Games, Technology, Innovation
The kinetic blogger Nicolas Nova netted a good one this morning on the tension between instrumental advances in technology (memory, media, speed..more programmer headroom) against creative and conceptual innovations in game design, play, mechanics from a webcast Raph Koster game through IBM called Moore's Wall: technology Advances and Online Game Design (gads, I love that title..Moore's Wall — good one.) Raph Koster posted the transcript and slides on his webcast — looking forward to getting to his book..it's in the holiday book pile.
The insight nugget is here:
Creativity is enhanced by limitations. Creativity, innovation, is largely about finding solutions within a known problem space. When the problem space starts growing too large, you can pretty much start throwing anything at the wall, and it’ll stick. And in a situation where we don’t have a particular problem to solve, it’s just human nature to fall back on known solutions. It’s just human nature to do what we have done before, only to try to do it nicer. And that fundamentally is the limitation of advances in technology as regards game design.
What does this mean? Given (practical) infinite resources, game designers will tend to come up with the same-old, same-old only with 1024 colors and reflection mapping, rather than a creative, innovative, fun solution within a world of hard constraints. Whatever the X-Box 360 racing game demo I saw at SIGGRAPH was, it was just a racing game with richer background textures and some thumping music. But..as far as game play? The racer cartridge I have for my N64 is as good.
Why do I blog this? There are about five or six genre games, just like there are five or six genre movie plots. Are video games the next cinema? I think this answers that question. Now, what is the future of gaming?