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[baconman]

  "And then, it hit me."

[moonkid]

Like any craft/aftform, you can make something familiar to people with just slight tweaks or improvements, and have some amount of confidence that they will respond positively to the tried-and-true formula. If it's too much the same, they'll likely be bored, but if it's too different, the odds are you'll make some missteps.

Really innovative games are great wayys to try out new ideas, but only a rare talent can pull these things off first go. Usually you will need to take what works and refine it over and over before you achieve a polished gem of an experience.

Be safe or take risks (or some amount of each), according to what you feel works for you.

[Paul Eres]

i think people are "wired" to dislike things that are too different or too unrecognizable. so making something too different isn't a great way to get a lot of attention (even if you do, it'll mostly be negative attention). if the number of people who play your game is what matters to you, just make games that they're used to playing, and change a few minor things that you think would make such a game better than other games of its type.

there's no reason you can't do both, though. make short experimental games and make traditional games. i've done both in the past, and both can be rewarding in different ways.

the audience for each is different, too. if you make an experimental game you'll get a completely different audience than if you make a traditional game. the people who play jason rohrer's games largely aren't the people who play konjak's games. there's some overlap but probably not that much. as others have said, it's up to you. if you're the kind of person who enjoys playing traditional games, make those; if you enjoy playing experimental games, make those.

[Muz]

Just make what ever you're motivated to make.

While a good approach in most cases, I think this is a poor approach if you find yourself too innovative. In some cases, you're motivated to try and make something too creative, and you're the only one who understands it.

I think I tried to be a little too innovative with my game, Chaos Wave. It had a lot of new ideas which I loved: new controls, new damage mechanics, new "level up" system, different timing... but 95% of the people who played it, even the pretentious ones didn't "get it". That other 5% somewhat saw a bit too much into the game and were baffled when I admitted that the game sucked.

Chris Crawford probably provides my favorite answer to this question - Limit yourself to one major innovation per game.

It's not really that people don't like things that are different. I think people enjoy them, but don't like the hassle of learning a different style when they're just taking 5 mins to give the game a chance. I think you just have to make your innovation intuitive. World of Goo does a good job at this.

[Stwelin]

Just make what ever you're motivated to make.

While a good approach in most cases, I think this is a poor approach if you find yourself too innovative. In some cases, you're motivated to try and make something too creative, and you're the only one who understands it.

I agree with the statement that "if you're explaining, you're losing" (which I found through reading one of Arne's awesome design documents.)

So don't try to make an innovative game that perhaps only you understand, and then attempt to explain it to the player in order to make them like it. Just make it.

Yes, most people might be turned off by unfamiliar controls, a different gameplay style than they're used to, or some strange sort of narrative technique. However, there will be some people who absolutely love it.
Noctis is a very interesting an "different" game. I am not one of the people who could spend hours playing it. I find the controls unintuitive and the gameplay lacking (if it would be classified as a game rather than a simulator) but the thing that really intrigues me is the feeling of the game. It has a certain style and charm to it. This is why I like it. This is also why it is an inspiration for many concepts I have come up with for some unfinished games sitting on my hard drive.

The point I am trying to make is: it is sometimes good to put your own understanding of your game first. Make a game that most will call "unintuitive" so long as it feels right to you. If you are comfortable working with your own game, you can make it a better game. If you try to explain it, or try to make it more understandable to most gamers, something will be lost "in translation."

[The_Flying_Dove]

Just make what ever you're motivated to make.

Amen to that, brother. I don't find it wrong to work on traditional games. However, focusing solely on existing concepts, to me, would feel too boring. Paul Eres seems like he's found the right balance between traditional and innovative game design. That is why when I get into game design, I will probably work on simulators with existing concepts, but I may try to experiment with them as well. And I might even go into the field of creating games that focus on other systems of interaction, like conversing, to help push the games industry forward, beyond just violent actions. This is my dream.

[Vino]

Not having read most of the previous posts in the thread, this post may be redundant.

My philosophy which I picked up from conference talks and speaking with other professionals is:

* Do one thing.
* Do it well.

It's really the same as the old Linux mantra about avoiding bloat in applications. Don't make an application that does a billion things. Find one thing that your game can have fun with and iterate on that.

Portal is a great example. They took the concept of portals and did a bunch of stuff with that, but the game doesn't really complicated other than portals. There's nothing in the game that doesn't involve a portal somehow, everything else was stripped out. The team took the basic gameplay elements and iterated on them and built a game around them.

Another way I like to think of it is, innovate in one and only one area, and in every other area just copy other games. If you innovate too much at once, you alienate people, you cause yourself problems, you over-reach yourself. In the end it's better to have a game with one well polished unique and interesting gameplay mechanic than ten half-baked innovations that don't coalesce into a consistent experience. Your game will get done faster, it'll be easier to make, and it'll be more fun.

[The_Flying_Dove]

It's certainly true that every new idea must come from already existing ideas. When we link together old ideas in new ways, this helps us form innovative gameplay. That's how Chris Crawford put it, in his book Chris Crawford on Game Design. I find it a very difficult, if not impossible, undertaking to come up with an idea these days that fits into a entirely new genre. However, maybe if we found ways to make lots of nonviolent gameplay fun, then we could learn to make games virtually about anything (i.e. a boy and his dog, romance, family values, cooking, the news, etc.). Minimalism, in the sense that we remove the most unnecessary parts of game design, is perhaps the key to constructing experiences that are new and exciting to gamers.

[Muz]

I just watched Inception yesterday. That movie is extremely innovative. It tries to explain a lot of new concepts in a very short period of time and even makes up rules and laws of physics that people wouldn't be familiar with. I think at least a quarter of the movie was spent just trying to get the audience familiar with the concept. Aside from that, the movie stuffs in a lot of plot, plot twists, and action. It successfully pulls off all that cheesy stuff like foreshadowing and symbolism without sounding too pretentious.

It struck me as a good example of how far you could push innovative ideas and get people to understand them. The TVTropes article on it is a nice explanation how they pulled it off. Audience Surrogate is a very nice tool on explaining why and how things work without giving the player a lecture about it.

They also just kept it as simple as possible, introducing the concept of inception without trying to add more than they had to. A lot of games have trouble squeezing in so much content, so it's a good example to look to.

[Paint by Numbers]

One thing I loved about Inception is that they don't need to spend any time at all showing how different their world is. We never see the public, that is, anyone beyond the main team, their commissioner, and their subject. We never get any shots of what society is like. Yet we can still tell that dream-infiltrating is a well-known subject, but has not become a major part of daily life for most people. I really appreciated that they didn't have to stick in all sorts of establishing scenes to act as worldbuilding.

[hmm]

You know, I was thinking the same thing about Inception when I watched. How it's similar to a game in that it takes an idea, makes up some rules, and then plays out within those rules.

Jesse Schell highlights the importance of a strong theme in games. A theme can be very informative when making decisions about gameplay mechanics and aesthetics, and thinking hard about how best to implement that theme will usually result in a few innovative flourishes.

Rather than trying to innovate for innovation's sake, let innovative ideas arise from the design a laser focussed coherent experience.

[Vino]

Audience Surrogate is a very nice tool on explaining why and how things work without giving the player a lecture about it.

It's also a lame, overused one. So many games movies and books have audience surrogates, the neophyte who asks questions just for the sake of the audience, that when it happens it's obvious. There's better ways of doing this. In one of my games that didn't pan out I was going to have an audience surrogate character ask a question but instead of getting explained to, he gets given a PDA, with a snarky comment about how nobody has time to sit around and explain things to the newbie. Then everything in the world has data discs associated with it that the player could pick up to learn about things. Now the players who care about the story have a new disc-finding minigame and the other ones can just go around killing stuff.

[AMAZON]

honestly, you would have to get really really creative to use anything but an audience surrogate for a movie like this and even still it probably wouldn't work

[Vino]

For inception yeah I suppose. It's a pretty effective method of providing exposition, it's just so easy to spot by now.