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

blog.kylekukshtel.com

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

#61

Post by kkukshtel »

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 know it sounds like I'm trying to hoist the majority of the complaints onto AAA, and I am, but like I mention in the article and have mentioned a few times on Twitter in other threads of the post, indies are susceptible to a lot of the same forces (if not more).

I really want to make it clear that my argument isn't "AAA BAD, INDIE GOOD", because that's far from the case. I even went back and added in some examples of indies eating each other towards similar ends, tracing the aping of Dorfromantik into two other games, and Vampire Survivors into 10 Minutes Till Dawn. There are still outliers for sure, but they are far from the norm. Also for as much as I love Disco Elysium (literally did a whole podcast series on it), it's far from "progressive" design and innovates more in the realm of tone / narrative. A lot of its appeal is that it is like older CRPGs.

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

#62

Post by BlargMcLarg »

account42 wrote: post #46
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

> Even indies suffer the latter. Not too many indies have a hit again when they create a game too different from their original hit. For indies a confounding factor is that the first game often has really been in development for the creator's entire life up to that point - not neccessarily literally but by amasssing creative ideas that they can then pour into that project. For the second game to be significantly diff…

I agree with the former, I don't agree with the latter. By nature of processes, experience and software, it is obviously far easier to push out the same thing, both in terms of time or in terms of cost. However, nothing indicates that indie developer needs to make a game in a shorter timeframe than before.

They could bring the money of their former success to the new project, allowing them to push out the game in a shorter timeframe simply by living off the profits or hiring others to help them develop. But this isn't a necessity.

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

#63

Post by kkukshtel »

dgb23 wrote: post #28
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…

Niche and indie video gaming is exciting these days. Just an example are strategy/survival/simulation mashups, like They are Billions, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Frostpunk. There are quite a bunch of innovative hardcore puzzle games out there. Fresh approaches to single player RPGs. Beautiful and varied click and point adventures. The list goes on. Whenever people complain about the dullness and cash grabbing of…

FWIW I'm an indie strategy game dev (https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/) and am well aware of the full scope of the space of games (used to also be a game journo, and actively do a games podcast where we play most everything https://www.badendpodcast.com).

I want to be clear that my post isn't trying to be a Gamer and complain about "mOnEy gRUbbIng pUBLisheRs!!!!!!" — it's trying to look at the economic reality of making games in 2022 and how that steers design towards conservative decisions. I'm not on some moral high horse about design (and also think that game design itself doesn't sell, sort of like a notable DP in film doesn't get butts in seats).

That said, an addendum to this post is that I do think strategy games are where some of the best design IS happening (with games from devs like 11bit and Klei, like you mentioned), and perhaps not incidentally I think a lot of the best design work is happening boardgames right now. Strategy is a weird genre because it enjoyed dominance in the early days of PC gaming, but with the limelight off of it I think it's forcing developers and publishers to get more creative about what they are making. For boardgames, the economics just make way more sense — things like GMT's P500 idea act as pre-validators for design + thematic pairings in a way you can't really do for videogames (and Kickstarter similarly).

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

#64

Post by karpierz »

scoutt wrote: post #21

My father (1951) went through Tandy's Dancing Demon through text adventure games, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, Doom and modern video games. He went from black and white mummies movies through Rambo to Matrix. I (1980) was raised with Lucas Arts games, and you know the rest. The gap between my father and me is huge. He saw the entire entertaiment industry transforming, from technology and from content points of view…

> The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.

You can also predict how most magic tricks will end: they'll make the dove reappear, they'll escape the water tank, they'll guess your card. It's the journey that's interesting, not the destination.

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

#65

Post by kkukshtel »

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 2c is that a focus on "meta" has had a profoundly bad effect on games. It's hard to see ways it could have gone differently with the introduction of the internet, but it's definitely a Bad thing. Another outcome of this is what I like to call "the professionalization of amateur play" — thousands of players watch top 0.1% players of their favorite game perform at an expert level and talk about things experts care about, and then amateur players parrot those things in their local communities (or reddit, etc.) as if they are truth or if they are actually applicable to their skill level. This also belies the fact that a meta can change organically without developer intervention, but once any pro player "cracks" the meta, players are too lazy to find counter strategies and will just wait for the next patch. It creates a negative feedback cycle that makes players less interested in engaging with a meta, while simultaneously forcing developers to develop a new meta.

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

#66

Post by camoufleur »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #41
Aerroon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Making games has a very low cost. In fact, a lot of successes in the beginning of the game industry were people coding up things in basic on an 8-bit micro in their bedroom. As someone who started hobbyist gamedev in the DOS era, I can assure you that games are easier to make, and with much higher level of sophistication, than they ever have been. Even today we have notable 1-person successes: Undertale was basically…

I think Bo Burnham's Inside would make an interesting comparison

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

#67

Post by kkukshtel »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #35

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-p…

Someone else mentioned this on Twitter, but in my experience with Roblox, its easy-to-use creation tools lend themselves more to making copycat, free versions of top games rather than introducing new genres. Aka a kid wants to play a battle royale but can't buy PUBG / Apex / Cod (and ESRB rating stuff), they will instead channel that desire to something the Roblox dev community will happily leverage.

What made things like the WC3 editor generative of new ideas was that there were clear limitations. And anyone who is "creative" by any stretch of the word can recgonize that creativity is most generative when prompted with limits.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/best-roblox-games

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

#68

Post by ajmurmann »

kryptiskt wrote: post #54
mattmanser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant more the "simulator" games like Train Driver Simulator, Truck Driver Simulator, etc. that only really took off in the last decade (AFAIK). 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.

The mundane simulator genre did exist in Germany way back in the 80s/90s, I remember a nice airline simulator I bought on a trip there (I'm from Sweden).

As a kid in the 80s I was obsessed with a C64 shareware game called Agricola. You owned a farm and could buy and sell farm land, forest and farm animals. Probably the most exciting part was that you could also race horses (or rather watch them race and place bets). Never thought about it before as a mundane farming simulator. And yet it mostly was a mundane farming spreadsheet.

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

#69

Post by dgb23 »

kkukshtel wrote: post #63
dgb23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niche and indie video gaming is exciting these days. Just an example are strategy/survival/simulation mashups, like They are Billions, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Frostpunk. There are quite a bunch of innovative hardcore puzzle games out there. Fresh approaches to single player RPGs. Beautiful and varied click and point adventures. The list goes on. Whenever people complain about the dullness and cash grabbing of…

FWIW I'm an indie strategy game dev ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/ ) and am well aware of the full scope of the space of games (used to also be a game journo, and actively do a games podcast where we play most everything https://www.badendpodcast.com ). I want to be clear that my post isn't trying to be a Gamer and complain about "mOnEy gRUbbIng pUBLisheRs!!!!!!" — it's trying to look at the eco…

I had a quick look at your game and it is the type of thing I'm interested in. Also I like the aesthetics of it. Thank you for sharing!

I also think it is perfectly OK to have strong opinions about games. It is incredibly subjective and a matter of taste and art.

For example strategy games are my "first love" so to speak, think old Maxis games, WC1/2, StarCraft, Myth, Creatures, Startopia, NetStorm, Caesar2, Alpha Centauri, Black and White to name a few that I played as a kid.

They must be incredibly hard to design, because they very much hinge on well structured feature complexity and balance. Games that don't do this part well turn me off. It's hard to find a good canonical example that isn't also to some degree minimalist like StarCraft. There the features were so extreme and orthogonal that the game almost balanced itself over decades, with minimal input from the devs.

Also most of the good stuff seems to come out of small studios. Modern AAA strategy games tend to follow fads, add superficial fluff, dumb down the gameplay and have terrible runtime performance. A game that does this really well is Factorio, it's so incredibly well designed and engineered that it allows you to build hugely complex systems out of very simple core components. And it just keeps running smoothly.

More than anything I love these types of games because they create their own little worlds with their own rules. They enable you to be both creative or scientific in figuring out what you can do and how you can do them in various ways. But I think there has to be some challenges to guide the player so to speak, meaning I quickly get bored with games that are entirely sandboxes with no failure modes or external pressure.

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

#70

Post by AlexandrB »

kkukshtel wrote: post #65
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 2c is that a focus on "meta" has had a profoundly bad effect on games. It's hard to see ways it could have gone differently with the introduction of the internet, but it's definitely a Bad thing. Another outcome of this is what I like to call "the professionalization of amateur play" — thousands of players watch top 0.1% players of their favorite game perform at an expert level and talk about things experts care a…

This was really apparent in Overwatch. Before the "role queue" players would often insist their teammates change characters to emulate the current professional "meta" composition even though at that level (bronze league or whatever the bottom in Overwatch is called) individual skill differences trump team composition by a wide margin. Very silly stuff, and made playing the game unpleasant.
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