|
This is a bit of a summarized cross post from our blog at Inkling: Jesse Schell in The Art of Game Design has a great section on a lesson he learned from his juggling career on where to find inspiration. He was at a juggling festival when he was 14 and saw someone in a powder blue jumpsuit juggling there who really stood out from all the other professional jugglers. Not because of his suit, or because the guy was doing anything complicated, but because he had a style about him that was very unique and remarkable. This impressive juggler saw that Jesse was watching him and they had this conversation. Powder blue jumpsuit: "Know why my tricks look so different?" Jesse: "Uh, practice". Jumpsuit: "No - everybody practices. Look around! They're all practicing. No, my tricks look different because of where I get them. These guys, they get their tricks from each other. Which is fine - you can learn a lot that way. But it will never make you stand out." Jesse: "So where do you get them? Books?" Jumpsuit: "Ha! Books. That's a good one. No, not books. You wanna know my secret? The secret is: don't look to other jugglers for inspiration - look everywhere else. I learned this one watching a ballet in New York (as he does a trick) And this one I learned from a flock of geese I saw take off from a lake up in Maine... See, these guys can copy my moves, but they can't copy my inspiration (After pointing out someone copying a move but looking bad in the process)." You also see this type of copying Jesse saw at the festival all the time in this industry of ours of selling web applications. Application after application looks like a knock off of someone else's design. Which is great for learning, but as pale blue jumpsuit pointed out, these things will never look as good as the original because they lack inspiration.
|
However, that article points out what is often called "principle of correspondence". We can learn things that would help us in our field, by learning other fields. However, if you look and try to learn from someone in the same field as you, it doesn't prevent your imagination to go beyond the box, learn the move and perform it with a different style.
There is something I learned from sports; you don't admire how sexy is a leopard while running, because the animal tries to have a style. The quality of the action that varies depending of the different body proportions makes it unique and cool.
By example, two different Taekwon-Do ITF fighters can have two completely unique styles, but both practice exactly the same martial art.
What you are talking about is execution. Inspiration happens before you get to that point. If your inspiration is based on what's already done, then even if your execution is perfect and flawless you still end up with something inherently derivative. If, however, you draw from an external inspiration, the sky is open.
There are still many many brand new ideas out there that haven't been tried yet. Many of them will come from looking at life in general as inspiration. Didn't Miyamoto come up with Pikmin while gardening? I believe the most interesting ideas will come from developers who have serious interests and passions beyond gaming, and use them as inspiration.
Perhaps there is a trend where the more advanced gaming gets, the higher the barriers to entry, the more you need to be completely devoted to games and nothing else in order to be in a position where you can make games, the more likely your game will be inspired by the games you love rather than something new.
Can anyone think of other recent examples of games where the main inspiration seems to come from something completely outside of gaming? Of course, in the earliest days of gaming before genres came to be, everything was inspired by outside sources.
I found it odd when some of the best film-makers were asked in an interview what films they have seen recently and they say something like "Well, I don't really watch many movies and I don't even have a DVD player...". It used to baffle me but now it makes sense.
And this is precisely why I think God of War is such a tired and boring game. I played it before. The refinement that you speak of is small and iterative. The only refinement that God of War has over what came before is in its presentation and graphical fidelity. This has nothing to do with the mechanics that you seem to think improve over time.
Again, you too are focusing on execution rather than, you know, as the title says, INSPIRATION.