Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

Why focus on AAA?

As in many domains, innovation is done through scrappy low-budget experiments and/or by newcomers that are willing to take risks to enter the industry.

Once new ideas get some market traction, they are considered safer bets to expand in scope and production value, or to remix with established ideas to add some spice.

This seems to me like a rather wise and healthy way to operate. And this cycle of innovation looks to be as productive as ever right now, with an especially high rate of experimentation from indies.

So the cost to produce an AAA game approaches those of bridges and skyscrapers. This pulls the lever towards conservatism and reuse.

On the other hand, we want novelty from culture. Something's gotta give.

So what about the cheaper end of the spectrum? Indie games? Single dev games? In my armchair theory, they drop the cost, lose the polish but gain freedom to innovate.

Did the economy kill that too? The alternative hypothesis is that the author is not looking hard enough.

A maybe related note: I think I saw a novel gimmick in a fixed shooter recently. An in-flight entertainment game had the player's ship only take damage from the top. The sides were immune and could "sweep" bullets to gain energy for power shots. (Or maybe this is an old trick and I'm an ignorant old fart?)

The post by Nicolas Vereeke quoted in the blog post is a dystopian jab at games, right? Not a serious attempt att describing something either gamers OR publishers would want?

From the last sentence, I think it's intended as showing what supposed "benefit" blockchains can bring to gaming. But up until then I honestly read it as a critique of centralization and consolidation in the industry (see: "Clash of Guilds") a and cautionary tale on what could potentially happen to the gaming landscape.

I don’t think the counter examples people are already posting here undermine the fact that these are some of the dominant forces in gaming. Every cultural medium behaves this way (if I wanted to bore everybody I would add “once it’s co-opted by capital”).

Ultimately all you can ask yourself is whether it’s still possible to have new and transformative experiences with games (or art or film or TV) and for the most part the answer is still yes. I was surprised the author pointed to what appears to be a pretty straight Robotron clone with vampires as an example of newness that was quickly absorbed into game design memetics. Perhaps that indicates that given a long enough timeframe things can be forgotten and rediscovered, instead of being constantly mined into oblivion.