George Kokoris wrote an excellent post about the necessity of “personal inspiration” in game design, inspiration that needs to come from outside our own industry, he argues. He highlighted Dead Space: Extraction in this IGN interview with executive producer Steve Papoutsis as an example of what happens when a game is completely devoid of personal inspiration. Watch the interview.
George’s response:
“We have a variety of different mechanics that other games don’t have. We’ve got our zero-g, we’ve got branching paths, we’ve got camera control… And each weapon has an alternate fire mode, which a lot of other games don’t have.”
This is where the wheels started coming off for me. There is nothing in that sentence that helps me differentiate this product from any other 3D shooter. Plenty of games have those features, sometimes in exactly the same combination. But the unfortunate truth is that this really is what constitutes originality for a lot of developers. Extraction isn’t necessarily aiming all that high, so it may be an unfair judgment on my part, but I still feel it perfectly illustrates the limited scope of creativity in the game industry.
In a way, it’s unfair to judge the game and its dev team based on what the producer said in an IGN interview, since he’s basically been given a PR script to memorize.
On the other hand, as a PR person (whether he likes it or not, that is his role here), he hasn’t been given a very good script. One of the first things you learn in an intro marketing class is that you communicate benefits, not features. People don’t care that the car you’re trying to sell has built-in GPS with all this functionality, they care about the benefits of that feature: that they’ll never get lost. Or, in games, people don’t care that you’ve got 20 weapons and 10 maps in your multiplayer game, they care that they can play in diverse environments where no match will be the same as the last one.