Ideas are a thing, but like RivieraKid said, without work and research they're nothing. I think we can all make at least 4 or 5 games by day on paper...

teenagers are sadly most of the time far from the realities (look at the MMOs posts...)

I've noticed that usually anyone who has not made games before has bad ideas or those ideas are not enough to make a fun game. "A game with time manipulation would be awesome!!!" could get you Time Shift(boring shooter with a twist) or Braid(awesome^2). The objective is to make fun gameplay, not come up with crazy ideas. Most of the time Asteroids would be more fun to play than most teenager designed games.

Btw. I'm not trying to be elitist. I suck at designing games. Best ones I've made are direct rip offs of other games. I just think that you can't be born a great designer, you are learn to be one.

When it comes to gaming, it all somewhat comes down not to the initial idea for the game, but how the people are supposed to interact with it. Surely, there are plenty of great ideas for games, but it seems not everybody has an adequate vision of how that idea is going to work. People tend to overlook one important characteristic of a game: it's not a movie, it's an interactive form of entertainment.

The key to what defines a game as a game is interaction. If there isn't so much to do in a game, or if the tasks that the player must perform aren't particularly interesting, the game turns out to be boring despite what the underlying story is. On Tom Sloper's website, I've seen the line that ideas are a dime a dozen, and it boils down to just that. Everybody has at least once had a great idea of a game, but it's just that, a great idea, not a great game. There is a lot of detail in the theories of "funativity" and whatnot but there are no solid, fact-based proofs to support any ideas whatsoever. I mean, think about Tetris. The idea for the game is fairly simple, yet the game still exists today and is very prominent. But looking back at a game like say Heroes of Might and Magic III. Personally, I believe the game is excellent and I also play it today, but the sequel to it, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, was based around the same concept and yet didn't seem to generate as much enthusiasm (or at least I didn't like it). So there you have it :D That's what I think.

The best idea in the world is worthless without a competent implementation.

Conversely, an excellent implementation of even an uninspired idea can be worth quite a bit, though obviously not as much as an excellent idea executed excellently.

I'm reminded of this short and sweet article.

Of course execution can't be undervalued, but only the most naive teenagers and morons do that. Everyone gets the truth beat into them sooner or later.

What bothers me is how far this is taken to the opposite extreme. There's basically no value placed on ideas.

We have, for example, this whole genre where every story uses the same stock characters, races, classes, themes, like someone printed out a form and filled in the blanks. Names are created by throwing together random syllables and apostrophes and contorting the word "dragon".

This is called "fantasy", which the dictionary tells me is "unrestrained imagination". Classic.

Nothing got to me quite like that trade show a few months back. This lady comes out and talks about how exciting it is to come out with new IP and have new ideas and finally get to work on something that isn't a sequel.

Then she presents it, Gunstorm or Bulletshots or something, and it's intentionally as cliche and banal as one could possibly imagine, like they gathered a committee and sat them around a table and made it their mission and couldn't leave the room til they had regurgitated every shooter from the last five years onto one design doc.

They literally bought every shooter on DVD, ate them, digested for half an hour then threw up onto a sheet of paper labelled "Design Doc".

Will it sell? Probably, but so will slot machines and weed and I don't have to pretend to respect casinos and drug dealers.

Quote: Original post by JoeCooper
Of course execution can't be undervalued, but only the most naive teenagers and morons do that. Everyone gets the truth beat into them sooner or later.

What bothers me is how far this is taken to the opposite extreme. There's basically no value placed on ideas.

We have, for example, this whole genre where every story uses the same stock characters, races, classes, themes, like someone printed out a form and filled in the blanks. Names are created by throwing together random syllables and apostrophes and contorting the word "dragon".

This is called "fantasy", which the dictionary tells me is "unrestrained imagination". Classic.

Nothing got to me quite like that trade show a few months back. This lady comes out and talks about how exciting it is to come out with new IP and have new ideas and finally get to work on something that isn't a sequel.

Then she presents it, Gunstorm or Bulletshots or something, and it's intentionally as cliche and banal as one could possibly imagine, like they gathered a committee and sat them around a table and made it their mission and couldn't leave the room til they had regurgitated every shooter from the last five years onto one design doc.

They literally bought every shooter on DVD, ate them, digested for half an hour then threw up onto a sheet of paper labelled "Design Doc".

Will it sell? Probably, but so will slot machines and weed and I don't have to pretend to respect casinos and drug dealers.

Sounds like an awesome idea to me. Take all kinds of classic cliches and make something out of it. No need to force yourself to do something that is outrageous and never seen before. They are doing what they want to do. Being different for the sake of it is not that awesome.

Quote: Original post by JoeCooper
Neither is having the creative ambition of a sea sponge.

'Creative ambition' is not something that you pitch at publishers to fund your game. 'Creative ambition' doesn't even remotely imply a game that is fun. 'Creative ambition' doesn't generally imply a design that fits within the resources available to bring it to fruition.

Did the gameplay differences between Halo and Halo 2 fall within the realm of creative ambition? No. Did Halo 2 have solid multiplayer gameplay that millions of people enjoyed? Hell yes.

Very, very few games come out of nowhere with ingeniously delicious new mechanics that haven't been seen before. Braid, for all its acclaim, is just a 2d platformer with some gimmicky time manipulation abilities (that have been seen in other games) and some pretty art. What makes it brilliant is the execution.

What many people fail to realize is that while a seed core "idea" for a game can be spun out in an afternoon there are a million tiny details which involve ideas and solutions during implementation.

Your core idea is basically worthless when weighed against the implementation of a half million lines of interconnected ideas. I don't understand why people try to place so much emphasis on the initial direction when the system as a whole is, after-all, so much more than that.

Yes, it's important to have a compelling vision for the project, but the implementation itself is an entire world of interconnected logical puzzles spun out of pure thought. It is so much more rich, so much more detailed, so much more important than having a unique gimmick you're basing it all on.

As Vin Diesel once said, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration".

Indeed.

In my spare time I've wound up writing for some dude's online game. Filling out story text blurbs, item descriptions, etc.

The core idea was pulled out of our rears. All the work in making the idea useful is in the continual details. Every text blurb can characterize something about the setting.

Anyway, sorry about the rant earlier. Of course there's always a place for stuff like that, the off-the-shelf fashions, pop music, etc., and good craftsmanship can make it shine. Good craftsmanship is of course minimally necessary. It's OK to make a bog standard chair, as long as you can sit on it. I guess I forget sometimes how easily I bore.

i think an interesting example is Mount & Blade.

the combat in M&B is better with the mouse than any Wii game. Why?

The thought put into the control scheme of M&B was more important than the gimmick controller of the Wii.