Don't Be a Vidiot
What Computer Game Designers Can Learn From Non-Electronic Games
by Greg Costikyan
This is a speech I gave at the 1998 Game Developers Conference.
When you look at our industry, it's easy to get worried about the enormous number of dull, derivative titles, and the paucity of innovation in a field that was once known for originality and creativity. The best-seller lists are filled with licensed drivel--Barbie titles, games based on old mass-market boardgames. Developers produce shooters and real-time strategy games in enormous numbers, often finding it hard to articulate how their games differ from other games in the same genre because, fundamentally, they don't, much. Other sub-genres stagger on--graphic adventures, computer roleplaying games, flight sims--but innovation seems increasingly driven by technology rather than creativity in game design--as if a 3D graphic adventure is somehow qualitatively different from a 2D game.
For someone familiar with both software and games, this is a puzzling development. Software is an enormously plastic medium. You can do almost anything with software. If you can define it, you can develop it. And games are an enormously plastic medium, too; there is a staggering variety of games, an entire universe of weird and wonderful gaming styles.
There are those who claim that the consolidation of computer gaming into a handful of recognized sub-genres is merely indication of maturation of the industry, that we have now established the types of games people want to play, and that in future our task is to ring the changes, play with the tropes, explore the variations permissable within those established genres. I have a hard time believing that this is true. This field has only existed for twenty years. And the capabilities of the machines we work with grows by leaps and bounds, year in and year out. If an artistic form as old as the novel continues to see works of amazing creativity every year, then surely it is too soon so say that we have explored the basic configurations of the computer game.
The question is one worth thinking about, not only because we, as artists, wish to accomplish innovative and creative work; but also because the history of our industry shows that the games that succeed best, that spur enormous movement down the retail pipe, are often those that are truly novel. That was true of BALANCE OF POWER and SIM CITY and M.U.L.E. and TETRIS and DOOM and MYST and COMMAND & CONQUER; and it was true of DEER HUNTER, which for all its flaws as a game
qua game was still something we hadn't seen before, not a mere variant on the same-old same-old.
But if this is true, if the plasticity of software and the plasticity of the game mean truly novel products are possible, and if the market often rewards innovation, what is it that conspires to channel our efforts into reworking the same basic themes again and again? What is it about our industry that makes it so dull?
One factor is unquestionably the conservatism of publishers. If you're a producer for GT Interactive or EA or Eidos, say, and you green-light another COMMAND & CONQUER clone, and it doesn't sell, well, nobody can really say you failed. A lot of COMMAND & CONQUER clones get published. Some of them sell really well. Yours just didn't hit the nerve. You're not likely to get fired. If you green-light something truly offbeat and it fails, you must be a fool. What could you have been thinking? Your job is on the line. It's the old Hollywood cover-your-ass syndrome, and it's endemic in our field. Going with the flow, making the safe bet is easier.
Well, I'm not in a position to fund game development, so I can't do anything about the publishers' failure of imagination. But it occurs to me that computer game designers are at least partly at fault, too. Maybe it's true that the publishers are reluctant to fund novel notions; but I suspect that they aren't pitched many really creative concepts either.
Why not? Partly because of self-censorship by developers, who are unlikely to invest in a prototype if they know it won't get funded, and off-beat titles don't, often. But I suspect it's partly because most game developers just aren't aware of that entire universe of weird and wacky gaming styles I spoke about. Their own imaginations are constrained.
Tom Disch, a brilliant science fiction writer who has since gone on to a brilliant mainstream career, has a term for science fiction writers who have little understanding of any literature other than SF. He calls them "science fictionoids," and says that their lack of knowledge limits them to a handful of literary techniques, blinds them to the importance of character, and constrains their imagination. He insists that a writer who wishes to master his craft must read widely, in work from all eras, in and out of genre.
I think an analogous situation exists among computer game developers. If your sole experience of games derives from the arcade, the console, and the home PC--particularly if your sole experience derives from games published within the last five years--your imagination will be constrained. You will see only what exists in the here and now, and you will naturally be inclined to ring the changes on the apparently possible, rather than exploring more interesting alternatives. Your palette of techniques, your grasp of the possible, will be limited. You will be, if you will pardon the term, a "vidiot," a person whose sole understanding of games derives from video games.
If, on the other hand, you explore that weird and mutable thing we call "the game" in all its manifestations, you will see that the universe is large, that the range of technique is enormous, that this truly is a medium of great plasticity. You will have a bigger grab-bag of ideas to draw on, a wider range of ideas to steal, a broader set of shoulders on which to stand.
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