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ThePope

Innovation in the video game industry

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Bonus round on Gametrailers.com

http://www.gametrailers.com/bonusround.php

First off I would like to say how much I enjoyed this video,

I love reading (watching) things that relate to the industry side of gaming.

Keep up the good work GT.

I would also

like to comment on Jason Rubin's thoughts on innovation or rather the lack

there of in the industry. If this came out 5 years ago, I would have to agree

with what he is saying. However, I think over the past several years

developers/publishers alike have re-realized so to speak about the benefit of

innovation and you can see this in games like Dead Rising, Bioshock, and Bully.

Even EA has some new games coming out (Crysis, Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium

Wars, Army of Two) that are not following the same tried and true formula,

because I believe they have realized how stagnant their games have gotten. I

also understand that sequels are the easy way out of risking the money on new

IPs. I think they do not give enough credit to sequels. Personally if they can

keep the story interesting and the action fun, I’m ok with seeing a Halo 10,

but I would like to see Bungie working on original IPs along the way.

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Wow that was a more interesting roundtable than I expected. Very cool.

I think Jason Rubin is still 100% on the money. Yes, there's plenty of gameplay innovation, but not a lot of conceptual innovation, by which I mean innovation is to be found inside well-known existing games but is rarely part of a unique brand new IP & gameplay proposition. While small digitally distributed games are really awesome and a godsend for the industry in terms of generating new talent and diversifying the medium, it's only one part of the puzzle. Because, as Rubin rightly points out, small games are unlikely to convert to new AAA franchises.

What's interesting is that a lot of lip service is being given by publishers to expanding the market and reaching out to new consumers. If that's truly what they want to achieve, they have to get a lot better at mixing and matching characters, brands, gameplay innovation and talent and then properly positioning them both from a marketing and creative perspective. I see a couple of games that were quite deliberately positioned (most obvious ones are Spore, Viva Pinata, Brain Training, maybe LEGO Star Wars, etc.) but it's not enough. Publishers are really driven by genres and brands ('new FPS for next fiscal quarter' and 'we need a new strategy brand, let's acquire strategy maker X'), but if you really want to create new pillars you have got to be able to step away from that mindset more often.

Overall I'm pretty positive about the state of the industry though. :shifty:

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When I look at the PC offer in stores, I get all depressed and conclude that, yes innovation in the industry is poor.... but when I look at what is done on consoles, I can't say that anymore : innovation is in good shape and there's a lot of it; only, PC users and western players need to see more of it.

It's only one part of the puzzle[...]small games are unlikely to convert to new AAA franchises.

Yep, but I think that what need to be realized is that because publishers are in it for he money - you can't blame them for that - the innovation will always take two steps : first, small games innovates because they have the structure and the guts to do so. Then big games spread the innovation to a larger group or promote the small team to bigger-little-less-innovative-yet-still innovate projects because, well, they have the money and the influence that allow them to do that. Innovation on big games must be a safe bet.

So I would advice the producers to leave the independant market and its power of innovation alone while keeping an eye on it to retrieve some brains and put them in the Big Game. I mean... I think the movie industry and the new hollywood in the 70's worked well because they followed this kind of scheme(Scorcese and Friedkin were in that situation if I'm not mistaken).

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I'd agree that the console business is on an upswing with regards to interesting content compared to even last year or the year before that, for me personally. I'm seeing a lot more things that I'm at least interested in, perhaps even to the degree where I'll purchase it, which can't be said for the PC where there's maybe three or four games coming out in the next year that I'd even consider.

What the PC industry has locked itself in to is exactly what they were drawing analogies to with the comic book industry. For me though, I think Capcom is going to plow ahead this coming console generation, under the sagely guidance of Keiji Inafune, because they seem to be trying much harder than most at bringing out new IP that they can build their business on.

I'd agree with Marek though, that there needs to be a much bigger selection of styles and characters to make the new IP relevant. Even Capcom, who I think are doing as much as possible correctly right now, is missing out quite a bit in that sector.

Anyway, that video is so much better than the usual stuff that ends up on GameTrailers it's not even funny. Very much looking forward to part 2.

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For some reason I missed this thread after I first replied. This topic always gets me ranting, so here we go!

Publishers are in it for the money. (As well they should!) And in order to make more money, publishers should more often innovate on the core premise of a game and not just the execution.

The industry has grown and everyone has gotten a lot more experienced, meaning the quality of the gameplay has gone up with leaps and bounds. There's small innovations everywhere. Even things like the timed-button-press reload in Gears of War, or the way cover works in that game -- it's not really "sweet jesus never seen that before!!" but it's very well put together and it makes that game unique. And besides gameplay innovation, there's a huge degree of polish everywhere. The production quality on average has never been this high.

But on the surface games are all extremely alike. There's problems with that. Most obviously, it makes it harder and harder to innovate and polish the details within a generic premise. You're just going to hit a creative ceiling eventually. And with a generic premise you're also less likely to capture and hold a unique audience, because there's so much games competing for the same market position.

So it's actually critical to find and hold new positions on the Big Grid Of Games. New combinations of themes, gameplay, target audience, etc. It doesn't have to be freakin' Spore. I think another great example is actually Bully. That game decreases risk for Take 2... it gets them a new IP, they knew in advance it would probably do well, but it's still a brand new proposition (a theme that hasn't really been done before, mixed with some solid gameplay). Dead Rising is another good one! Zombie game + mall + hundreds of zombies instead of just a few + you can use anything as a weapon = new formula.

If publishers gave more trust to their game designers and their creative directors (the latter is actually way more important), perhaps the industry would figure out how to create new properties that have a higher success ratio than licenses!!11 I've heard horror stories from several creative directors (about politics, crazy product approval, execs thinking they know about games, etc.) but I think in time it can be done. It's just going to cost a lot of money, and investment in talent for a company to get good enough at the process of consistently developing and marketing new IP, but if they do get to that level, the profits will be much higher. I agree that Capcom seems to be taking a few baby steps in that direction and they're reaping the rewards.

There are occasionally new AAA games with a unique core concept but they're extremely rare and still too conservative (not saying they should be weird or way out there, just some more calculated risks). I also sadly don't see any small games transitioning into significant AAA games. (That's actually kind of how Grand Theft Auto 3 got created, but I can't think of any good recent examples!)

BTW, I don't think the issue is individual talent (or needing indie devs for that). There's already more than enough super talented designers working at large companies that can pull original stuff off. The crux is recognition of such talent, and having some guys at the top that know what they're doing.

It would also be great if the retail side would lose its enormous influence on what gets made and what doesn't, but I think that's already gradually happening.

Maybe I should start a personal diary for this shit. :shifty:

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Maybe I should start a personal diary for this shit. :shifty:

don't you mean a "blog"?

blogity blogity blog!

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :clap::fart:

:getmecoat

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But a blog would be public! I should really have a personal game industry rant diary on my nightstand.

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Okay if someone is going to mention the film template as an example, I would like to believe we have had our 70's in terms of games: Where directors were allowed to have their reign over what was happening, ignoring their financial backers, without letting the fact that their product was going flop despite its aesthetic appeal.

I would like to think that we are just starting to emerge from our 80's version of the games industry, where puerile shit or block buster crap was the only stuff that got any kind of recognition. All the while, people who will become our Sam Raimis (Spiderman isn't a favourite of mine, but he's good at it ) and Peter Jacksons (see previous bracket about Spiderman and replace it with 'Lord of the Rings'), are making games like 'Alien Homnid', 'Future Tactics' and 'Psychonauts'.

In future (the equivalent of the nineties, not necessarily a good thing), hopefully these people will be able to influence potential blockbuster IPs with the same wit and vision.... Idealistically.

With the homogenisation of games, it is difficult to be entuasitic about console gaming until they find that sweet spot where developers can release shit, that is shit, but still cheap, and has a few inspirational moments that doesn't competely destroy the publisher in the process.

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People should stop comparing games with movies.

It's bad for the computer games business.

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People should stop comparing games with movies.

It's bad for the computer games business.

Do you mind developing that bit ?

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Do you mind developing that bit ?

Actually, yes, I do mind.

But...

First, games are not movies. Games are more than movies because they (should) contain interactivity. And there are more of those things. So on the product alone it's not really comparable.

On the production side of it it's also bad to compare it. As twmac already explained there are some similarities. I think this is because of the self fullflling prophecy. By moddeling the computer games industry onto the movie industry you are more or less forcing history to repeat itself. So unless you think that the way the movie industry has developed has been more or less perfect (e.g. the way to go) it's a bad thing to follow.

The computer game industry is large enough to create their own path. It's a known fact that improvement can only be achieved by either innovation or by perfecting the current process of the product. Since you are, pretty much, constantly developing new products (new games) you can only achieve improvement through innovation. And innovation means taking risks. But a majority of the suits don't have the insight of innovation (also a very small percentage of the future-suits take courses in innovation management).

The episodic content path is an example where you are not developing new products so on that field you can try to perfect the process. A good example of this is EA Sports with their yearly titles. The only thing they do is perfecting the process of creating a sports game. Ofcourse this is very boring for the consumers and it's only a matter of time before people are fed up with that.

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I agree with you for the most part.

"Imagine if cinema had never outgrown imitating stage theatre?

How would you feel as a creator in that industry, knowing that so much wonderful stuff could be done but isn't?" - Jean Paul Lebreton.

Film literally used to be modelled on pointing a camera at a stage. This made them uderstandable to a lot of people, but also tragically limited them. Apparently when jump cuts were first used, some people got up and walked out of cinemas in disgust because they didn't understand.

Games are clearly a medium in their own right (Though the label "game" is troubling when you get onto virtual worlds, etc.), but it's important that they borrow from other media.

The conventions of games so far built are pretty shallow and insulated from the rest of culture, so people's concept of a game is often equally shallow. Comics wandered around in the same wilderness for decades due to the superhero and horror cliches that early popular work relied on.

Games take every other form of media and remix it in a unique way, and in respect of that it doesn't make sense to not borrow from other forms. The Katamari games are a great example: I can explain them or show them to a non-gamer and they look incredulous because it doesn't fit anywhere near their concept of "Video game". When I add that Keita Takahashi was a sculptor before he was a game designer it makes a lot more sense to them.

That kind of cross fertilisation is maturation for the medium, but if it's not underpinned by gameplay or development of other unique aspects, then you're right: It's deeply harmful. Games have already borrowed far too much from film.

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Games are clearly a medium in their own right (Though the label "game" is troubling when you get onto virtual worlds, etc.), but it's important that they borrow from other media.

I think that maybe at some point in the far future, what is currently just "games" will have branched off in to "interactive experiences" and something that's still "games". Possibly. I have no real basis for this though, so don't press me on it. :shifty:

The conventions of games so far built are pretty shallow and insulated from the rest of culture, so people's concept of a game is often equally shallow. Comics wandered around in the same wilderness for decades due to the superhero and horror cliches that early popular work relied on.

The comic industry still makes it's money from that kind of work, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a damning thing to say about games or if that wasn't intended.

Also, I wouldn't say that games having their own conventions is something negative at all. If anything, it creates an strong identity for the whole product grouping. I think this statement sort of contradicts what I quoted in the first part of this post. Of course, if the general public in no way connects to the gaming conventions (which could possibly be argued both for and against) then maybe those conventions need to go or just be shifted.

Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. When you say that the conventions of games are shallow and insulated, do you mean in terms of gameplay mechanics, general gaming experience, story wise, visually or something completely different?

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I think that maybe at some point in the far future, what is currently just "games" will have branched off in to "interactive experiences" and something that's still "games". Possibly. I have no real basis for this though, so don't press me on it. :shifty:

Total Recall comes to mind :)

Or would that be the new form of movies ... hmm ...

but iirc some already coined the "interactive experiences" term for games.

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Elmuerte, I thought you were saying that applying the production processes of movies to video games would be harmful to games... that's why I asked for clarifications.

On a related note, I think that, right now, the most important area of improvement for video games is project managment. We know most of games are late, flawed, bugged, and not reaching their initial goals and that's something that, to me, is frightingely beginning to become a standard. I was talking with a software engineer who left the game industry 3 years ago for a more traditionnal field and he was telling me that risks and ressources were hardly managed in game development... and that he hoped project leaders would get some clues from movie creation, other soft dev scheme and even other industries methods to get it finally right.

I don't know if the situation has changed since then, but if it hasn't it makes some sense to expect Video game to learn from the lessons of other industry that hadn't the luxury to have some precursors, doesn't it ?

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On a related note, I think that, right now, the most important area of improvement for video games is project managment. We know most of games are late, flawed, bugged, and not reaching their initial goals and that's something that, to me, is frightingely beginning to become a standard. I was talking with a software engineer who left the game industry 3 years ago for a more traditionnal field and he was telling me that risks and ressources were hardly managed in game development... and that he hoped project leaders would get some clues from movie creation, other soft dev scheme and even other industries methods to get it finally right.

That problem isn't only in the game industry. Normal software development has some of the same and related problems (e.g. being late, flawed, bugged, and not reaching their initial goals).

OTOH I think there's a major difference, I see creating games more as a creative process that evolves during the first part of development. For that reason I think using an agile development process is the best approach for game creation. But not all of the principles in agile development can be properly executed for a game because they are way to complicated to implement (refering to things like unit testing).

Anyway, I do think a lot of game devs are unaware of certain product development principles and I think it's mostly because they simply never heard about them. Which is ofcourse a sad thing.

I don't think they should be looking at the movie industry for that, at least not alone. Since a computer game is mostly a piece of software they should look at how software development is done (for a part). But ofcourse the other principles (story stuff, sound stuff, ... stuff) should be "borrowed" from the other industries. But still, the game industry is large enough to have their own segment, and I find it hard to believe that nobody is actually looking into this stuff.

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So far, however, games have been changed pretty rapidly for an 'artistic medium', probably faster than preceding mediums. The high-score mentality that dominated the proverbial game development petri dish is essentially gone. Although there are defined trends, such as the FPS/action trend we inhabit now, these are constantly turning over. And the marketing and accounting departments of publishers are constantly following, tweaking, and paying attention to whatever new (and probably dismal) trend consumer purchases dictate.

Asking the industry's tastes to mature is like wishing instant education upon the game buying public. The bulk of gamemakers and publisher will always be sitting on the median line of public opinion, trying to catch as many dollars as they can. It's not possible for the whole industry to improve because it is not advantageous for the developers or the largest slice of gamers. Things are this way because most people want them to be.

Any idle thumb or like minded gamer can really only wait for the games that have a vision not tied to market forces. They've been mentioned all over the forums, I'm sure you have your own idea about what constitutes a successful game experience. If you take these high-achieving games alone as your sample population, gaming as means for creative expression is thriving...jump from Grim Fandango to Ico to Katamari: these games have all been produced within one decade by completely different people. Cloying market trends commandeered the bulk of the industry while these games were being produced, but they are still coming to the surface with the regularity of most other mediums.

I think it may be useless to hope for games based on real ideas to come along very often, even if somehow the industry could cater to a strictly highbrow market. Even a Tarkovsky or Kubrick can only manage a handful of great films in a lifetime, right?

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When you say that the conventions of games are shallow and insulated, do you mean in terms of gameplay mechanics, general gaming experience, story wise, visually or something completely different?

To a certain extent all of the above, but in no way did I mean to say that games having their own conventions is a bad thing; I think it's vital. Gameplay is more important than anything else. However, any conventions around that are just one of many possible takes on the medium.

There's a difference between mimicry and influence. Games need to take on things from other bits of culture and reform them according to the nature of games, not reform games in the nature of other media. Sorry if I didn't state that clearly enough. (Again, Katamari is a very good example: Very ludic, influenced way from leftfield. Implementation of "collecting" that is unlike any prior one).

Insularity lends itself to immaturity, and in that sense I think there is a parallel between games and comics. Actually, in comics it's pretty much just the big two publishers that make money off stereotypical comics, there's a whole lot else out there in terms of content. Take a comic shop in my hometown: 80% of their shelf space is taken by non-superhero type things people wouldn't generally expect from comics, and it sells. In spades, to the point where they have dubbed the customers for that "the real mainstream". Comics have had a whole lot of culture infused into them over the past few decades, but public awareness is taking longer to catch up.

Nintendo marketing in the 00's seems to be pitching the perfect follow up to Sony marketing in the 90's, which encourages me. The move towards crew based production and the willingness of publishers to support pre-production are also good.

But still, many games are shallow and insulated in every respect, churning out repetitive implementations of familiar concepts - it's not as bad as it was a few years ago though. Clearly, there's a hell of a lot of territory left to cover technically for games, but I think the same is true culturally too. Gears of War set to piano music just isn't cutting it. Manny is right though, it's a long, slow and painful process, and the things that actually push the possibility space outward come from the fringe rather than the mainstream.

Film now is like film in the 1940's, but it has a lot more artistic experience behind it, many more cultural influences, and a much bigger and more powerful toolset than it did back then. For the most part, that development was artistically driven rather than market driven.

(Edit: cut the length down a bit :fart:)

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Those last three posts made me lose track of what I was going to say...

I think some of the problems that game development has is that it is kind of like a painting.

A painting that has a frame and canvass made out of the most brittle fiber known to man. The vulnerability of these get worse with the prettier and more complex the painting gets...

Another random thought that was cohesive:

The industry is looking towards outsourcing more and more, as they realise that keeping a work force all year round just isn't feasible. This is definitely embracing the film set formula and in many ways could be very effective.

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The film set formula is some of the best industry news I've heard in ages. It just makes so much sense for games to follow similar models of production to other forms of media.

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