Game design is plagued by game designers with no influences

[Erik_Twice]

Holy crap, don't tell me my post got lost AGAIN.

I will do it again when I'm less angry

[dsheinem]

Holy crap, don't tell me my post got lost AGAIN.

I will do it again when I'm less angry

Your post recognized the futility of arguing with me and committed suicide! It was defending your honor!

[Erik_Twice]

Your posts recognized the futility of arguing with me and committed suicide! They were defending your honor!

Fixed

[Erik_Twice]

And note that it's not just about having influences or not, it's about being to abstract them and get the good out of it.

Can you give me some examples of what you mean, both in video games and other media?

Sure.

DISNEY. Disney is probably the most influential animation studio that ever existed. And they were good. Their movement, color and solid character design were unrivaled in the industry and still are. There's a lot of good stuff in Disney films, but there's also a lot of bad, and it outshines the good when it comes to influence.

Disney had great technical skills but it was wasted on soapy stories, corny gags and generic characters with little or no personality. Their poses repeat ad infinitum and Fantasia has the same "Oh. I'm sleepy" yawn repeated four times through the film!

I think this is a good example of Disney at it's BEST/WORST:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sea66z3B ... ure=relmfu

It's all very well done but it's all completely generic. The poses, the movement, the music, the concept of the nightmare sequence...Theres a lot of drama, something Disney was very good at tough.

Imitators of Disney don't copy the great design or underlying principles, they take the corny aspects, sad/happy duality of Disney. The songs, the annoying sidekicks, love stories...They are all results of copying the worst of Disney.

Example of Disney's BAD influence: Don Bluth's A troll in Central Park.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5lh-W9TLMg

The film has all the faults of Disney, but with none of the sincerity, twice the cornyness and not an ounce of their skill. The character designs Troll uses are terrible misunderstandings of Disney, which is surprising given that Don Bluth worked there!

This is because Don Bluth didn't think in the abstract. Instead of following the principles of animation, he copied the end result. He took the poses and character sheets but not the ideas. And Disney could have been corny but it was HIS cornyness and understood it well. Don Bluth didn't, he was just following what other people did, so he was stuck making copies forever.

Compare this to Warner Bros and their films. They started out by trying to copy Disney and failed. They didn't have the budget to do it. So they started cutting down to the core. Less characters on screen, less detailed backgrounds,more mundane topics. They had to work on their animation principles harder than anyone, because they relied more on them. Those limitations forced them to understand animation better and turned them into great artists.

Concerning videogames, Rad Racer is a good example of copying without abstracting:

1) The game lets you choose music, and it's good music. But why? It doesn't have the thematic ties OutRun has, so choosing your music is irrelevant.
2) The road goes up and down, but it's not tied to the level design. In OutRun going up or down ties into the scenary and layout of the level.
3) OutRun having traffic is no fluke, it's carefully designed by hand to create a more nuanced level design than in other driving games. In Rad Racer, traffic is based on an algorithm, with no importance being given to it. This makes the game frustrating, traffic gets in the way of the level design (Well, the little it has).
4) Remaining time gives you a lot of points in OutRun to encourage understanding the game. In Rad Racer it barely gives you points so understanding the game becomes irrelevant, the game is just about beating it. This was also not chance, rewarding players for understanding the game makes them have more fun with it.
5) Scenery is not just a trick to give the illusion of speed, the amount of signals or trees to the sides changes the difficulty radically. This is why Rad Racer is so unfairly hard, if you get a bit out of the road, a signal will knock you out.

All this stuff arises from an incomplete understanding of the game they were copying. They took everything at face value instead of trying to know why the guys at Sega did something.

In fact, I wouldn't say being innovative is important at all... Being evolutionary is great, but being bland and generic isn't. I simply do not want a rehash of old concepts.

I read this as a lot of contradiction, and as very counter to the points raised by the OP, so again some clarification or examples might help me see your point here.

Bland and generic uses no principles, it just copies. And since it copies and doesn't use principles, the end result is a pale copy of the original.

An evolutionary game can't exist without use of principles so the end result feels fresh and unique.

Some examples (Copy/Evolutionary)

Call of Duty/Team Fortress 2
Rad Racer/OutRun 2
Guitar Hero/Crackin'DJ
Star Wars Episode 1/Star Wars
Herman and Katnip (Tom & Jerry Clone)/Roadrunner cartoons

Maybe I am missing your point, but I've argued before and will continue to argue that there has probably never been more variety of games, gameplay mechanics, influences, etc. than there are right now.

I agree that there has never been more variety of games than we have right now. Now, variety of influences, I disagree, I find most games to be influenced by the same pop culture concepts. I don't see anyone saying they were influenced by life of their out-of-gaming hobbies, which is sad.

Are you essentially upset that trope-ridden genre games which foreground effects/graphics over creative ideas are the games that sell so well? This is historically true of pretty much every form of entertainment ever, so why wouldn't it be true for games?

I'm very much upset over it. And no, it's not something new, nor do I expect it to go away (if anything, I expect it to become far, far worse) but I would rather not have it happening in games or any other field


Hope that helps to explain my post a little better

[dsheinem]

*novel-length reply*

Cool, I get a much better sense of what you mean, and I agree with you for the most part about abstraction now (though even slightest criticism of Fantasia gets my dander up )...but I think I still disagree about "outside influences" though.

Take, for example, the list of games in that awards show I posted earlier. Even in that list of mainstream titles, there are a bunch of ideas/stroylines that are/were unique to those games at that time. I don't see an industry only returning to the standard military/sci-fi/fantasy wells for everything they do. If we open the list up to include the top indie games of the past decade, I think you'd see an even larger swath of the influences you are looking for. I guess for you it boils down to the persistence of certain tropes and the amount of redundancy in a high percentage of popular titles, but - again - that's true of all popular media. I don't see the problem, as just as the case with music or movies - I don't feel the need to consume the most popular songs/films if I don't want to. There are lots of options. I'd even argue that fresh ideas have done better in the games industry than they can in other entertainment industries...

[GSZX1337]

Some examples (Copy/Evolutionary)

Call of Duty/Team Fortress 2

What?

[Erik_Twice]

Some examples (Copy/Evolutionary)

Call of Duty/Team Fortress 2

What?

I do not mean that CoD and TF2 are similar or have the same games as inspiration, just that one is a copy and the other is evolutionary. TF2 is directly evolved from Quake, it's core principles are Quake but has a lot of wrinkles and tweaks that make the experience very different while Call of Duty is purely the Instakill core with some consolization.

[Ack]

But even in Call of Duty there has been innovation. Ok, not lately, but it has done it in the past.