Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)
As negative as the modern state of gaming development is now, makes me wonder if learning from past renaissance times (e.g. the &#x27;90s, particularly 1998) will bring any wisdom.<p>For instance, it&#x27;s a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative&#x2F;interesting forms?<p>Maybe it&#x27;s because the death of AA studios means that there are fewer sub-blockbuster entities to create influence? Because there are way more games today so interest is diffused and gravitate naturally towards AAA attention sinks? Because on a technical level, gaming is so advanced that there is a push towards photorealistic simulation rather than the innovative abstraction that earlier period of gaming had? One&#x27;s creativity is capped by the amount of effort and resources needs to go towards making sights and sounds of greater quality than Hollywood movies. Either way, maybe the medium and the industry is just at a stage where conventions calcify and it&#x27;s harder to turn the ship.