I have a game idea (already in progress by me) that uses quite a bit "taken from many other games" tecnique + "add a bit (much) more" to create a VERY interesting game. I hope I soon will be finished (about a year or so ) (I AM NOT GOING TO LAY OUT THE IDEA HERE) but I''ll say that there are infinite possibilities.

Does it matter that games are 100% original anymore? As long as the user has fun right? So lets see; take 5 of your favourite games and merge them together changing slight details. It''ll be like all 5 of those games together. Now that would be fun. Just because it hasn''t been thought of, doesn''t mean it doesn''t exist.

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Original post by aldisd
You''re on crack. My game ideas have never been done before.

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that''s a hasty decision I must say, unless you have played every single game ever released since 1980.

I had this grande ideas, I was like "omfg omfg this would rocks!" then I played Rise of Nations and I was like "wtf? they stole my ideas!"

Then I had another idea, then I saw my friend playing Interstate ''76 (a really old game!), and I saw my ideas there.

They are not exactly the same, but similar in some ways.

I think what this person was trying to say is that originality in games has been lacking lately... not necessarily trying to create a discussion about the theoretical possibility of infinity.

I think the more practical/scientific background of the people here is keeping you from stating the obvious. Everyone is right, the original post is a foolish assertion. But the easiest counter is that games and music are an art form. People have been saying about the many variations possible in music such as length, tempo, pitch, different instruments, etc. to refute that music has reached a limit. But that basically boils down to that these are art forms and only limited by how many ways our minds can mold sounds, and in the case of games, pictures and stories, into something different. People who think music is reaching limits because everything new just sounds like old stuff. That''s just because most musicians aren''t very good artists, or artists at all for that matter. They''ve just got some talent with an instrument and they just string together a few chords and words that fit into a genre of music they like. That''s not entirely a bad thing. There''s a lot of regurgitated music I like and it''s different enough to interest me. I can''t really pretend to know what I''m talking about when it comes to art, but this is my opinion on it.

"If there are only a finite set of notes, this obviously implies that there are a finite number of possible songs - experts guess that all the possible songs have already been written!"

The premise for your reasoning is incorrect. You see, though there are a finite number of notes, that is increased by the following:

* The order of notes
* The scale used
* The ocatve
* The length of individual notes
* accents or stresses on notes
* rhythm/pacing/silences
* Micronotes
* Timbre
* Etc...

Due to this and others (these are modifiers that even I, as one uneducated in Music, can determine... if we can pull a Music expert into this forum, they could probably produce a list a screen or two long of variables), Music is hardly finite. Though it is, in a literal sense, somewhat finite, it is only finite in the same terms that there are a finite number of molecules in the universe, or a finite number of nanoseconds since the beginning of time. Is there a finite number? Yes (unless you take into account analog values such as Microtones, in which case there *IS* an infinite amount), but the pursuit of Music would no doubt have had to have been the sole pursuit of every human on earth up to now, through now, and centuries into the future before we could have produced every possible arrangement of music.

Now, the fact of the matter is that things like Microtones, pacing, and so on make it so that the number actually is infinite, and even all of that theoretical effort would be in vain. Don''t discount Music so readily, there''s still endless untapped oceans of music. And as such, don''t discount writing (be it of books or video games) either. Though the basic plot may bear resemblences, there are infinately may to be had out there.

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Original post by NecroMage
Taken to the basics, everything in the world is made up of only three things (electrons, protons, neutrons) so everthing must be finite. Right? Taken to the even more basic level, everything is probably made up of one type of particle (some super-neutrino quarkon that hasn''t been discovered yet) so that means that there in fact are NO possiblities at all. Right?

It''s interesting how people are irrational.

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Your logic is awful. You''r ignoring position and the forces that act upon position... which, if position is at an infinite "resolution" provides an unlimited number of possibilities.


"Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall." - Grizwald

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but I'll say that there are infinite possibilities.

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AP: This is a precarious assertion; though in it can be true, it often isn't when people make it in regard to computer software. For example, you can model an infinite universe in a computer using a random number generator (such as rand()) as an input to a function that places matter, right? Well with most random number generators on computers, no you can't. That's because they have a cycle time. What they really do is spit out a convoluted stream of numbers that doesn't repeat itself for a long time, but it DOES repeat itself eventually. That means your universe would repeat too eventually. Now I can think of two ways you really could have infinite possibilities:

1) You could use an irational number as your random number generator and move through the digits of the number to generate new "random numbers." To seed it, you set a starting point. That is guaranteed to never repeat.

2) You could be including the interaction with a human being over time in your definition. Since there is no bound on how long the human could interact, nor anything forcing them to a particular pattern of behavior, there really would be infinite possibilities.


[edited by - bob_the_third on March 15, 2004 6:42:32 PM]

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Original post by grbrg
Could it be?

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No.

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Are there no more game ideas that have not already been done before?

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There are plenty of ideas that have not been done before. Just because you cannot think of them immediately doesn''t mean there aren''t any new ones. I guarantee that when the game industry first started, ideas for games were even harder to think of than now, because there was so little to base them on.

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Original post by alnite
Then I had another idea, then I saw my friend playing Interstate ''76 (a really old game!), and I saw my ideas there.

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Interstate ''76 isn''t a really old game. It came out in about 1997, I think.