Gamasutra Comments Of The Week: Originality, Social Story and Science

[This week's best comments from the Gamasutra community include a look at the forces that lead to the creation of derivative games, an analysis of story's role in social games and a takedown of yet another study of "gamers"] Our winning comment this week comes from Brent Orford, who responds to Treyarch's complaints about "contrarian" gamers stifling creativity with an in-depth look at what he thinks leads to a lack of innovation: Lets look at how we create games in the industry. First: I believe that middleware helps stiffle creativity. There's a reason AI and others haven't changed forever - we're all using the same products to meet our schedules! Don't get me wrong, middleware is great and some of it is really well written; so if you're looking for a productivity win to get your game out than it's a great help. If you're looking for uniqueness in your game than you can't use middleware for the unique areas. Assembling anything from off the shelf pieces is going to feel like it! Games loose their unique feel and end up like other games out there from how we put them together these days. Second: Oversaturation, product categories, and used game sales hurt future innovation. I hear all the time in the industry comparisons to other games. Oh, is the game you're working on like Fallout, or Mass Effect? It seems that everything is a clone of something before it these days... we're oversaturated. As game developers we just assembled the same 'game' (FPS, RTS, RPG, etc) out of the same off the shelf components bound together with some custom 'glue' code. It doesn't feel unique. We added our own art and put it on the shelf. But hey, congratulations! You've made a product that made it to the store! Then what happens. The first week to a month your game sells really well! Everybody likes fresh new stuff; maybe this one will be better than that crap that came out last month! Nope - it's the same, how disapointing for you Mr. Gamer... You paid full price expecting something groundbreaking and new but... you got the same old thing. You tell your friends that it's basically the same as the game they already have and game sales wind down. Maybe they'll pick up a used copy instead. Who gets the revenue for used games? Not the publishers/developers! It all goes to the store selling the used games. The way the industry markets games, and the way people buy and sell them implies that the games we make don't need to stand the test of time. They simply need to be like a new girlfriend. Fun for the first month... wishin you were with someone else after that.... For his comment (which continues in the original thread), Brent wins a totally original Bejeweled 3 mousepad, pictured above. Oooooh... Aaaaaah. Honorable Mentions Responding to a blog post on story in social games, commenter Alan Jack questions whether story, as its commonly understood for games, is really so important in social games: Does it really add that much fun? Farmville is infinitely more popular than Space Empires. "Story" in a game means a lot more than a solid pre-existing world and a well-written protagonist. The concept of interactive narrative is such that there's an element of story in all interactivity, however abstract that story might be. In something like Farmville, "story" is strong, but abstract. It exists mostly in the nature of the game - the story of the interaction is little more than "open, click, click, click, click, close". The compelling element isn't a grand character back-story, but the set of rewards, the context given to those clicks. So on the next level, it is "open, grow, grow, expand, share, grow, share, grow, share, grow, close". The final level of the story, wherein I acknowledge my character as a farmer building his own little world, is not what drives me to play. So when the user is learning the game mechanics, I would argue that the more important thing for them is to see the immediate benefits of their actions, not that they have a narrative drive to push them onward. As someone who wants to move into narrative-driven games design, its a strange dichotomy - I want to support story in games, but in most cases it is used superfluously. Playing off our Xbox Live Arcade Sales Analysis, commenter Benjamin Quintero asks why Microsoft doesn't do a better job promoting their digital back-catalog: Older titles simply need more exposure. This is made abundantly clear when any promotion appears to double or triple purchases of a game that has fallen off of the radar. As powerful as XBox Live is, it's falling behind when Steam is showing weekly deals, promotions that change daily, and a constant cycle of bundle sales. XBLA and XBLIG both suffer from the same neglect. I don't understand why they can't pay an engineer for 40 hours to add alternate queries; "top rated", "top selling", "picks of the day", "oldie but goodie", "greatest hits (top of all time)", "new releases", "what people are playing (based on leader boards)", "recent price drop", "recently updated", etc.. Unless someone forgot to put the raw numbers into a database, and they are parsing these by hand, in notepad, I am having trouble understanding the reason behind not having these alternate lists. Someone, enlighten me... Is it really just neglect, or conspiracy? I prefer the latter, it sounds more devious than plain stupidity. In a thread following our feature on redefining game narrative, commenter Breno Azevedo urges develops to hold their ground when pushing for alternatives to cut scenes: Interactivity is absolutely key. As both a producer and a lead designer I always think twice (or thrice!) before removing the control from the player, even if for a brief moment. Control suspension is barely tolerable for some action-relief (low intensity) or reward moments, that's when you can generally stick in the odd help hint or cut scene. It's kind of an on-going struggle to keep this right on larger productions though, where coders and some producers (God forbid, even an investor or marketing guy!) keep asking for more "cinema like" moments, claiming "it's cool". If that hasn't happened to you before, trust me, it will. Hint: don't take the bait. Stand firm and give them another code-related task. The game will thank you - twice :) Responding to a study that linked playing racing games to driving dangerously, commenter Prash Nelson-Smythe points out that correlation doesn't necessarily prove causation: This is an observational study based which cannot determine any direction of causality. The study basically says that one or more of the following three statements could be true: A. Playing games causes you to have more dangerous driving habits. B. Having dangerous driving habits causes you to play games. C. Some other unknown factor causes you to have more dangerous driving habits and to play games. Cognitive biases tend to make researchers thing that only A is true (i.e. the most likely causation based on intuition and prejudices). Unfortunately, this happens every day in "real" science too. At most, this allows us to generate hypotheses that must be tested before they can be considered as evidence of any statement involving cause and effect. Since this a self-reported survey, another possible conclusion to draw is that gamers are more honest. And finally, commenter Joshua King asks a poignant question about a sequel that received generally positive reviews: Could you say that two worlds two is two times better than two worlds?