Ludomancy

The games industry keeps screaming “We need more innovation!” over and over again. You could hear it everywhere in this year’s GDC. What’s funny is that every game designer working at obscure startups I’ve met there claims his company’s strength is doing “innovative gameplay”.

Yeah, right, like everybody else.

Most people complain about the industry being stuck, risk-adverse, in sore need of originality, etc. But as soon as I dig deeper, I realize most of them did not even think about what is “original gameplay”.

Doing something “original” means that nothing like it has been done before. Unless you are some kind of visionary genius, if you do something new, you are not certain it will actually work. To know if something new works, you have to experiment.

We can call gameplay in this experimental stage, well, experimental gameplay.

The definition of this is not very easy to pin either. The folks at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions tried by giving counterexamples of what is not experimental gameplay.

But let’s try this simple definition:

Sounds obvious, but there are a few implications:

• There is not other known game to safely compare your gameplay to
• You might end up with something that sucks