Have you ever experienced one of those times when you had the best idea ever only to find out that somebody beat you to it months ago, and then somebody else created something that is so much better than the original idea, that the original idea would be considered obsolete at best? No? Well, to me and a few of my friends it happened.
Consider to following setting: Four computer science grad students on a hiking trip, 
trying to come up with an innovative idea for video game design. While drinking black coffee with the trees above and the flow of the water, an idea is born for a time travelling mechanic. Slowly, ideas formed into specifics, leading the naive men to believe that this was an idea that was meant for greatness.
Little did we (yes, I was one of those poor men) know that this neat little flash game was already on the market… Unbelievably, it was almost identical to the the game we formed in our minds, down to the smallest details of the time travelling mechanic and paradoxes! Playing it was just like travelling to the future and playing the game we designed just a few days ago. It was as if the creators of the game listened to our conversation, travelled back in time in a manner no so different from the one in the game and created the game before we even thought about it. Kind of a lame usage for a time machine though…
So somebody had already thought about (and implemented) our idea. Bummer. But here comes the good part: it didn’t matter. Enters: Braid. Braid was released on XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) about two months after we had our “big idea”. Although it is considered an indie game, Braid was richly funded. The time manipulation mechanics in this game could, I am sorry to say, wipe the floor with our mechanics.
The trailer shows some of the mechanics used in this magnificent title..
Without getting into an artistic discussion, Braid is carefully implemented to include puzzles that are on one hand complex and diverse, and on the other hand accessible and satisfying. Each world in Braid employs a new time manipulation mechanism that is usually completely different from other worlds, and then immediately puts you in a position to use that mechanism to solve carefully planned puzzles. The puzzles were planned thoroughly and it shows.
I only played Braid for the first time when it came out on the PC three days ago, and I am enjoying every minute of it. This leads me to several conclusions to this story: First, if we want to design an innovative game, we need to think faster. Second, even though we came up with our idea too late, it was a good idea in retrospect. I can say this because, as I said, I can play a game that implements it almost completely. Third, if our idea is not as innovative as we thought, we could still create something that makes better use of it, just like Braid did.
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Inspiring post.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteTiming IS everything, and it probably won't be the last time that this will happen to us. However, on the optimistic side, a good idea is worth gold and that, my friends, makes us rich. We will get there sooner or later, just have to keep trying!
ReplyDeleteWow. Your description of us drinking coffee and weaving the idea made me so excited! I don't recall it was such aspiring :)
ReplyDeleteWell, I remember that it was :)
ReplyDeleteSeeing as you're a computer science guy, I interpreted this pretty literally as a call for web 3.0 tagging and searching. This same situation has followed me every time I move from one field of study to another (drama, film, now games). I'll start work on a project for school, wholly intent on developing it later into a finished product. Then when I turn it in and show it to people, somebody says "Oh that's like this: insert link here!"
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, I always do a metric fuck ton of searching before working on something. But you never find what you want simply Googling or Redditing. If there were a more advanced tagging system, and a better Internet research workflow a la Vannevar Bush's memex, this kind of shit wouldn't happen nearly so often.
Of course this isn't the same case as your example, where you crafted a very developed idea in the woods as a group only to find out later that it had been done. This phenomenon could only be understood through Jung's idea of synchronicity (take it with a grain of salt if you want, but it pans out sometimes) - basically the idea that the collective unconscious (which you can basically read as the sum past efforts and events of our species) causes the same patterns and ideas to manifest themselves both in the world and in our minds.
Anyhow, I agree with your conclusions: think faster in the future, and always remember that the thought experiment helped. Even if you had coded parts of it and then ditched the plan when you saw the other games, the act of making your ideas manifest in code is a growing experience and learning tool that you could use for making other games--or at least showing game developers or any other tech company that you can execute your ideas procedurally.
Simon, thank you for your suggestions and welcome to the blog :). It is comforting to hear that even if my work did not carry fruit, it is still not completely worthless.
ReplyDeleteThe reason we did not conduct research beforehand was mainly because it was a spontaneous idea that somehow came just as we were at the right mindset to seriously discuss it. Of course, to develop seriously, we will conduct real research before we start designing and coding.