FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Game Ideas from Other Games
A great many people who play computer games want to design them as well. When you play a lot of games, you develop a sense of how they work and what their good and bad points are. Playing games is a valuable experience for a game designer. It gives you insight and lets you compare and contrast the features of different games.
Sometimes new game ideas are motivated by a desire to improve an existing game. We think, "If I had designed this game, I would have...." To learn from other games, you have to pay attention as you play. Don't just play them for fun; look at them seriously and think about how they work. Take notes especially of things that you like or don't like and of features that seem to work particularly well or not well at all. How do resources flow into the game? How do they flow out? How much of your success comes from luck? How much from skill?
As creative people, our instinct is to devise totally new kinds of games that have never been seen before. Unfortunately, publishers want games that they are sure they can sell, and that usually means variations of existing games, perhaps with a new twist that can be used in marketing. This explains why we keep seeing sequels and thinly disguised copies of earlier games. As designers, we have to learn to balance the tension between our own desire to innovate and the publisher's need for the comfortably familiar. Leonardo da Vinci warned against persistent imitation, in his Treatise on Painting:
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the work of others as his standard; but if he will apply himself to learn from the objects of nature he will produce good results. This we see was the case with the painters who came after the Romans, for they continually imitated each other, and from age to age their art steadily declined.... It is safer to go directly to the works of nature than to those which have been imitated from her originals, with great deterioration and thereby to acquire a bad method, for he who has access to the fountain does not go to the water pot.
Deriving game ideas from other games tends to produce games that look or work alike. Studying other games is an excellent way to learn how they function, but if pursued exclusively, imitation produces similarity and, ultimately, mediocrity. The
greatest games break new ground. They're unlike anything seen on the store shelves before.
