Response to Doug Church - Formal Abstract Design Tools

I thought this article was an interesting read. It really got me thinking about why designers insist on creating games which all seem so similar. There are so many first person shooters out there - Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Modern Warfare, Counter Strike etc ... so why if we have one do we need another? Sure they may change location, focus on a different war or even have a different guns but when you get down to it they are so similar is is only those little details that make one differ from another.

Maybe its the designers fault. So many young designers like to make the games they have played that the market has become over run with games that are just copies of previous hits. This was also a point that was suggested in the 'Dont be a Vidiot' article by Greg Costikyan. I agree with him to an extent, but i don't think that is the only issue. Perhaps so many ideas have been done its hard to find something new. I'm sure it is possible to create something exciting and fresh but i feel that games designers being given boundaries in what they can create by one thing only - publishers.

I studied Media studies at A Level and this is definitely a trend that runs through multiple industries. Like the movie industry, why when the world screams 'no more vampire movies!' do they insist in drowning us in them? The answer is an obvious one; money. A publishers priority is to make money so why take a risk? They know for a fact that a war game that has been published is doing great, they can just make something similar and do great too. So there instruct their team of designers to create a new war game similar to the latest craze, but give it better graphics or a new gun. And so they do.

So what is causing all this madness? I think we, the consumers, are to blame. I brought call of duty recently and i enjoyed it so much i brought the new medal of honor game too, just because it looked similar. Does that sound familiar? And that's the issue. This trend will continue until we say enough of this genre now! I wont buy it anymore i need somthing fresh, but really whats the chances of that happening? And so the trend will continue publishers will carry on making money and stop the designers doing what they do best, creating, inventing and designing.     

Reference:

Church, D., Gamasutra - Features - Formal Abstract Design Tools. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal%20abstract%20design%20tools.php