–matt

Matt, absolutely.

Was about to type the words ‘Looking Glass Studios’ and ‘Ion Storm Austin’, oopsy…butterfingers. Regardless, please don’t forget the modders out there. I tend to look to modders these days for something-analogous-to-punk bedsit innovation, or at least to give original content a longer shelf-life. And if these fine people didn’t think that their pet game was worthy then we’d get no mods. We’d have no Thief2X or Morrowind better bodies or what have you.

–matt

I had a much larger rant here, but decided to keep it to myself. I have way too many nasty things to say about the industry - from personal experience - that I would be here all night.

If we understood game design better, maybe there’d be some merit to the argument that having fun is enough to be valid. But game design is still largely defined by how the designer “feels”, and game design is rewarded almost exclusively on popularity. We actually know LESS about game design now than ten years ago, if that were possible, largely because simple popularity has outpaced intellectualism. There’s just too many unanswered questions and unchallenged theories to say that the game industry is doing it’s job. We can’t even tell if it could do its job better because we don’t know what “better” would entail.

So yeah, I think the industry needs to be taken to task for inbreeding and innovation, if for no other reason that keeping the debate alive is perhaps the only reason why games like Katamari Damacy are given a chance in the first place. As long as we worship innovation above all else, the industry will always keep a place for it somewhere. But the second we say “nah, we’ve got enough innovation” or “hey, this stuff is way too innovative”, the game industry will start to agree.

As for Guitar Hero, it’s a fine game. I’m just saying it is a fine game by virtue of plagiarism.

You can’t see something if you’re not looking for it, and boy is he not looking.

Further, you aren’t punished for innovation in “the games industry.” You may be punished for it in part of it, but the solution there seems obvious: Move to a different part of it. Three Rings or our company, for instance, are as much a part of the games industry as Blizzard. The latter, of course, has nearly infinitely more influence, but expecting innovation out of the mainstream is asking too much in any media format. The big players fulfill the needs of the masses and occasionally pull out something incredibly cool/innovative and massively successful (the Sims, for instance), and the smaller players innovate more frequently but perhaps in less impactful ways. (We pioneered an entire business model in the last 10 years, though few noticed until the Koreans took it up bigtime.)

Nobody earns being a curmudgeon. You either do something useful, or you’re just a crank with a good story in your past. I have no inherent objection to being a crank, but I do object to a crank that’s given a microphone to attack something I’m a part of.

The fact is, fun games continue to be made, and that is what matters as far as I’m concerned. And hey man, don’t rip on Guitar Hero lest I feel forced to lay the gauntlet down and challenge you!

–matt

The game industry IS inbred. I’ve been there. Creativity is definitely a distant characteristic of a majority of commercial games. And there really is only a handful of capable designers who can work in multiple genres, much less ones that can invent new ones - and the game industry is currently in state where getting more of these guys to the positions they need to be in is an impossible proposition. Truly, the best way to succeed in the game industry is to either not be in it, or to be Will Wright.

There is innovation happening in the industry, but almost without exception, it is happening in SPITE of the industry, not because of it. The industry could very easily be changed to support innovation and innovative designers, but instead you are punished for it. I won’t say there’s no innovation out there, or even that they has to be, but I will say that they could be more innovation and we’d be better off for it.

Crawford’s work on whatever the hell it’s called these days really is revolutionary and amazing - but from a structural level. It won’t produce decent games by itself because he’s working on something far lower level than you would need. The things he’s defining and discovering probably won’t be useful or common place within his lifetime - and even then, only after someone else has left a mark on it by bringing up a layer or two. It’s like he’s defining the transport layer of story and it is up to someone else to do the protocol and application layers. At least that was my impression a half dozen years ago when I was reading about it for the first time. He’s a crumudgeon, but he’s earned it my eyes.

Oh, and Guitar Hero is a near identical clone to a seven year old Japanese game called Guitar Freaks. I personally smack anybody who calls it innovative with a rolled up newspaper.

Also, it’s more than a little ironic that we’re talking about this shortly after Raph discussed how the UO team implemented a similar hand-crafted system into UO. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/

Crawford has been working on variations of Storytron for the past 15 years. One of them (Trust and Betrayal) was a published game. But yeah, he seems to believe that breaking down conversations into tokens is somehow revolutionary and groundbreaking.

So good to see you can still effortlessly mix unapologetic annoyance with cutting instinctive perception.