Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)
blog.kylekukshtel.com
blog.kylekukshtel.com
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.
The current range of variety in game design is genuinely mind-boggling. I used to be able to keep up with most things going on in games, now it's essentially impossible.
And I've probably missed some too - e.g. Total Warhammer / TW: Three Kingdoms might even fit into the RTS bucket.
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 video gaming I feel like they miss a huge entire category of games that are made by people who care deeply about them.
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).
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.
Can you explain what's innovative about Breath of the Wild? Open world RPGs aren't exactly a new concept. Their 598th copy of Pokemon isn't that groundbreaking either. Pokemon Go was, but that was more Ingress than Pokemon.
"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.
I wonder if this where the different perspective comes from. As a consumer I don't care very much if 95% of what the industry producers it's boring, not innovative or otherwise bad as long as there are enough games that fill my needs. Right now there is a unbelievable amount of games being released. As an adult with a job who has a variety of interests, I can't even play a fraction of the games I'm very interested in.
So in a long winded way I agree this is something that you'll care more about the more you care about the practice of game design itself.
Games without good visuals/design can sell, but there's not a ton of games out there with ugly/sloppy graphics that become hits (they do exist, sometimes it's kind of the point of the game).
So if you don't place a high priority on aesthetics, you're taking a risk in your game not finding an audience. And I'm saying this as someone who designs games with a mechanics-first mindset.
The board game industry is very aware of this, and very few publishers skimp on game aesthetics nowadays.
When there's hundreds of thousands of both great and aesthetically pleasing games out there people could be playing, why should they waste time playing a game that doesn't look good to them?
I think it depends on your tastes. Certain genres like arena shooter and rts have definitely declined.
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.
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 different they then need to come up with new ideas in a now much shorter time unless they take a break from game development in between.
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.
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.
- Minecraft was released in 2011 and revolutionized building in most games, as well as basically inspiring a whole "survival" genre (Ark, Rust, DayZ, etc.)
- H1Z1 was released in 2015 and that Battle Royale format has taken over most casual shooters
- Garry's mod (2006) inspired a whole new genre too
- An entire genre of simulators like Farming Simulator or whatever that would have been unthinkable 15/20 years ago (I have no idea what the provenance of that genre was)
It's very easy to miss revolutionary ideas in your own lifetime because you sometimes don't realize how revolutionary they are.
EDIT: A few other things have popped into my head:
- Dark Souls-esque has become a genre in itself, and it took a while to become main-stream
- rogue-like became a big idea for indie devs to cheaply produce a game in the 2000s
- A lot of the revolutionary stuff today is happening around being able to move what were single player games into multiplayer and you can see that in recent games like No Man's Sky, Sea of Thieves, FO76, etc. (some more successfully than others ;)
- It's also easy to forget that there's been a whole lot of phone game innovation going on, Angry Birds was only 2009
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.
Since when is it about "true art" though ? It's not like arthouse cinema make record profits compared to mainstream movies... most humans don't like it and prefer the simple fun of mainstream media.
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.
That used to be so much not the case that it was a surprise at first: the "gaming fad" died down until another generation of graphics came along and made things a little more complex, animated and detailed. Then it became the business model to bank on repeatedly surfing the technology curve, which eventually gave us AAA size productions. New platforms in different markets like portable systems and web games could reset the curve for a period, but this has been reduced to niche hardware ideas(headsets and hand-cranks). By now, everyone is saturated in games of some sort if they want to play them.
The consumptive packaging has also gradually broken down. While everyone still demands good, quality assets, playing the actual game isn't as highly treasured a thing since one can easily find a gameplay video and experience the surface assets that way. One is left with mostly stuff intrinsic to interactivity: well-crafted scenarios, the chaos of physics behaviors, the emotions of another human opponent or ally.
I think a good testament to this are Steam statistics. If you look at the top 15 games on SteamDB for example, the list is usually dominated by games where social interaction or PvP is key, e.g. battle royale, MOBAs, MMOs, etc.
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.
I've seeing the same things since year ~2000. I am tired of nostalgia, seeing the same things over and over again... The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.
While I enjoy Ron Gilbert doing Monkey Island again, and retro games, I still expect something more. And it's not coming.
I surely can see there are more modern topics like inclusion and the kind in most American movies and games, but I don't think it's enough for a change in the industry like the ones my father saw.
And Modern tech like deepfakes will only enforce nostalgia... Entertaiment industry is stealing my middle-age.
Early film (as soon as people realized that film != theatre, at least) was wildly experimental, because qualities of the medium were still largely unexplored. But after a while the rules became more and more codified, so that if you wanted to find something "new/more", you often had to look past the mainstream offering. Which, I mean, makes sense? As demand grows, a part of the industry will inevitably focus on the "tried and true" formulas. It allows them to play it safe and get more-or-less predictable returns on their investment.
(And about Ron/Monkey Island, actually he is being very clear he is not doing a retro game and he definitely wants to move the franchise forward. I surely hope so!)
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.
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.
Fighting games have this to the nth degree. Fighting games are split communities (really any game that is high skill ceiling) between those that have been playing seriously for years/decades and those who just play.
SF6 is coming out in 2023 and it will be "solved" within a month or two. Once top players get to a tournament and show strats, the entire meta evolves to the rest of the community.
Just like you cant get security through obscurity. A game can only fake depth when there isn't communication. The identification of top strategies is inevitable and rapid. But the experience of executing and being a top player is completely within the realm of design.
Devs want to fake depth, but players wont play fake games.
Also known as Powergaming, back in the day. Powergaming is probably unhealthy in the long run for large communities in games for many reasons, and with exceptions.
But unhealthy things can often be loads of fun in small doses!
The author may have been confused, because MW2 remaster was actually made. It was released in 2020 and contained only campaign.
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.
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.
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?
Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all. Just look at how ConcernedApe is described on Wikipedia:
>is an American video game developer, video game designer, artist, composer, and musician.
Imagine how difficult it would be to hire somebody who would be able to fulfill all of these roles at the same time and how much you would have to pay them. The 1-person successes are people who are on top of their game.
>Even today we have notable 1-person successes
And how many failures? How many people gave it everything they had and it went nowhere? Those failures have a cost too.
>When was the last time you saw a movie made by someone with a cell phone and adobe premier playing in a major theater?
But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap. Movies get a constant stream of new ideas from books that are written. Most of those books are failures too, but the barrier to entry there is much lower than making a game. You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.
You say these things like it isn't true of literally every creative endeavor including writing.
> But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap.
Many game developers of yesteryear took their inspiration from tabletop RPGs, board games, sports, and just regular real world activities that looked interesting. There are places to start other than diving in a making a game... and yet lots of people do, because it has a low barrier to entry.
> You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.
A strange thing to say considering how many games are incredibly linear stories with almost no gameplay whatsoever. Also strange considering how many books simply don't translate to film very well. Go on, write a screenplay for Gravity's Rainbow, I dare you.
But seriously, there are lots of ways to learn game design without ever touching electronics. Human beings have been designing all sorts of games since they've had enough free time to play games. A lot of those ideas can become video games.
In 2021, 11.7k games were released on steam. That's 30 games per day[1]. Cost of making games is too low.
[1] https://vginsights.com/insights/article/video-game-insights-...
Additionally, this "what happened to game design" is a refrain I've literally heard every year for 30+ years now. Here's the thing: if you have fun with a game, most of the time you want to keep playing that game. I just finished Mad Max (late to it!) and it was awesome, and I want to just keep playing it, but there is nothing else in there except finding the few % of places that I didn't completely explore before. But I'd kill to have a DLC for it or a Mad Max 2 that is just more of the same.
There is far, far more exploration and experimentation now than ever, and if you think otherwise, you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think many artists would find this fits quite well as a definition of an artist, in process if not in intent.
The RTS genre is a perfect counter-example because RTSes arguably peaked with Homeworld in 1999 and since then we have had nothing but sequels and re-treads of fundamentally the same concepts[1]. We went from a game that had fully three-dimensional battlefields and complex formations to, basically, rehashes of StarCraft/Warcraft with differing mixes of micro/macro. There have been a few[2] cool indie games, but the concepts they presented never gained traction in the mainstream.
With mobile gaming on the rise, the genre seems to be devolving to Clash Royale-likes.
[1] Honorable mentions for Company of Heroes (2006), which had a lot of cool ideas as well.
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.
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.
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
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?)
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.
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.
Over the years I personally did notice an ever-increasing amount of sequels, tie-ins, re-imaginings, re-releases and remakes. The indie boom brought some respite - with small, self-funded developers going against the grain and bringing some innovation and experimentation - while at the same time also launching a massive nostalgia wave. But that fresh wind didn't really break the general trend. For me, the article does add a new perspective to the topic, looking at it from some angles I personally haven't previously thought about. And I do like articles that make me think.
I'm not quite sure why so many responses in here are so strongly dismissive or even outright hostile to the article? As if people felt offended, and were trying to just brush it off...
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.
After staying mad at the triple A industry more than a decade, I am finally content. The Boomer shooters scene is thriving. There are countless actually good platformers and puzzles. It's crazy, really.
"2 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."
Aha. If you say so, buddy. Something tells me even the smallest real world hypermarket or big supermarket has more junk for sale than what's on steam/itch.io + consoles combined.
New ideas come faster -> the "good-old-days" come earlier.
I am not claiming that this is the primary cause, just a thought.
Note that not all innovation is positive. There has also been rapid progress on predatory monetization and optimized engagement via addictive design. This may push people to be nostalgic earlier in the same way.
At least indie devs have a way to make a living, but indie moviemakers have a much harder time finding funds and studios are increasingly less prone to experimentation. Either it's a sequel, or some data-driven decision pushes the same variant of the same action/horror movie.