also used because to the person making it is all good because it is Final Fantasy 7.

i think also we are looking at an industry where most of the people who go into it are going in with the intention to be a video game designer, peter molyneux for example pretty much stumbled into the business by accident and then he had a go at making a game and ended up making populous which became a smash hit, at least I think that is how the story goes, either way he wasn't the typical video game fan or computer geek, this could be why his ideas always come off as being a bit off the wall or strange, either way a lot of what he does seems to be of his own creation and though process, this may explain why he gets so excited over his work.

I'm probably rambling a bit but it does get me thinking, a lot of games now seem to be marked on the merit of "if you liked x you'll like y" or "x was good, y was either better".
Lets say for the first example X is Devil May Cry and Y is bayonetta, though people don't say it like that you know it is what they are doing, it is hard to deny that super mario 64 is the bar that all 3D platformers are judged on.