Day Ninety-Six: Ctrl+C
Where do you get your ideas from? It's a common question to ask any designer or artist in an attempt to draw out their influences or highlight their originality. As far as games are concerned, though, should we really expect more of the former and less of the latter?
With games being the last of the large entertainment mediums to hit the streets, they've got something of a reputation for mainly cannibalising from another source: movies. Developers voraciously create games based on films, usually of the action or sci-fi genre, derivative plots structured around a playable framework.
But that's only one
part of the overall picture. Gaming also has a knack of copying itself.
If one successful idea makes it into market, a dozen more will follow
in its wake. Sniper rifles get made famous by Goldeneye, now every gun
title has one. Max Payne does slow-mo Bullet Time (that, too, obviosuly
copied from The Matrix movies), and everybody else wants to put that as
a feature on the back of their box. It's testament to the togetherness
of gaming as a one-for-all community that such idea-cribbing is so
prolific. Without now getting bogged down in the minutiae of copyright
law and what concepts a developer can or cannot take from another, I'd
assume such homages are encouraged for the betterment of gaming as a
whole. After all, it's not the plot and settings that (usually) get
copied, but the playable features: the over-the-shoulder camera from
RE4, the slideshow adventure format of Myst, or the shield recharge
system of Halo. If it's in one good game, it'll definitely be in
another one very soon.
Back to originality again. If narrative-based games take their influences for other media, it must be the abstract games that are truly unique. Games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids and Pong. Basically, those very early titles, influential in themselves, but beholden to no predecessor. OK, we could get into an argument as to whether they're based on any other worldy influences, however the fact is that those kinds of games are the origin of our genre, residing at the base of the huge gaming family tree.
With such a proliferation of features stemming from the
gaming's historical foundation and from other mediums, it's not much of
a push to say that there is nothing new under the sun as far as games
are concerned. Games don't directly influence other media, it only
works the other way. But that's a sweeping statement to make (where
does Dance Dance Revolution fit in here?), and besides, even if we were
to qualfy it, it doesn't matter: it's not about citing your sources but
about perfecting what you do with them. Ideas are only as good as how
they're executed. Done well and we don't care.
