As a judge for the Independent Games Festival, I’d be the first in line to agree with Jeff Vogel, who suggests in an article for RPG Vault that the truly innovative games won’t be coming from the indie gamedev scene, but rather from the big corporations:
But truly innovative games? The sort you’re only going to see a few more times in your lifetime? Those will come from Electronic Arts.
I would agree with the point Jeff’s making, and I do enjoy the dash of realism that he’s attempting to throw on the indie fanboys. After reviewing hundreds of indie titles over the years in the IGF (as well as reviewing hundreds of non-indie titles for the AIAS), I would say I’ve seen equal numbers of innovative titles in each camp.
The deciding factors for both groups is risk. Innovation requires lots of risk, otherwise everyone would be doing it. And clearly, as Jeff points out, a big developer like EA as a much larger safety net for assuming risk than does a one title, shoe-string budget indie developer.
Of course, if one assumes that many indie titles are products of love rather than products of the market, it would seem to suggest innovation as being more likely. Unfortunately, game development is not quite to the point where it can be driven 100% by creative vision. It still requires an unnecessary amount of technical skill. That may be (or rather, should be) changing, though.
The problem is that companies like EA are not in the risk-taking business. Well, that’s not quite right… they’re in the healthy-risk-taking business, the calculated-risk-taking business, but not the going-out-on-a-limb-crazy-person-risk-taking business. That’s left to the indies — or to the lucky few well-funded creative visionaries in our industry like Will Wright.
Of course, for those indies that are developed as an extra-curricular activity (and many are), then that’s the real opportunity for innovation. Those indies have the benefit of stability (their day job’s paycheck) while at the same time having the option to be incredibly risky. I think this is where we’ll see the real innovation in the indie market.
Where do we find folks who are financially stable while still having plenty of time and desire to craft indie games? Look no further than your local college or university (or even high school!). Their bills are paid, their room and board is covered, and they’ve got plenty of free time (and a burning desire to do stuff differently than those that came before them purely out of spite). Huh… kinda the same place where most musical innovation comes from, and lots of cinematic innovation.
But I think the real innovation kicker will be when technology is a secondary aspect of game development. That’s not an original statement, by the way, so don’t bother quoting me on it. Digital artists and musicians basically don’t have to speak in terms of “innovation” anymore as a buzzword because they can essentially do as they please with their craft. It either works or it doesn’t, but there’s little risk (in time or resources) in doing something different than what’s already established.
In game development, since you have to tackle a stupid amount of technical hurdles, and process hurdles, and resource hurdles just to get a reasonable representation of your idea, innovation (which usually requires an incredible amount of iteration) becomes very costly. In fact, the more innovative something is the more costly the iteration becomes. For example, to iterate on an FPS is cheap because you’re making minor tweaks to balance gameplay. To iterate on some unknown, unestablished genre, you find yourself turning the ruleset upside-down one day, adding six layers of complexity the next, and tossing it all in the garbage at the end of the week because it’s simply not fun. That’s expensive. That’s really expensive if you’ve got 100 artists and programmers supporting your efforts.
Of course, the indie doesn’t have the 100 artists and programmers to worry about when they innovate… they’ve just got that telephone bill and house payment sitting in their inbox with no paycheck in sight. The reality is that the indie is simply burning the candle at the opposite end than the non-indie. While corporate devs may be burning cash to innovate, indies are delaying any potential of cash in order to innovate. And both are left in the undesirable position of the end results still not being fun on even the most superficial or basic levels.
Hence, the reason why indies (and non-indies) end up rehasing the same games over and over. We already know they’re fun. We already know what works about them and what doesn’t work. We’ve got great ideas of what we’d do different, and we’ve got great ideas of which aesthetics we’d like to change.
Ironically, the problem facing our industry right now is that the defining trait of our medium, interaction, is the most costly thing to innovate with. That’s because we’re simply piggybacking from other industries on how to innovate elsewhere: art, music, graphics techniques… they’ve all been innovated in previously, and the iterative loops for innovating in them is well-established (and thus inherently less risky). Interactivity, on the other hand, is new and unique to game development — the defining trait of game development — and thus, no one has come before us to prove out it’s necessary iterative loop.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. One thing academics are bringing to the table is the same thing their students bring to the table: someone who’s got a bit of stability and the opportunity to take risks. That’s what we pay them for (or rather, what the colleges/universities pay them for). The academics, in their incredibly self-concious way, are helping idenity how to best iterate on interactivity.