There are giants below us. Apparently big ones because they are holding up Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier and other giants of the game industry. Those giants below them may not be game industry giants, as many of our current popular game developers did not necessarily grow up with games, but for the children of the digital revolutions we will be standing on top of the current heavy hitters in the game industry. But what does all this tower formation mean for the ones that are being continually stood upon? We may remember a few giants below us, maybe the bigger ones, but the others get lost in the abyss of innovation.
Should we care about this succession of innovation? Evolutionary science would state that we should not. The best of every set of giants is moved upwards, refined and grown by new giants into new ideas. But innovation is messy and unproductive, as Keith Sawyer would say in his book Group Genius, and it is easy to lose ideas as we begin to stand on each others shoulders. So what can we do to capture that line of succession and perhaps discover something that may have been left behind?
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I am quite impressed with the new series Unskippable found at The Escapist. It is literally Mystery Science Theater 3000 for games, even the actors’ voices sound the same.
A month ago I read an interesting article on Massively.com, which I read daily now, that covered the crafting system in Everquest 2. What is interesting about EQ2’s crafting system is that it is not just a “push button to make” system. There are random events that occur through out the building process and players have to counter-act those events, doing something similar to guitar hero. Basically throughout the crafting process random events pop up, like in the picture below, and you have to press a button, one of your Tradeskill Arts (a spell), to counter-act the event. If you do not counter the event then your item suffers and affects the two qualities of an item, the Durability and Power.
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After playing said “burn the rope game” an IGF Innovation Award nominee I’m utterly disappointed. Yeah we get it games can be abstracted to such a basic level that it is the equivalent to turning on a light. But in that case it can’t be considered a game, and an anti-game would have no interactivity at all so I don’t see that argument either.
What about the number of other games like “don’t shoot the puppy” or “press this button to win,” where are their nominations? As a flash animation or Youtube video this ‘game’ is fine but I’ve lost respect in the IGF.
