The Curse of Genre

Indie designer Cliff Harris takes up the pen to note how he thinks the current problems in innovations come from publishers for big games and from genre restrictions for indies.

When you forget genres and just sit down and think “Let’s make a cool game,” without any pre-conceptions, then you stand a chance of making something really good. I remember back in my wannabe-rockstar days, I was a big fan of two bass players (Stuart Hamm and Billy Sheehan) who both had very showy and complicated playing styles. Stuart Hamm once said he’d deliberately avoided seeing how the other guy played because if he saw him it would lock him into doing things the same way, and prevent him working out his own style. I think he has a very good point.

I’m not suggesting game designers shouldn’t play games, but we shouldn’t be thinking purely in terms of existing approaches and genres when we sketch out ideas either. My best selling games were inspired by a book on how the brain works (Democracy), and the film Donnie Darko. Existing games didn’t get a look-in.

For the record, I’ve found this out the hard way. I’ve done an arcade shooter or two, a tycoon game, two top down racing games and a minesweeper clone, all of which sold fairly badly. Then I designed this weird 2D turn-based politics game which had no 3D and basically looked like a spider’s web of connected icons. It didn’t fit into any genre, and comparisons with other games on the same theme were difficult. It sold more than all the other games I’d made put together, and enabled me to quit my job and go indie full time.

Hey, if it works for you, Cliff, more power to you, but working inside defined boundaries doesn’t limit creativity per definition, it only sets a conceptual framework for most people.

Spotted on RPGWatch.