magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
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Bi-tech.net has posted a column from indie developer Cliff Harris, called The Curse of Genre, discussing how genre limitations can remove surprise, personal style and innovation from games:
He goes on to cite some examples of the flaws in designing by genre:Early games were simplistic, horrid to look at and prone to crash without saving at the most annoying moments. Gamers my age often look back on those glory days with very rose-tinted glasses... BUT!
There is something I miss massively about the early days of gaming, and that's the element of surprise, wonder and innovation. These days we have established genres such as FPS, RPG, MMORPG—even Tactical Shooter and RTS. In some ways, this is great, you can tell a lot about how to play a game, and what you will like about it from the genre...But the problem is we have got so used to slotting games into genres we have all but forgotten how cool it was before they existed...
Back then, there literally were no conventions when it came to how to make a game. You picked your subject (Jet packs! Giant ants! Wizards!) and just designed whatever seemed fun. These days it seems the designers pick their genre before they even pick the theme. Right away, at line one, page one of the design document, they throw away 99 percent of the freedom that game designers had in the old days.
And some conclusions:Publishers will say "You should make a WW2 FPS with online stats tracking. Our statistics show this to be profitable," and that's the end of it. That's the first 99 pages of the design done already. Game design used to be about freedom and creativity. Now it's a matter of designing how long the build queues should be, or deciding just how many crates to have in a corridor. Game design has become safe, timid and predictable.
But let's not have a go at the poor game designers and pretend the gaming public aren't guilty of 'genre-boxing' too. And that includes me. I said earlier I don't like RPG games, and listed genres I like. How many of us turn the page of a review the minute we find it's not in our list of 'approved genres'?
More information.When you forget genres and just sit down and think "Let's make a cool game," without any pre-conceptions, then you stand a chance of making something really good. I remember back in my wannabe-rockstar days, I was a big fan of two bass players (Stuart Hamm and Billy Sheehan) who both had very showy and complicated playing styles. Stuart Hamm once said he'd deliberately avoided seeing how the other guy played because if he saw him it would lock him into doing things the same way, and prevent him working out his own style. I think he has a very good point.
I'm not suggesting game designers shouldn't play games, but we shouldn't be thinking purely in terms of existing approaches and genres when we sketch out ideas either.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
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