Why originality fails in the marketplace
From the perspective of a game designer, people are stupid. Okay, that can be a perspective anyone can have, but the reason game designers have is that people aren’t buying the games they’re asking for.
Doesn’t make sense at all, does it? As a hardcore gamer (also casual when my Free Time Metertm is low), I’m deep into the gaming scene - forums, news feeds, modding, and so on. While in these trenches (actually they’re pretty comfy chairs) it’s obvious that originality is lacking and every gamer knows it. We want more original titles! But hey, don’t pay attention to the sales figures on that last Madden game or MMO expansion - we really don’t like endless franchises (pay no attention to that Final Fantasy XIII).
Yet every time an excellent original title comes out, it falls short of even the most conservative financial expectations. Okami, Rez and Psychonauts are just a few of the many original titles that hit huge critical acclaim but fell flat on store shelves. Why?
It seems there’s a pattern to all this. I’m probably wrong, but I wouldn’t know that until you said something (there’s a comment section for a reason eh). Anyway, it appears that each original yet unsuccessful title had a vague objective (or many diverse objectives) like attack monster in a variety of unfamiliar ways or explore this illogical realm and so on. On the other hand, all the successful titles were very clear - win football games or kill anything that moves or conquer bases by building your own and so on.
So could it be that the reason original games are failing in the market is because we don’t understand what they’re about in the 5 seconds we take to consider it? This isn’t too far fetched, considering the fact that the average American has the attention span of the average goldfish (goldfish are shiny). If we don’t understand something at a glance, well, forget about it. Literally.
But is this really surprising? We’re overloaded with massive amounts of information every hour, so in order to continue functioning well enough to do our jobs (studying or writing memos, whatever) we have to be damn good at filtering out the noise in the signal. There’s already a ton of stuff about the attention economy and whatnot, so this certainly isn’t new. What is new is how we’re coping with it all - we still haven’t quite figured that out yet. We’re still developing the necessary tools to get us back to pre-internet info loads.
So how do we design around this? In games, the way I would do it is to present a very clear objective, but while you’re playing the game, slowly introduce a new and (hopefully) interesting gameplay mechanic, without ever confusing the player about what the goal is. If you try to slap the player with a new concept from moment they look at the cover, forget about it. Alternatively, you could take the Katamari approach and have the only objective be so incredibly simple that it could be translated to the potential player in so few words or pictures.
This could also be applied to anything else really. You just have to make sure your design is a natural extension of what they already know in order to keep people’s attention - grabbing it is easy. Even better though, you could stick to simple designs. (But oh wait you have to have real talent to do that, so it’s an unlikely course of action for most designers, unfortunately.) There’s a lot of hubbub regarding simplicity in everyday designs (software, internet and other types of interfaces, other products or even architecture and so on) and how we should probably scale back the features to the point where the purpose of the object is pronounced so clearly that the user wouldn’t have to think twice about it. Because they won’t even if we want them to.