Recently, it has been announced that the number of internet users just reached the one billion bar. In my book, this is a good proxy for the number of potential gamers. [1] In the early days of gaming, the most successful titles (Pac Man, Space Invaders) would reach half of the gaming base. More significantly, such games would become instant pop culture icons.
Today, the Playstation 2 has "only" sold 100 million units. Speaking of games per se, the most popular games today have definitely not infiltrated society as their glorious ancestors did: World of Warcraft may change the life of its gamers, but there are only 5 million of them - 0.5% of "our" billion. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, despite sales of around 15m, is not very well-known outside of the gaming world, even after the notorious "hot coffee" incident. Likewise, major sellers such as Resident Evil or Final Fantasy are not familiar names to people who have little interest in gaming - unless they remember the movies.
Indeed, games that shake the gaming world, then exceed it and become society phenomena are few and far between. I can think of Pac Man and Space Invaders, then Mario, to a lesser extent Zelda and Sonic, Tetris, and, closer to us, Tomb Raider and Pokmon.
There is an immense potential that is yet untapped. Publishers are aware that literally hundreds of millions are waiting for the Next Big Thing. Where will it come from? Well, there are basically two philosophies:
Some believe that the Next Big Thing can only be created through radical, disruptive change. That’s not irrational to believe that, given that most of the historical bergames were complete departures from what previously existed. However, the reverse is very untrue! Change, originality, innovation are not sufficient to turn a game into gold. If they are not in tune with what the audience needs, they will most likely harm the game rather than serve it! Black and White probably contains more gameplay innovations than, say, Pokmon Blue. But it only enjoyed a relative success, while Pokmon managed to resurrect the ailing Nintendo.
The other school favours Execution over Innovation and believes that the Next Big Thing will be a game that perfectly responds to the players needs - by analysing what they truly want, what works and what doesn’t, in other words, by understanding the more or less hidden rules and conventions that govern gaming. A game that perfectly respects this framework could be an instant "classic" - and arguably, Sonic or Tomb Raider are extremely well-thought, conceptually solid games, not wildly innovative random gameplay experiments.
Yet, the two approaches are not incompatible. An innovative game that doesn’t respect reasonable gaming conventions is implicitly rejecting a large number of players. And a game which is just plain old, plain old is, well, boring. What is the solution? Consistency is part of the answer. Rules are made to be broken, especially in this industry, but there should be a good reason for that. The other logical thing to do it to continuously survey, analyse, and, most important, question game rules: Some rules just exist because of tradition, and are harming rather than structuring their games (i.e. make games hard, make the player die often, and gives them the option to "continue" by spending a "credit", but only 3 times).
Well, scrutinizing and discussing game rules is definitely one of gamethink’s objective, so keep reading!