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[Unknown33]

I don't know what I am talking about, necessarily. As you were warned at the outset of A Christmas Carol that the Marley's were dead to begin with, you must remember this at all times, or what is to transpire hereafter will make little sense. I fear it may never make sense. But if you let it into your heart, you might just feel a little of what I feel. Which would be most groovy.

Have you ever eaten a new flavor of an old treat, only to discover that it was terrible? Remember that feeling of disappointment? Do you remember wondering how the people who made the original treat you love could also make something you hate? Keep that in your mind.

Novelty.

What does it mean? It doesn't mean quality. It doesn't mean improvement. It means, simply, different or new.

Some people thrive on different and new. Trends. Hot topics. The edge that is cutting. What am I talking about? I don't exactly know, but here's what I believe to be my point:

What if you took a very common game idea and did it very well, as opposed to inventing something new in hopes of discovering a new niche? A lot of indie games fall into one of two categories, in my opinion. What the heck is this even... or, oh I think I see what they are going for, I wonder why it doesn't work. There are other categories, obviously, but these two contain the multitudes.

I am no master ludologist or veteran developer, far from it, but it would seem to me that if a game genre can hardly be defined, it can most hardly be refined. That sounds smart, I'll keep it. If a game genre is well understood, then even though there is little room for novelty, it can still be done well to great effect and respected and appreciated by players.

I think it is more challenging to do something ordinary extraordinarily well than it is to do something completely new, and the payoff is more consistent for basic things done well than radical things that can't easily be categorized or quantified.

Other than the obvious, that everything was once novel, is there any reason in trying to break new ground when there's still plenty of room left on already broken ground to expand, and a seeming endless number of people ready to gobble stuff up as fast as it can be built?

[I_smell]

I think you're looking for the upsides and downsides of trying to make something nobody's ever seen before, versus leaning into a common language of pieces we all recognize.
I'll contribute one point on both:

If you've done something radically new, I think you're contributing a lot to your peers and other developers. At some point in time, people were just not making games with a priority on showing their political perspective. I think that door opened up over a few years, but you could definitely say that Papers Please was holding the megaphone. I know that a lot of developers became interested in Rogue-style pacing after playing Spelunky, and there was a new popular format for puzzle games when so many developers played Portal in 2007.
This is really common in more classical art circles, where artists make projects to speak to other artists, not a consumer audience.
I think it's generally healthy for the industry that people are out there making bizarre new games, even if the consumer audience doesn't like them. It's kind of like doing some good cardio once in a while, and it helps elevate the design process for all of us, even if we're working with completely different intentions.


There are benefits to leaning into what's familiar too. It brushes away a lot of noise and time spent explaining yourself. A common experience like "My dad has had a heart attack" carries a complicated mix of emotions and responsibilities that someone could spend all day explaining. Using football or churches or first-person-shooters can be a short-cut to a much bigger conversation, and that's not lazy or boring, it's just a design tool like anything else. Hopefully you'd be using something every-day and familiar to pave the road to something more interesting.
Then there's the concept of drilling down very deeply into a short-hand that other developers are using, which can also be kind of interesting, but hey this is a long enough post already.

I usually try to spread out decisions so that I'm burning up the audience's patience and good will on my cool new ideas, and then relaxing the composition of the whole thing with an interface or a goal structure that everybody already knows. That's my style though.

[Ninety]

This is a topic that really interests me, I've seen a lot of devs talking about it of late.

One thing I will add is that it's possible to execute an old idea in an interesting way without necessarily being "novel" or "innovative". There are definitely some games that sell themselves on being unique but that doesn't necessarily equate to being a worthwhile or interesting experience. Some of my favourite games just figured out a way to make old tropes feel really *good*.

[Pfotegeist]

I think novelty is a quality. For entertainment it's a positive quality.

In general, discovery starts an automatic nerve response whether this is like any other cases.  We're highly attuned to our environment.  Even the microbes in it shift biological evolution.

Social acceptance most simians desire is threatened by poorly investing their trust, and information lag is the primary cause of distrust.

Something brand new objectively is guaranteed a value.

[Ganbare]

Adding my two cents, I'm gonna start with the definition of novelty off of Google: "the quality of being new, original, or unusual."

Practically speaking from seeing all of the games being released every month, I feel that novelty for most gamers really hinges more on the "unusual" part of the definition. Take Undertale as an example. It is basically a standard top-down rpg (which there are thousands of thanks to RPG maker) mixed with a bullet hell like combat mechanics and a simple timing minigame for the actuall attacks. What make Undertale stand out from everyone talking about it not really that, but its emphasis on its focus on meta commentary on how a player's actions impact the world of the game and what consequences does it really hold. That kind of meta commentary isn't really even "new" or "original" as Kojima also did something very similar with Metal Gear Solid 2 14 years prior in 2001 on the PS2. But, it was "unusual" compared to the majority of other games coming out at the time.