When I wrote about the problems with FOSS games, most of the responses I got back were about originality. Clearly this is a point worth looking at in greater depth…

Edit: Freegamer has again posted a similar post around the same time but quite independently. Great minds think alike?

I, Unoriginal

I’ve had a game idea on the back-burner for quite some time now. It was to be a game about saving civilians from zombies. The idea was to put the player in the awkward position of having to choose the lesser evil, perhaps even killing innocent civilians to prevent the spread of infection.
I thought it would be a great way of talking about collateral damage and other interesting themes entirely through gameplay:

This is actually not the first time I’ve tried to been a smart-ass: Murder Man was supposed to being an interactive exploration of the Hippocratic oath among other things. Clearly I haven’t learned my lesson from that debacle, but it seems I’ve been sparred repeating past mistakes by somebody else making my game first:

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind but it’s close enough. So how is it that these people managed to read my mind? Easy: we all played “Zombie 3″!

Originality: a myth?

There’s an expression: “there’s nothing new under the sun”. In other words it’s all rehash, whether we are deliberately copying something or simply being subconsciously influenced by it:

This is probably a bit of an exaggeration. I’d say things are probably more in line with Hegel‘s theory of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis: progress is either in extension of or in reaction to existing ideas, or it’s their recombination. In Local Search this would be called Intensification, Diversification and… well, re-Intensification. I could go off on a further tangent and start talking about Memetic Algorithms but… let’s just stick to plain old Memetics. That is, the evolution of ideas. Or, in our case, the evolution of Game ideas.

A pragmatic definition

I’m not going to talk about the “value” of originality because defining “value” is impossible. So instead we’re going to be pragmatic and speak in as level and dispassionate terms as possible.

A while back I had the cheek to define “Art“ as being “any creation requiring human mastery to conceive, construct or otherwise create”. This may not be the accepted definition of Art, but its (I will never forgive myself) it’s one I stand by simply because it’s specific enough to be in some way meaningful.

By the same token we need to decide on a meaningful definition of “Originality” if the remainder of this post is to make any sense. So let’s go with “any idea that either extends, combines or contradicts existing ideas”. After all, we’re sceptics who don’t believe that ideas come entirely out of the blue – poof! -  as if by magic (even if it might seem like they do).

Vogue sells

It would be interesting to consider our Western society’s obsession with the “New“, but I’m just a humble Computer Scientist so I don’t have my head far enough up my own ass to qualify for a such a debate. Instead I’ll say simply that “New“, “Better” and “Different” sells, and since we’re all devout Capitalists this obviously makes them things well worth pursuing.

Needless to say for a game to sell it needs to be “New“, and for a game to be “New” it needs to either do something better or differently (or possibly just cost less, but that’s cheating). In other words it must either intensify or diversify, starting from one or more pre-existing games, dreams, or drug-induced states.

The Commercial Games Industry tends to make liberal use of intensification via extension or recombination while the growing Independent Gaming movement has found their niche through a generous application of the diversification. You can think of this as the difference between branching out shoots in all directions and growing a strong -if inflexible- trunk.

The problem with FOSS gaming is that they don’t always concern themselves with “New”, because they generally aren’t constrained to do so. The idea is, after all, to make games not money. Whether this is noble or misguided is beyond the scope of this rant, but I’d like to believe that we’ll soon have a commission-based Open-Source entertainment economy – when the internet has finished making publishers and distributors redundant – where one can have the best of both worlds…

“Multi-objective Optimisation”

The reason originality sells is that it’s a fairly sure-fire way of ending up on the “Pareto Frontier”:

“Fart Power! Abe can posses his own farts and blow stuff up. No other game has it…No other game wants it!” – Abe’s Exoddus

In Multi-object Optimisation, one is presented with an N-dimensional objective-space: for a solution in this space to be worthy of consideration it merely needs to be the best with regards to a single objective. To put it another way, we can eliminate any solution that is worse with regards all objectives than every other solution, because no matter what weight we end up giving to each specific objective I’ll always be able to find a better option.

In practice this simple means that to make a game that people will actually care about we need to make a game that’s better with regards to at least one objective (for instance graphics, sound, story, etc) than anything else on the market. To do this we can optimise with regards to one or more objectives (intensify) or, alternatively, we can create a new objective (diversify), adding a new dimension to the space within which we will automatically be ahead of the pack.

Of course, being original by no means guarantees that your game will actually sell, garner appraise or be otherwise appreciated, but it does mean that people will (hopefully) stop to look twice, which is certainly a necessary condition for all of the above…

“Bugger!” is my first C++ game, but when I’ve got a couple under my belt I’d like to start questioning the establishment, as much because I consider this to be a meaningful pursuit as because that’s probably the only way I’ll ever make ends meet as an independent developer: it’s not like us microbes can beat big guys at their own game….