How much do games really need to "innovate"?
By AURON570 16 Comments
Quote from the highly opinionated article above:
"Racing games have become increasingly realistic, FPS evolve to meet the demands of the online gaming community, sandbox games have become more complex and detailed, and even RPGs have changed significantly from their early days."
Firstly all game genres can be reduced to a few fundamental things that don't change from game to game. Racing games: you control a car, press buttons to speed up/slow down, try to place first or beat a time limit. FPS: point and shoot. Fighting: pick character(s) and fight other character(s). By that same token you can reduce all video games to a fundamental principle: player has controller, controller inputs make stuff happen on a display.
So really, how much do games have to "change"? If we accept video games as a form of art (which I do), we can ask the same question as "how much does a new piece of music have to change to make it new or interesting?" How about a new movie, new novel, new play, a new painting? Really what keeps video games interesting whether it is Fighting, Racing, FPS, RPG or any other genre you can think of, is that each new game reiterates on the same fundamental principle that all games are based on "player has controller, controller inputs make stuff happen on a display", and present things in a new interesting way. This is what makes games interesting. There's a reason people still listen to Beethoven, or read Shakespeare, and there's a reason why people keep playing video games.