How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 74

How many games can we say that about today? Very few. Recent
examples probably include Katamari Damacy and Desktop Dungeons —
beyond that, I can't think of any games from the 2000s that were actually
games and were actually innovative with regard to their gameplay ( Por-
tal was innovative but it's a puzzle). Many are fooled into thinking games
like Swords & Sworcery or Bastion are innovative because they have an
interesting presentation. But that's all we've been getting: a continuous
flow of new presentations of the same ideas.
I know that no medium has ever had an environment in which ev-
eryone was innovating all of the time, and that's not even what I want.
The variants are good in that they are further exploration of what's pos-
sible with a given game. For instance, I do prefer Team Fortress 2 to
SpaceWar! . There should always be a balance, but in digital games we've
been out of balance for a long time. We need more innovation from the
ground up.
Video-Game Generations and
Other Developments
Those who study the history of digital games tend to divide the existing
history of games into generations. Indeed, console makers seem to all
want to create new hardware with a similar rhythm of somewhere be-
tween five and ten years each. This is probably entirely the result of two
things.
Gamers have always erroneously believed that higher levels of
technology equals better games.
Moore's Law dictates that computing power will double approxi-
mately every two years.
These two factors (combined with some cultural factors surrounding
video games) seem to have created a perfect storm for hardware manu-
facturers that has lasted nearly 40 years. Can it last forever? Already,
brick-and-mortar retail businesses are hurting with digital downloads
starting to change the way that people buy things. And some say Moore's
Law may be broken in the next ten or twenty years. Let's take a look at
the generations themselves and review what these individual eras meant
for digital gaming.
The Beginning (First Generation, 1972-1977)
Those of us in the digital-games industry are familiar with the refrain
“when new technology comes around, it's really going to change every-