I admire innovative game design. It’s always fascinating to see new ideas for expressing things through gameplay, new ideas for things to be expressed through gameplay, new ideas for what sorts of play could even be considered a game. At the same time, innovative ideas are seldom what actually holds my interest as a creator: A weird new idea from out of nowhere might be fascinating for a week or two, but it has to be a really good one for one to feel passionate about sinking years of one’s life into. If I’m going to invest myself into something that much, it’s going to be because of some greater narrative or expressive idea, something that feels powerful, something more than a novelty – an emotional payload which the game mechanics serve primarily to deliver, rather than mechanics which attempt to necessarily be interesting in their own right.
Much of my perspective on this was shaped by a particular lecture by Jon Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness – I try not to listen to what he says much any more, for reasons that will become clear if one bothers to look any of it up, but I still admire Braid as a design and think frequently about the design lectures he gave in the years leading up to its release. He described game design as an open space: Existing games comprise the explored section of that space, and one could choose to make a game inside that well-understood design space and have some confidence that it would work well. However, one could also choose to work outside of that understood and explored space, to make something “innovative”, and to be thus uncertain whether or not it would actually make something good and interesting – but to also thereby work to expand the space, making it bigger and more interesting for future games.
Many people derided his subsequent games, in this light, as being essentially twists on Mario and on Myst, hardly innovative at all. I don’t really buy this as a criticism: If you’re going to innovate in a space and want to still make something interesting and satisfying to play, it’s wise to ground anything that isn’t the area you intend to innovate in in extremely well-understood game design tropes. This makes the game easier for both the designer and the player to approach and understand: There may be weird time travel puzzles, but they’re couched in a highly familiar format. Which then raises the question of why one wants to innovate in the first place. Is it a form of pure research, of having an idea and wanting to throw together a project to see if it works? Is it an attempt to invent a solution to a problem or to express a particular idea through mechanics? Or is it that you believe that some established game design mechanic is unfit for purpose, that there must be a better way to achieve the aims it is usually deployed towards? Any of these might be valuable and interesting, but it’s important to understand what one is trying to achieve – and to, perhaps, simplify the project outside of these ambitious aims, to tread well-trod ground on your way to your exciting new unexplored territory. Even if you wish to innovate, it helps to be grounded in the fundamentals.
Nevertheless, even as I broadly understood all this, I’ve felt some slight degree of shame that my own designs are, in their way, quite conservative. I don’t think innovating is necessarily so difficult or unrewarding that I’m scared to tackle it as much I I simply find it more interesting to use existing mechanics to express perhaps unusual ideas. What I’ve also come to realize, though, is how much fertile ground exists between well-understood game mechanics – and how much room for expression exists in that space. For instance, with the project I’m working on now, one can point to many Metroidvanias, many adventure games with dialogue trees and light puzzles, and many strange horror games – but very few games are interested in mixing these elements as mine does. While the overall design space is well-trodden, this specific intersection still feels strange and powerful and exciting for me – yet, given my experience playing games, I can state with a reasonable degree of confidence that this should all work together.
What’s often frustrating to me, looking at other games, is how often they don’t even bother to try to pull in suitable ideas from games outside their declared genre – often using clunkily adapted solutions from similar games rather than attempting to integrate one from a seemingly disparate source. Eventually, over time, ideas do cross-pollinate, but the way this happens is also frustrating to behold: Elements from other genres, combat and crafting and experience levels and skill trees and town-building, get pulled in bit-by-bit, not to achieve any real expressive goal, but simply to be features. Rather than seeking some elusive perfect combination of understood elements, some perfect recipe that highlights the ingredients, these are ground into a perfectly uniform and indistinct slurry.
I don’t like to be prescriptive, but the method for making something good has to include at some point at least an attempt to understand what it is you’re trying to achieve with it, and an assessment of whether what you’re doing is suitable to that purpose. Of course, I know that huge big-budget games have weird secondary concerns imposed on the designers from above, and I don’t want to blame those designers for things outside of their control, but it still inevitably frustrates and disappoints me. That said, if you are solo or on a small team and you aren’t interrogating your mechanics this way, fighting to understand what they express and how, then you’re doing your project a disservice. You must understand your aim and find the best tool at hand to achieve it – or, if there’s no suitable tool to be found, press yourself into service as an innovator, as thankless a job as that may be.