TIGSource Forums

Hi,

I came across this article (http://"http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/28/ezra-pounds-types-of-writers/") the other day and thought the "6 types of writers" was interesting, and perhaps applicable to games/game designers.

In particular, the first three types:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

I feel there are some parallels with games. Often you have some niche unknown game that first coined a game mechanic or entire genre later used to masterful effect in another game. It also neatly highlights the benefits and pitfalls of creative stealing.

So, what examples are out there? Who, in your eyes, are the inventors who created entirely new ideas, the masters who brought everything together, and the diluters who copied (though we can probably ignore these guys).

Example: Metal Gear/Hideo Kojima (inventor of stealth), Splinter Cell (a masterful game), and a whole load of trash that followed.

Finally, should the 'indie' thing be all about free-wheeling inventiveness? Since we have the freedom to do the crazy stuff and potential to kick start something masterful?

Sid Meier and his Civilization, 3 of course.

fyi, Metal Gear was riffing on Castle Wolfenstein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein

Link to article isn't working. :P

Inventors: Dune II
Masters: Starcraft
The diluters: most real-time strategies with 3D graphics (I don't think the two mix very well)

 :whome:

If you want to use a framework like this, it might as well be the obvious:

1. Things made by people who cared about making something good
2. Everything else

Maybe it got something to do with art imitating itself, like Metroid imitated Aliens and many indie games imitated Metroid.
The thing is, that good game developers got their inspiration from books or movies, while bad developers got it from other games. Its problem with indie crowd: there are nothing really new, everyone is locked in pixelated limbo, in which they reference old games and popular indies with nothing really new.

I think this is a fairly silly assertion. How can anyone perfect a particular style of gameplay if they aren't inspired by games?

I think I should correct myself, you can be inspired by certain features from other games, like RPG Castlevanias were inspired by Metroid, but straight reference is bad. The problem is, instead of game design choices people copy more obvious things, like graphic style, controls or interface, so instead of perfecting Metroid exploration based gameplay, people just add free movement, save chambers and Chozo statues.

Heh. "Inventors" and "masters" maps well to the old marketing truism: be first or be best. Course, the problem with going for "best" is that there are usually studios with 20+ staff and multi-million dollar budgets chasing that particular rabbit.

Cobralad: You missed a tier. Many of the best developers draw inspiration from life and personal experience, not just second-hand from other cultural artefacts and certainly not just from other games.

So, if "best" is out of the question for independent developers, perhaps that leads naturally to the conclusion that "first" should be the focus for indie studios. Certainly, the best indie games for me tend to be those that do something different, whilst the best AAA games do a lot of (not necessarily original) things very well.

Inventor: Doom
Master: The Half-Life series
Diluter: brown WWII shooters

Yup. That said, there are many genres which aren't conventionally seen as commercially viable for big budget developers: platformers, arena shooters, visual novels, adventure games, shoot 'em ups, space games, 4X games, flying games, survival horror, complex simulation games, anything turn-based, etc. Small developers can absolutely carve out a niche picking one of these and executing them well - as with Amnesia, Jamestown, Dungeons of Dredmor, Legend of Grimrock and many others.

Personally, I would say that being "indie" is just about making what you want to make. The games that have made it big that were "indie" games weren't just well-designed, or "something new" but when you play them, you can feel the love they put into the game. Zelda definitely wasn't an indie game, but as one of the most coveted franchises of all time, the games that made it popular oozed with that feeling of love and creativity. The difference is that "indie" games have no limits other than knowledge. AAA titles have to follow a laundry list of rules, and be proven marketable. It's much harder to love a project when your original idea gets taken and torn to pieces by a board of investors, or a marketing team.

Basically, don't try to follow some rules, or a framework. Find a project that you want to share with the world, and pour yourself into it. If you try your best, you will be amazed what will come from the fruit of your labors.

I think Civilization was heavily influenced by the board game of the same name.

It's same as with anything else in life.

Disagree with the assessment. Inspiration always comes from somewhere. Nobody is an inventor. Inventors take inspiration from other small inventions.

The difference is how well you can sell that invention. An unknown invention may inspire a slightly known one.. the slightly known one may be iterated upon and create a really good design, which people consider an "Invention".

Like the iPhone - smartphones and touch screens existed long before it, but iPhone combined both. Samsung was already working on a touchphone at the same time. Or Friendster - networking is an ancient concept, and so were online photos and '6 degrees of separation'.

PhD candidates and academics are an excellent example of people who spend their whole lives inventing really difficult things that nobody sees. Then someone finds it, sees it as a solution to a problem they're thinking about, buys it, and becomes a millionaire overnight, while the 'true inventor' survives on royalties.


I thought it was influenced by Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire_(video_game)).

No one becomes a millionaire overnight. ... unless you include lotteries, inheritances, extreme circumstances.

oh fine, 'in a year' then, if you don't like hyperbole  :ninja:

Being original requires looking at what ISN'T there. It's about putting yourself into the void and leaving everything else out of it. To be original you must see yourself as the way point between everything that has already come.

That's still extreme, though I understand a little better. Even if you're a stealing asshole, you need someone to give you success, or large pieces of it (i.e. they earn it for you), or you need to earn it over a long time. A year is still crazy, even if you steal.

If you think of PhDs, you get guys who have some brilliant insight. Let's say someone takes this insight, finds a way to apply it to a market, martials the resources and support to create a product, does the research into how to create this product, then creates and delivers this product. The original insight is, though critical, a minor fraction of the entire process. Maybe it's 15%, and its development carries next to no risk.

I'm sure there are people who get unfair results for their efforts some times, but in-general, especially over a long time, the idea that an insight is as valuable to the beneficiary's results as you suggest is an underestimation of what it takes to build and deliver something. Though I admit there will always be exceptions.

ps. In my experiences in learning things from professors, then turning them into something that I think is commercially viable, the amount of work I need to do on top of what they give me is enormous. The amount that I do is so enormous that I can't even find a particular segment that is directly based on their work. Though I can certainly reference my ability to understand things to their influence. However, I can link the work of many companies and products to my ideas, but again, even the largest influence among them is minor relative to everything I have come up with.

The more money a company makes the more source it pulls from, in general. "Easy success" is a myth without crazy luck.

It's not really unlikely to make a million in a year, it's been done very often via buying and improving on someone else's design. But mostly with small products, which is why it's a good example. I once talked to a guy who made his first million from applying something from newspaper printing into toy manufacturing.

It's not stealing; it's just that some people are really good (and really obsessed) with specific ideas and lose the big picture of how to make good use of it. And it takes someone else to make use of that.

The way patents are designed means that the academics make money off it anyway, though not nearly as much as the people who discovered a use for the invention.



Lol, strongly disagree. If something came to you while you were in the void, chances are that it was subconsciously inspired by something else. But it's all about working away from the things that everyone knows and taking patterns people have never seen.

You just supported me with what you said. "it's all about working away from the things " and "taking patterns people have never seen ". lol
So in essence you have agreed :)

What I mean is the idea that this "guy" you know made the money that easily is a misconception. He probably spent a good deal of his life understanding business, people, a particular market/need etc. The Angry Birds guy made 52 casual games before Angry Birds. Business guys that capitalize on an idea often come from a steady history of understanding how to apply ideas. The concept that they were "doing nothing" then found "the secret ingredient" then applied the "secret trick" is often espoused but is rarely true.

Though I'm not saying that's what you were saying, it is just a common implication behind the phrase "overnight success." I may be picking.

I think we're saying the same thing. They're just people who have been looking around for a secret ingredient and found it in someone else's work.

Those 'inventor' types aren't exactly poor either, they're good at what they do and paid highly for it.


Nobody's really born a master.

There's the people who focus and specialize on one small thing and spend their lives perfecting it.

There's people who focus and specialize on one grand goal and spends his life gathering the parts to do it, normally taking a lot of them from different specialists.

There's people who are not at all motivated by what they're doing, but instead do it out of external motivation (money, fame, etc)...

.. some of those people slog through it and actually become good at it out of habit, but never understand why.

.. many of of them actually realize that what they're doing is fun and become 'late bloomers'.

.. some of those people chase one trend after the other, only later realizing that they were too late or that they couldn't get what people want.

.. the rest don't have passion and don't want to work, so they end up doing the easy boring monkey work on behalf of the people who love what they do. Then they complain about how the people doing hard work don't make any money.


And then, you've got the lucky one hit wonders, who were just monkeys at a typewriter and hit the right cheat code.

I wonder if games like Fallout were made this way.. I recall it wasn't very well planned, just a dungeon crawler in the FUTURE. And that the really high interaction that people loved was because they wanted to make something for whatever characters people made. It wasn't really a great design, but worked out ok in the end, and they built Fallout 2 on experience from the first.

Yeah, I figured. It's just an internet thing. I see a thing and just talk about whatever I associate into with it.

Well, like they say - working on the Fallout topic - invention is often an accident. The studio folded, so they weren't "on the nose." I read a design doc for character-work for Planescape: Torment, which is an excellent game btw, and I could tell that this was just a bunch of dudes bro-ing it.

I think they just really believed in that universe. They filled it with things they could relate to, and everything sort-of connected with everything else, and the mechanics - though not brilliant - fit in that world because they were all on the same page. Having a team that:
  a. Believes in their content.
  b. Communicates (with each other).
  c. Is honest about what works.
  d. Actually works (ie. does the work).
... can produce something pretty good, design insight or not.

Their successes seem like happy accidents, but they did the right things that were needed. Getting a skilled team together who can apply themselves to any topic for a long period of time is the accomplishment there.

Don't worry about the one-hit guys. True one-hit guys get their down-turn in the end.

That's a nice analysis btw.