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

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 goes on I gravitate more and more to indie games and even self-published e-books rather than mass market publishers, as I find that they actually try new ideas and go somewhere fresh.

If we'll excuse some navel gazing:

I wonder, how much effect has what I'll call the "distillation of the meta" had on game design? By that, I mean the community driven effort in everything from Warcraft to Diablo/Paths of Eternity to yes Call of Duty or Tarkov, to find the utterly, mechanically superior approach and gravitate towards it? To the point that public test realm data or beta patches are immediately data mined and examined with a fine tooth comb.

Best-in-Slot lists, ideal ability rotations, skill guides, 'meta loadouts', and the like.

Sure, we've always had bulletin boards, strategy guides, and sites like GameFAQs. But as the popularity of gaming has grown, naturally so has the drive to play the game perfectly, or erk out any slight advantage possible.

I'm probably tiling at windmills, and much like film, the creative bankruptcy of late is entirely economically driven.

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 indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

Maybe it's because the death of AA studios means that there are fewer sub-blockbuster entities to create influence? Because there are way more games today so interest is diffused and gravitate naturally towards AAA attention sinks? Because on a technical level, gaming is so advanced that there is a push towards photorealistic simulation rather than the innovative abstraction that earlier period of gaming had? One's creativity is capped by the amount of effort and resources needs to go towards making sights and sounds of greater quality than Hollywood movies. Either way, maybe the medium and the industry is just at a stage where conventions calcify and it's harder to turn the ship.

Sorry, can we back up a bit here? I'm stuck on the bit where there is a world where that linkedin post isn't a parody of the absolute worst trends in game designs in the last decade made 100x worse and we're apparently in it? How in the hell do you say that in earnest?

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 or Disco Elysium that push what a game can be and how closer to true art the medium has come. I recently played some short, relaxing games like A Short Hike and Big Ocean, Wide Jacket that would have not been economically viable at all not that long ago. There are so many phenomenal indy games that nobody could possibly play them all and many of them have innovative concepts. I feel obligated to mention Babs Is You and Into the Breach. There are some studios that are not AAA but produce polished games like Supergiant with games like Hades and Pyre.

But yeah, some Call of Duty game and The Last of Us are getting a remake so it's all terrible now and innovation is gone.

It's been pretty widely circulated due to how hilariously tone-deaf it is.