How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 90

Looking Back
As I stated earlier in the chapter, we've only recently entered this new
period in which there's actually a commercial demand for games. And
with all of these new platforms and possibilities, the potential has never
been greater—yet, year after year, it seems like we're sort of treading wa-
ter. Most digital games that are good almost seem like they were good by
accident. Developers are shooting in the dark.
Worse, we're now in a position where a large percentage of our games
are merely reskinned clones of one another. We have the RPG, the third-
person action game, the FPS, a few RTS games, the puzzle-platformers,
and games based on sports. That list makes up 90% of the new releases
in any given year. Worse, a system of check-box game design has been
bringing us closer and closer to all games being the same thing: a first-
or third-person action game with cover, health regeneration, quicktime
events, and RPG elements. Still worse, the modern gamer has come to
expect new games to be like Advent calendars: look in all of the windows,
consume the content, and then you're left with garbage to throw away.
So how did we get to where we are? Well, actually, we never really
changed . We are still mostly the same regarding games as we were thou-
sands of years ago, it's just that we're suddenly being asked to produce
hundreds of games each year (when we used to need maybe one new
game every hundred years!). We're throwing mechanisms against a wall
and hoping some of them stick. We're thinking up themes and building
systems that express those themes. In short, even if we're paid to design
games, we aren't thinking like game designers.
Game Shame and Immersion
First, we have to develop a serious respect for games. It's not surprising
that no one has a good understanding of what games are and how they
work, since they're considered frivolous activities only suited for chil-
dren. Video games are a joke in our culture.
For about six or seven years, I played drums in a band that played
covers of songs from famous video games. Our repertoire was made up
of the soundtracks from Super Mario Brothers , Mega Man , Castlevania ,
and Sonic the Hedgehog , just to name a few. And we would do shows—
most of which were for an audience of hardcore gamers, oftentimes at
gaming tournaments or other gaming events. And there was a recurring
theme to how people responded.
I should mention first that the reaction was positive—it's not that
people didn't like the way we played. The weird thing was that everyone