The Boss View: Innovation Needs Your Support

Electronic Gaming Business, Oct 20, 2004

Be careful what you ask for in the games industry, snarls the Boss, because you just might get it. Last holiday season, critics screamed about the lack of creative innovation in game design, the dominance of familiar game play and franchises atop the bestseller list. We all wondered aloud whether this industry had already become too conservative to maintain gamers' interest into the next generation of hardware. Actually, the real question now may be whether game culture itself is mature and adventurous enough to explore the boundaries of the public's taste.

This season, there are loads of examples of novel, interesting, and genre-busting game play in the channel, but the champions of innovation may not get the audience response they anticipate. For instance, Nintendo's Donkey Konga, a simple music game with a bongo drum interface, should be a GameCube system seller. It is almost impossible not to smile when playing this game. The ill-tempered Boss, who opposes good will and warm feelings simply on principle, was seen cracking a grin as his scaly paws pummeled the drum peripheral. He even passed it along to family, who quickly got into the game play. This is the sort of console game that even wives play. More importantly it engages a kinetic dimension of interactivity that genuinely expands the experience of console play so that other audiences can relate to it.

We're sure that Donkey Konga will sell at a decent pace when the numbers come in, but according to sales projections from TerraNova Institutional, the game was sitting at #3 on the GameCube charts in its first week and fell off the Top 5 in its second week. We think it deserved better. Games like this challenge the industry to figure out how to market to new audiences, how to communicate the novelty of this sort of game play, and how to convey a style of interactivity evokes a smile. Does the usual run of print, TV, and online ads running in the usual places really reach out to new audiences? This game should be in the hands of family magazine editors. It should be demo-ed in toy stores, not game specialty stores. It should be in holiday gift segments of morning TV shows.

Atari says that it is trying to run "between the raindrops" this season by marketing mass-appeal titles outside of the gaming hardcore, which will be pre-occupied by GTA and Halo 2. Sid Meier's Pirates is a good example of a beautifully designed, highly accessible title that we fear will be lost in the marketing mix despite its strengths. Meier is a master of understanding how to balance strategic challenge and sheer fun, and this is one of those rare games that actually modulates game play types in a highly satisfying orchestration of thought and action. But will anyone be touting that core appeal, the thing that really makes it stand out? No. The ad campaigns will use the usual game marketing conceit: "be the swashbuckler!" Go to the Atari Pirates site and you will see a lot of blather about how this "updates a classic," which pitches it directly and only to veteran PC gamers, not the broader public it needs to reach.

The Press We Deserve

There are also remarkable examples of niche titles that deserve much better exposure because they bring to gaming media experiences that larger audiences embrace. Atlus Software is distributing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, which may be one of the most convincing translations of Japanese anime aesthetics to an RPG game the Boss has ever seen. In graphical style, in apocalyptic storyline, it is spot on, and this game should be pitched to and played by all of those millions of fans who flock to see Ghost in the Shell II or who read Japanese manga. Our guess is that if it sells 200,000 copies this month, Atlus will be very lucky.

Obviously, the game industry's marketing patterns remain too entrenched among the hardcore venues, but so too are the gaming press outlets guilty of complacency. The gaming press has a responsibility to promote innovative game play and, frankly, it is shirking its duty.

A few magazines went out of their way to praise the recent and otherwise obscure Katamari Damacy from Namco. This PS2 novelty title is genuinely brilliant in its simplicity and creative depth. Your job is to roll a sticky ball over various environments to create ever-larger clumps of everyday objects. The surreal experience of this game play really speaks to the ways in which interactivity can project us into new imaginative spaces, genuinely new relationships with reality. The game quickly became a cult hit off of just a couple of small but enthusiastic reviews, and now you can't find the title in most stores.

But how much mileage can we expect from positive press when the reviews are half columns stuck in the usual spots at the back of the book? A courageous editor who really believes in innovation in his own hobby would put Katamari Damacy as a lead review and say outright that this is the most ingenious title the industry produced this month.

We complain about the lack of innovation in game design, but in fact design may be one of the real centers of creative energy in this hobby. It is the way we discuss and promote games that remains Neanderthal. Even in a consumer-centric economy, audiences still need to be instructed about what is new and interesting in novel forms of media. The marketing and the media of games in America is where we really lack innovation.