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

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

#31

Post by Aerroon »

sparsely wrote: post #27
izacus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even RTS got their Age of Empires remakes, Iron Harvest and is gearing up for a new Company of Heroes. And I've probably missed some too - e.g. Total Warhammer / TW: Three Kingdoms might even fit into the RTS bucket.

None of those are really adding anything new though - they'd definitely fall into the nostalgia/copy bucket.

I think Three Kingdoms and Warhammer were kind of new though. Having very powerful hero units does change how Total War plays quite a bit. Being set in fantasy is also interesting, because it allows for unit types you can't have in a more traditional Total War setting (flying stuff).

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

#32

Post by Aerroon »

Apocryphon wrote: post #4

As negative as the modern state of gaming development is now, makes me wonder if learning from past renaissance times (e.g. the '90s, particularly 1998) will bring any wisdom. For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indi…

>For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

I think the problem is the minimum cost of making games is too high. It's very difficult for a single person to make a movie, but there is a low cost alternative - writing books (and scripts). A book can translate pretty well into a movie, but there is no proper alternative for games. Maybe custom games in map editors of established games is the closest we can get, but even that tends to require a lot of skill using that specific map editor.

In Japan there are people who start out writing web novels. These are usually not the greatest quality (compared to published novels), but because anybody can just sit down and start writing there's a lot of them. Once in a while some of them become popular and end up getting adapted into manga, anime, even movies. This is (somewhat) happening or going to happen in the western world too. I don't think there's an equivalent path for that in games though.

The other problem is with players. Players expect most games to do too much. It's not like novels where you pick a novel read it once (for some hours) and never read it again. Players play some games for thousands and thousands of hours.

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

#34

Post by meheleventyone »

ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds o…

The author is an indie game dev so I'm pretty sure they're aware of the segment and whilst it doesn't mention indie games until the footnotes I think he intends the critique to extend to that space as well. At least that was my reading of the whole thing from the perspective of being a game developer myself. Although I also know the broader context from the discussions on gamedev twitter over the past week or so. The footnote:

"One thing I really don’t like about the general direction of “indie” games is that they seem more concerned with aesthetics. It’s often aesthetic progressivism mixed with design orthodoxy. A beautiful hand-drawn art style for a puzzle platformer less complicated than Mario."

This cultural stagnation is also pretty clear across pretty much the whole landscape from fashion to games. We're looping through the same few decades of nostalgia creating more of the same with small variations. IMO it's just a result of the commodification of creativity.

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

#35

Post by michaelbuckbee »

The author and a lot of other people in this thread seem wistful for the days where game design was a lot more weird and experimental and are pointing to the indie game scene but I have an alternate suggestion: try Roblox.

Roblox is (rightly considered) to be a gaming platform for young kids but its unique mix of:

- portable identities/avatars/friends

- easy to use dev tools

- platform distribution

- built in multi-player

Have made it a virtual riot of creativity and fun and odd mashups of things. Here's just a sampling of things I've seen my kids play.

- social potion making + adventuring (to get components for portions) + you drink the potion and are a giant

- social tower defense but it's also a platformer

- survival game / city builder where you build out a peninsula and islands in hexes but can also send out attacks on other players and sometimes you're attacked by sharks

- adoption game but with kidnapping as an emergent behavior

- 3D character brawler (ala Smash) but it's a circular island and it's centered around slapping. Each time you slap someone off your hand gets bigger until it's the size of your body and has lightning.

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

#36

Post by voldacar »

ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds o…

>I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games.

I think it depends on your tastes. Certain genres like arena shooter and rts have definitely declined.

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

#37

Post by Jataman606 »

Arrath wrote: post #2

From TFA: "...even just a week ago, Activision Blizzard announced a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game barely a decade old..." My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot. Still rather creatively bankrupt, but not a plain 'HD Remaster' of yore. Minor critique aside, I find myself agreeing with the general thrust of this article. As time goe…

> My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot

The author may have been confused, because MW2 remaster was actually made. It was released in 2020 and contained only campaign.

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

#38

Post by meheleventyone »

izacus wrote: post #29
sparsely wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are really adding anything new though - they'd definitely fall into the nostalgia/copy bucket.

If you're this reductive, then nothing in the world adds anything new and it's all nostalgia. With that attitude you'll never enjoy anything new - maybe, like OP, you're just old?

Being old isn't a bad thing it just means you've seen these things before and can critique them. Obviously if you missed the boat the first time round this all feels fresh and new. This is also why the past is mined because it's full of successful ideas that haven't been recently repeated and as a commercial strategy for producing commodity titles mining the past avoids a lot of the hard work.

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

#39

Post by BlargMcLarg »

ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds o…

>That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games.

Nintendo is falling into the same trap if you look hard enough, and mostly innovates for its series rather than the industry as a whole. Remakes or iterations are rampant among established developers due to the lower risks and relatively high earnings.

Even indies suffer the latter. Not too many indies have a hit again when they create a game too different from their original hit. The best option they have is to iterate incrementally, not change the formula in any wild way.

This isn't even a bad thing (iterate until you perfect the formula, spin-offs and minigames to test things), but it does show how established names have a humongous stranglehold on most of the market with relatively little effort put in, and pawn off the risks to indies who have no other choice but to innovate.

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

#40

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds o…

It’s like complaining that all movies are cookie cutter now, because you’re tired of Marvel superhero movies.
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