It’s easy to mock me for writing this post. “Hey, this guy think’s he’s really creative, and have creative ideas, and now he makes an article where he laments about how dead the industry is.” It’s true but unimportant as a critisism towards me, since it doesn’t point at anything negative about me as a person really, big ego? Not really, I’m not really saying I have great ideas and that there aren’t that many other creative people with game ideas, what I’m refering to instead is the fact that there are still a lot of creative people out there, but they don’t get to realize any of their ideas because the overarching business structure that greenlights which projects to do and which not to, is stale, and bogged down in management structures. Maybe it’s not such a black and white story? Maybe it’s also creative people lacking faith in themselves and not regarding themselves as good enough? It is a mixture of both of course. But the videogame industry right now is very strange, it’s very odd.

You have a very diverse setup of hardware with which to experience the medium through. New but old with better horsepower, and you have other platforms like wii, iPhone, DS that incorporate new interfaces.

Take the iPhone. Multi-touch.

How many insane, original ideas can’t be made using such an interface? And how many have been done that are great so far? Not enough compared to what could have been done. What’s the problem? Well… it’s certainly not the stale overarching business structure, since anyone can produce and instantly sell games on the iPhone, so of course, another factor has to be taken into consideration here instead: namely that creative people don’t even believe in themselves enough to develop a simple gameidea cheaply for a platform like iPhone. Then again, people don’t generally have time, it just takes a lot of time to think about new, fun game ideas, and then to execute them and involve other people in the process who you have to talk into believing in your idea renders the thought ridiculous. But I have to mention that the iPhone definitely is getting some gems, so I have faith in the iPhone, and I’m glad for them since hey have a very developer friendly platform.

The saddest story goes to Wii, a console with so much potential but that has only gotten really crap offsprings to Wii Sport, with few exceptions. Here the blame in many ways goes to Nintendo for letting anyone put anything on the shelves in stores so that the few good titles disapear in a flood of crap titles, which in turn results in fewer good titles being developed because they don’t sell. But obviously it has got to do with creativity as well.

The reason why I write this article is a lot because I have this lack of understanding what has gone wrong. It’s not like the world has turned uncreative. The tv-medium has blossomed into one of the most interesting mediums in the last decade or so, it has seen this really distinct raise in quality over any decade that has come before; so creativity isn’t dead, at the same time there’s no sign of it flourishing in the videogames industry.

Today in the videogames industry you have so many players that you feel like the industry is stale because the systems that are getting the most love are the ones that don’t have any new, interesting interface.

So the only area that’s getting any talent right now is where developers make progress with already establised genres with already established overarching gameplay. That’s not wrong, but then those games really need to have some very new, creative IP in terms of gameworld, characters, narrative structure, more fundamental gameplay mechanics, and pace of the game. As for narrative structure it has gotten quite a lot of attention the last years, and I’m glad I started to write about it back when I did (I don’t know, 6 or 7 years ago maybe), but it doesn’t really help if the gameplay feels slightly dated or if the pace is flawed, or if the premise of the game (story + gameplay) is deranged.

In the Edge interview with Miyamoto this week he mentioned that he would like to see more original ideas made specifically with the wii’s interface in mind. So it’s obvious that at least within Nintendo there is a wish for more original content, content that the larger masses understand and think is fun.

Here’s hoping the Wiimote 2 will be the turning tide. Anyways, this was just me rambling about what could be the cause of the creative draught in the industry, maybe you have something else you would like to add, then plz go ahead and comment the article.