Thinking Inside the Box

The word "innovation" gets thrown around a lot in the gaming community. "We want innovation," people will cry, "We want new experiences and fresh gameplay concepts!" And, contrasted with this, people will lament the procession of samey first-person shooters and motion-controlled minigame extravaganzas which flood today's marketplace. The assertion that innovation in dead in big-budget game development is, if hyperbolic, increasingly common even by industry analysts.

So what's the problem? Are the cries for innovation really falling on deaf ears? Is there really no way to get high-profile game developers out of this rut they're in? I say "No!" on both counts. The real problem here is that, for all the ranting and raving done on the subject, a lot of people don't seem to put much thought into what innovation actually is or, more importantly, how it comes about. If you ask me, the sameness of modern video games comes from the fact that modern game designers have too much freedom to do what they want as opposed to too little. Innovation comes about when you have restrictions to work around and sacrifices to make.

Imagine for a second that you had a magical pantry. (Just...just go with me, here.) In this pantry, you could get any kind of ingredient you wanted and thus make any kind of food imaginable. On the surface, you might believe that this would allow you to create new and innovative dishes every night, but think about it for a second. If you had access to every ingredient on Earth, why would you ever choose low-quality goods? Why would you ever bother with ingredients you don't like? If you hate eggplant, why would you use eggplant when you have so many other options you do like?

Now imagine a second magical pantry. This pantry also contains any ingredient imaginable, but only a few of them at a time. Every night the contents are randomized, so you might have a bunch of ingredients you like or you might not. And that, my friends, is when innovation really kicks in. One night you might have eggplant as your only available vegetable, so you'd have to really think about how to make it work. Maybe you could try cooking it a different way than normal or maybe you try covering it in a really rich sauce, but the fact that you're restricted in what you can use is forcing you to be creative.

Modern, big budget game designers are a lot like the first scenario. Between the massiveness of their budgets and the beefiness of modern hardware, they have all the resources they could possibly want when designing a game. And, as such, they just continue to make the same "comfort food" they like the best almost every time. Oh sure, some days they may feel a little adventurous and cook up something new, but they've no real reason to.

However, things weren't always like this. Going back to the NES, Super Nintendo and even Playstation eras, game design was more like the second scenario. Game designers had to fight against the upper limits of the hardware every time they created a game, and this forced them to think of innovative ways to do more with less. If you think back on all the old "classic" games, there wasn't a whole lot to them. In Super Mario Bros. you run, you jump, you duck and you occasionally find one of three power-ups. It's a simple but very elegant core of gameplay which the designers could iterate outward into a million different challenges, all pulling from the same relatively small set of tiles and enemies. The developers surmounted the limitations of the hardware by focusing on making core mechanics that were fun and versatile enough to stand the test of time.

Another example of innovation through limitations would be the first Silent Hill game. In many games of the Playstation and Nintendo 64 era, the problem of "draw distance" was tricky. The hardware being what it was, the system just couldn't render that big an area at once, so the player always had to deal with a sort of "fog" blocking their view of far-away objects. When faced with this, Silent Hill's developers made a brilliant move and turned a hardware limitation into a core of the game's atmosphere. In the haunted town of Silent Hill, the ever-present fog became a big part of gameplay, and the concern that a mutilated beast could come charging out of it at any moment kept the player on edge.

This process of "innovation through limitation" is also the reason you see so much creativity in small, independently-produced games. In the case of these indies, the limiting factor isn't the hardware, but rather the money. Indie start-ups only have so much money and time they can pour into a game, so they need to put a lot of thought into how to get the most bang for their meager buck. Just like in the old days, this means building an engaging (and usually unique) core to your gameplay which you can iterate out any number of ways. This is why you see indies taking advantage of things like procedurally-generated content and abstract or retro-stylization in their games. These elements which may be considered too strange or bland for big-budget studios are, like the eggplant, the ingredients with which indies are forced to work to get results.

"So that's a nice theory and all," you might be saying, "but I thought you said innovation isn't dead in big-budget studios. If just yelling at them to innovate won't work, what should we yell at them to do?" I'll admit it does sound pessimistic to say that the very freedoms game developers have is stifling their creativity, but I think that innovation through limitation can still drive the industry forward. It's all about following one simple rule...

DEMAND QUALITY!

Just think for a second how much the gaming community lets developers get away with. We have games that are glitched, to the point of unplayability, at launch and are only fixed by patches down the line. We have games where human character models get loaded onto birds, ragdoll physics bug out for no reason and...I don't even know....yet we don't seem to care. We don't complain about getting obviously-unfinished and untested games. We just let developers kinda do...whatever, and this is exactly the problem. As it is, a lot of modern games (particularly "open world" ones) feature a crushing amount of seemingly half-done content which feels like they just took every single idea the brainstorming room threw out and tried to cram it in there. The result tends to be a gigantic, schizophrenic mess that really illustrates the "Less is more" concept. Once upon a time, it was a lot easier to accept a game being buggy or feeling unfinished. The hardware was newer and the developers were smaller, some of them working with budgets no higher than the indies of today. But now, with the sheer amount of money and manpower going into AAA titles, there's no longer an excuse, and developers need to start being held more accountable for what they sell.

If we, as consumers, demanded games with actual polish to them it would once-again force developers to seriously consider what to put in and what to leave out. Developers would need to concentrate on having a core set of fun and engaging features (which are easier to playtest) rather than a zillion conflicting, stupid features which no testing team in the world could do justice.

Now that hardware has reached a point where just about anything is possible, it's up to us the audience to set the limitations which will drive the industry forward. Simply put, it's time for developers to once-again start thinking inside the box.