Standing Out through Perfection, Innovation, and Novelty

There was a discussion at Design Dojo recently about Making Great Games, and how designers and developers often chase innovation as a means of achieving that. Part way through the discussion, I realized that I didn't actually know what the word meant. As I'm pretty particular about knowing what the words I'm saying actually mean, I looked up the definition, and it didn't meant at all what any of us thought it meant!

Embarrassing.

In any case, it got me thinking about what we are actually chasing when we say we are chasing innovation. I realized that, simply, our goal is to make a game that's somehow special or stands out from the crowd, and also that innovation (by any definition) is only one way of doing that.

I boiled it down to 3 main "modes" of standing out: Perfection, Innovation, and Novelty

Perfection

There are two main thrusts to perfection: Completeness, and flawlessness. The idea is that you did everything right, fixed every problem, polished everything to a fine glimmer. Perfection doesn't necessarily involve doing anything new at all, but simply doing it better than anyone else.

This has been the guiding principal of AAA FPS development for the last, oh, 15 years: Our shooter is still just a shooter, but it's better than any other shooter to date. There may be sparks of genius in the details, but overall, the plan is to be a best-of-breed. 

Perfection is attained through hard work. It's something that can, to a certain extent, be solved with manpower! So the benefit of pursuing a Perfect Game is that it's conceptually very easy; you can start achieving it from day one. The cost is real resources—time and money—which are required to cover all the cases and erase all the flaws.

It's very easy to "sell" perfection: Who doesn't want something better than what they've got?

Innovation

Innovation means to introduce as new. Not that the thing is actually new, but that it feels new. In fact, proper newness works against innovation. It's all about building a new things from the same old parts, about hijacking existing tropes and knowledge to provide an unexpected experience.

When Halo introduced the two-weapon inventory, it was being innovative: The idea of the character being able to hold two weapons goes way back in RPGs and countless other games, but they made it work in the context of a first person shooter. It was an old mechanic being used in a new place.

Innovation relies on keen design insights to succeed. In fact the whole concept is incredibly clever: Find something that people are already comfotable with and use that existing comfort to move them to a new conceptual space. Innovation can happen in a moment, but requires the right kind of thinker, and careful testing and analysis to get right. Because it tends to be perceptual, it's very easy to miss the mark entirely in the concept state, so resources must be spent on prototyping and focus testing to prove the hypothesis.

Innovation tends to be subtle—you can't really point to it and say, "Hey look! We're tweaking your expectations!"—but tends to have an enormous impact on the actual player experience.

Novelty

Anything new or unusual is novel. (There is an unnecessary negative association with cheap toys and candy which we will ignore for this discussion.) It's important to distinguish from innovation, which is necessarily usual. Where innovation is comfortable, novelty is uncomfortable—and that's a good thing. The goal is to create a situation where the old tropes don't apply!

Novelty tends to be exhibited most heavily in puzzle games, where familiarity pretty much leads to boring. It can comprise individual mechanics, like the time-rewinding in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the entire experience, like Dance Dance Revolution.

The kinds of lateral motions required to introduce real novelty tend to start from the seed. You can't really "tack on" novelty to a project, it has to be part of the original spark of the idea. Usually novelty comes from exploring new tech, blue-ocean brainstorming, experimentation, and looking outside of games for inspiration. By definition, it's a mess of unknowns, so developing a novel concept is risky and unpredictable, both in terms of production and player experience. Historically, the payoff isn't that great either—it's usually some kind of sequel or knock-off (i.e. innovating on the concept) that ends up making the money, once the audience is comfortable with the idea. 

This risk is pretty widely known; being novel is just as likely to turn someone away from your idea as it is to attract them. But when you get it right, you stand head and shoulders above the crowd; you invent new genres.

Context

It's extremely important to note that all these things are incredibly contextual: What's considered old-hat in the AAA Console space might be novel on Facebook; what's innovative in mobile games could be well understood in web design; and so forth. Understanding who your audience is is critical to understand how they will relate to your game—and should affect the way you develop and present your ideas!

Combining It All

Of course, no product is specifically any one of these things. Games are complex, fractal beasts, and contain all at once perfect, innovative, novel, and mundane pieces. 

Start thinking about why your game or mechanic is special, who it's going to be special for, and what you can do to optimize it for that relationship!

Comments

[Wallace Jans]

The novel is usually overlooked until the public has the opportunity to put it into the context of what they are already familiar with. While a few innovators may grasp the significance of a novel idea or product, the masses will inevitably gravitate to the familiar until such time as the novelty fits into the context of their known world. Most people just want to jump onto the same band wagon as everyone else.