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

Even today we have notable 1-person successes: Undertale was basically all Toby Fox, Stardew Valley was entirely Concerned Ape. Both games are on Playstation 4, Switch, and Xbox One, which is just completely wild from the perspective of someone who grew up making hobbyist games in the 80s and 90s. When was the last time you saw a movie made by someone with a cell phone and adobe premier playing in a major theater?

However, WoW example is exactly backwards:

> WoW nostalgia, monetarily leveraged through Activition Blizzard’s release of WoW Classic, feels (and is) a regressive moment for games (...)

WoW Classic didn't happen because of nostalgia. It happened because there has been a _huge_ community of people hosting the vanilla version (and the first expansion) of the game for quite a while now. It was simply acknowledging the fact that many players didn't like where the game went after its initial release plus one maybe two expansions.

WoW is a perfect example of a franchise that got butchered over the years. It lost what made it magical and didn't expand on the aspects that made it unique. It was a social game where you would find your grandma and your school buddy in the same virtual world, each playing in their own way.

People thought they wanted more shiny things, instant gratification, less dependence on other players and the social aspects of the game. So it turned into something generic and quite frankly ugly.

If you look at the history of the game, it already had all the things in place to make it the dull, money grabbing game that it is now. But at the same time it had elements, some accidental, some pushed by certain designers that barely made it, which were encouraging social interactions, small and large scale organizations and player driven stories.

I feel like AAA games _should_ look back and re-learn why their franchise even had success in the first place. Re-discover what made them _good_ and why players built a culture around them that wasn't just oriented around consumption.

Harvest Moon started that as far as I know, came out in 96/97, though it was more of an RPG with farming as the core gameplay loop rather than just a farming sim.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(video_game)

But certainly Harvest Moon has been a genre that's now entered the western mainstream much more, and took a while to 'take off' in the western markets with things like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing in recent years.

I think all the points here have value, I've definitely played some really good games recently including some that were mentioned above, but I definitely think there's a general risk averseness because AAA game studios are too big to experiment so a lot of games are rehashed sequels or incremental "improvements" (as in the movie industry or whatever's in the music charts).

I'd put some of the blame of this on the outcome bias, things are judged on whether the outcome was favourable (e.g. profit) not whether it was the right decision (e.g. let's try something different with novelty, but riskier).

As Julia Galef covers in one of her podcasts (will have to find the link), the exec that tries something risky might get a promotion if it succeeds and get sacked if it doesn't as opposed to getting promoted from suggesting something novel regardless of whether it worked. See also "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".

How many films that get critical reception now, got poor/indifferent reviews initially because they were just too experimental/novel for the time, e.g. Original Blade Runner. What will people think in 10, 20, 50 years about Marvel films.