This is the second part in a light-hearted series about no-brainer games and the inner moron. In the first part I talked about what moronism is, and started into a list of questions that you could be asking to vet your ideas, to see if you are in fact being a moron. This article continues that with four more, including a reference to elephants!
4. Is It Unrealistic?
If you've ever read the hilarious 27b/6, you might be familiar with the author’s email exchange with Simon Edhouse. Simon is a man who thinks he can invent a form of Twitter, which would be bigger than Twitter within a year, and people would pay to use it. The idea is clearly ridiculous because, as the Times is currently discovering, paid and widespread do not generally go together.
While Edhouse's idea is pretty fringe, unrealistic ideas are very common, and they often come in the form of a no-brainer. These ideas take some pre-existing game that already exists and infer a behaviour in that game that supposedly makes it compelling,. Then the moron proceeds to try and tack on a new way to make money from it.
Its foundation is the belief that users will just show up regardless. The problem is that the behaviour inference is wrong. It is usually uninformed, rationalised or even imaginary. Users are most commonly a lot less engaged with a brand or a game type than the moron assumes, and they are not usually so passionate that they will jump through hoops and fire to get there.
That kind of queuing-at-midnight engagement that we saw for the Starcraft 2 launch, for example, is earned over long years of over-delivery of content and service by Blizzard. It doesn't just happen.
Being risky in dreaming up exciting new game ideas should absolutely be encouraged, That is one of the ways that we get brilliance to emerge after all. Being unrealistic in a ‘It’s like Twitter, but you pay for it’ way, on the other hand, is just giving flight of fancy to no-brainers that have no chance of ever working.
5. Is It Confusing Elegance With Easy?
My friend once railed at me about a former manager who routinely confused the words easily and simply. As my friend would tell it, his manager always wanted to jump onto the newest trend or idea and stitch it into their current game because it seemed easy to him. He would say things like 'All you need to do is simply add four more elements to the screen, simply put some more explosion effects in, simply change the character physics to allow him to be blown off the ground, and simply alter the controls.'
Elegance is rarely easy.
No-brainer ideas often mistake the elegance of simplicity for ease-of-creation because they fail to take account of hidden factors. Hidden factors include such things as technical feasibility, misunderstood audience intent, misunderstood route to market, lack of coherence in the idea, or a misplaced belief in ease of adoption. There are usually hidden factors involved with every idea you can think of.
Game balance, such as Plants vs Zombies demonstrates, is a major hidden factor that takes a long time to get right. The easy mindset sees a basic real time strategy game in which the player is only manipulating a few objects, and asks ‘How hard can that be to replicate, but with Nazis? It’s a no-brainer!’.
The elegant mindset, on the other hand, realises just how many wrong turns and blind alleys it must have taken to come up with something so simple and beautiful. The inner moron doesn’t see that. Its mistake is failing to acknowledge just how much of a factor elegance really is, and so assumes it takes no time at all.
6. Is It A Four-Elephant Idea?
A lot of no-brainer ideas are like the elephants holding up the Discworld. They rely on several interdependent elements, and the idea relies on the harmony of all them to bring forth its genius. Four-Elephant ideas are kind of like Nuts and Gum, but instead of a combination of ideas that already exist, they are a combination of ideas that the moron thinks could easily coexist.
Four-Elephant ideas don't work because none of the dynamics (the elephants) underpinning the game are individually that interesting. This particular no-brainer is hoping that the combination of them will somehow yield a geometrically richer experience. It doesn’t.
The biggest game that I’ve worked on was The Movies for Lionhead. We were trying to create a game in which the player ran a movie studio, looked after movie stars, and also could create and direct their own short films.
It had lots of things that you could do, but why you would do them was very unclear. We even ended up including silver trails on any object that the player picked up in order to tell them where they were supposed to place them. The player didn't really know why he was supposed to do what he was doing, or how he could do it better, so he just sort of bimbled along.
We became convinced that the harmony of the three dynamics in the game would deliver a grander experience. Instead, each of them felt half-completed, or in conflict with the others, and the fantasy that each was trying to convey to prospective buyers just wasn’t that interesting.
And yet it was such a no-brainer idea: Be in the movies. Only what exactly is inherently interesting about running a studio lot and looking after whiny actors?
7. Are You Trying To Summon Techthulhu?
I wrote about Techthulhu recently, that being the belief shared by many game developers that the intrinsic constraints of games will one day be solved by adding further layers of technological sophistication. Often, a no-brainer idea is actually motivated by a member of the cult of Techthulhu.
Their idea is actually a dull game concept, or one that has been seen too many times before, and yet the moron intends to make into a market leader by simply adding tech. This strategy gets some coverage in the games media because it produces initially promising visuals that get journalists excited. But it then fails to deliver on the back end. It does not generate enough success to cover the exorbitant production costs, and so jobs are lost.
Trying to upstage incumbent games is not just a matter of rendering more polygons or making even better cut-scenes. Instead, it comes from identifying the itches that users of the incumbent have, and then scratching them in such a way that you over-deliver to their wants.
Summoning Techthulhu is usually a very expensive waste of time. It's just an excuse to get to play with new toys, but serving old games in new tech wrappers is still serving old games.
(This concludes part two. Watch out for the final post next week. If you like this, show your appreciation with a retweet!)
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