How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 81

to get looser and easier, a development that some began to call casual
friendly . This new direction was caused by (I might say, “allowed to hap-
pen because of �) a perfect storm of two important and powerful factors:
The promise of the fantasy simulator. Fantasy simulation meant
that we didn't need to fuss about details such as whether or not
the gameplay was interesting. Final Fantasy 's gameplay was ex-
cessively repetitive and heavy on grinding; that is, most decisions
were trivial. But we looked past that, because it wasn't about the
gameplay. It was about simulating a fantasy, and this type of soft-
ware became more and more common.
An expanding industry that needed to keep expanding. Some
would say an inherent problem (and certainly also an advantage)
of a capitalistic economic world is that you can't be satisfied with
the success of yesterday. Particularly in a market in which demand
was exploding and the future was uncertain, companies needed
to do better than they did last year, even if last year had been a
banner year for the company. The feeling was that if a company
rested on its laurels at all, the other guy was going to take over
and it would only be a matter of time before the company went
out of business.
Companies had to do everything in their power to stay alive. They
had all seen many great teams collapse in 1983, and they weren't going to
let that happen to them.
Of course, I personally wish that they had doubled down on their
game design efforts I remember saying in the mid-1990s that they were
focusing too much on technology and story and all of that, and that they
really just needed to focus on making fun games. So why didn't they?
Well, they had no idea what made a fun game in any kind of solid, useful
way. I myself didn't have any inkling about what it meant. If a company
like Nintendo or Sega sincerely had wanted to just focus on making bet-
ter games, what would that have meant? Hiring people who had made
successful games? Instituting company guidelines for game design?
What would those guidelines be based upon? What I'm getting at is that
in 1995, there were no fundamentals established for game design.
We haven't formulated these fundamentals today, either. If a com-
pany today wanted to focus on better game design, the best it could do
would be to hire people who seem good, based on whatever reasons seem
like good reasons. My hope is that my book, and hopefully other topics
like it, will help establish design guidelines, so that the Nintendo of the
21st generation can focus on game design if it chooses to.