When designing the basic concept of the game for my group’s Game Design Studio Project, our first step taken was to think up a particular genre or theme that we wanted to work on.
As the Lead Game Designer and Writer for the group, I had to record every idea and suggestion down. We treated this early brainstorming process of creating a game like a game itself, tossing out many an idea into the open. Ideas originally thought to be original were eventually decided to be too hard to be implemented, and thus had no choice but to be scrapped. Many ideas went down this road during the brainstorming process, until we settled on an interesting game mechanic, and built on it.
When we had finally decided, completed and built upon our concepts, created and fleshed out a story for it, we discovered that what we had created had already been done, albeit only slightly differently, by another game, even two. What we perceived to be totally original was not, even though we had not viewed the games that we ‘copied’ off of before.
This was when I realized that originality is hard to create. By originality, I mean originality in the truest sense of the word, something fresh and totally unseen or unheard of before. According to dictionary.com’s first and third definitions respectively, originality is the quality or state of being original; freshness or novelty, as of an idea, method, or performance. That is why, for many games you see in the market out there, can be related/compared to another game with very similar properties. An example would be people saying that Halo is just Counterstrike with aliens, Left 4 Dead is just Counterstrike with zombies, Gears of War is just Counterstrike with a cover system, Dead Space is just Counterstrike with alien zombies etc. Basically, many successful games were based on a previously popular and successful game, but with slight tweaks and improvements to the overall game play, and given a new facelift in terms of graphics and/or story. Yet, many see this process as creating originality, hailing Halo or Left 4 Dead as groundbreaking games of their era.
However, these games were successful for a reason. They gave enough of a unique spin on the original concept they based their game off of. As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, why fix it? They not only did that, but they improved on that already successful concept.
This made me realize, in the game design process and game industry, even though originality is valued greatly, it is equally hard to come up with a truly ‘original’ idea. (This is not unfounded however, as games like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus proved.) This would not stop many companies from creating commercially-successful games.
Thus, my group somewhat embraced our ‘copied’ idea, but decided to improve on it further, trying to deviate away from the game that it was similar to, while still retaining and keeping many of the qualities that made that game fun in the first place.
