Gaming's Dark Age: Losing Creativity.

I recently wrote an article on the importance of remakes and why they are more than just a money grab. Since then then I have put more thought into the pitfalls that follow their success. Replaying the BioShock series and diving back into Call of Duty 4 is great but they do not add any new ideas. I fear that the growing amount of remakes is a sign that game publishers and studios are losing confidence in their own creativity.

To explain this further I want to use Hollywood as an example. Movie studios have recently been criticized for regurgitating the same principal ideas into the movies they create. Every year a new super hero movie comes out and it is largely the same premise. Good guy with super powers fights bad guy with super powers to save the world, with some change ups in between. Super hero movies are fun and provide entertainment plus revenue for movie studios that desperately need it. But they do not add anything new and creative to the silver screen. A super hero can put on a new costume but at the end of the day they are just a super hero with a different look.  

In a similar fashion game studios are using their already proven titles to flood the market with old and little new. A perfect example of this is the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The success they generated has caused them to re-create the same game over and over again but just in different time periods. Now you can silently murder people in nearly every major historical time period. Great but the game mechanics are the same and they add little original content. Wouldn’t it be cool if they made an Assassin’s Creed that jumped into the future and involved silently assassinating alien life forms?

Maybe or maybe not (probably not.) but the point is Ubisoft won’t let their developers take a chance to dive into something new in the series because they have security from what they already know works.

Nintendo is a great example of a company that understands the importance of creativity and new ideas. The Wii was a huge hit and arguably opened the door for Virtual Reality gaming to be viable with the success of its unconventional motion controller gaming. They also are not afraid to take a proven game and completely reinvent it. Mario is a fantastic example of finding success by making something old new again. Mario is nearly as old as gaming itself yet Nintendo has found a way to continue to make him relevant. They do this by making all sorts of original games ideas to put Mario in. Think about the selection: Paper Mario, Mario Party, Mario 64, Super Smash Bro’s (still Mario), Mario Kart, Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Creator, Super Mario Sunshine, Mario Golf and Mario at the Olympics for crying out loud!

Nintendo has had its fair share of failures and it is much easier to place a cartoon type character like Mario in creative fun worlds then it is for Master Chief or Ezio. But Nintendo has taken a tried and proven franchise and successfully (most of the time) turned it into something time and time again. 
  
 I can’t help but feel that the Golden Age of video game development has come and gone. It started in my childhood. I got hooked on games from playing Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I become more infatuated with gaming with the release of PlayStation and Nintendo 64 and eventually fully hooked by the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 and well into Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. All of these systems included a vast library of original games and introduced the franchises that we know and love today, such as Halo, Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, Gears of War, BioShock and the list goes on. But where are the titles and franchises the next generation will get hooked on?


I am worried that we live and era of gaming where success sacrifices originality, and where originality is more likely to be greeted by failure. Where big game companies would rather cash in on a game, then invest time and money intro creating something new. I am hopeful that gaming will pull itself out of this Dark Age but I do not think the Renaissance is coming anytime soon.  

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