should be:

'not so much about unoriginal games being made, as it is about gamers not wanting' original games.... 

Yeah. I've been following the ABA Games guy for a year now. He's awesome. I really think pushing an obscene number of simple objects on screen makes for more attractive games than pushing fewer high-detail objects. 

Metagames:
http://www.allrpg.com/editorials/metagaming.php3 

I've tried to think of all the original games I've played recently, and I came up with a big fat zero. Part of it is defining an original game -- as so many people have pointed out "nothing" is original these days; it's all based off of something else. Example: GTA3 is fairly unique as far as games go, but it's the third in a series of games. It follows the footsteps of the previous games, but takes it to the third dimention. How can that be original?

Another reason I haven't really played any original games lately is that I haven't played any new games at all in the past six months. (I'm sure many of you have heard me whining about not having a machine that can play recent stuff.) This leaves me with playing GameCube games, and I've only recently aquired that so I'm still working my way through some older GC games that interest me. Of course, this brings up the logical argument that original games wouldn't necessarily utilize the most recent technology; especially games developed in the independant community.

Or maybe I just haven't played any original games lately because I'm too mainstream. 

games on the basis of originality is akin to criticizing theatre because the plotting remains essentially the same after 2500 years.

There is creativity involved in visual design but wether you play Quake or Tetris, you are essentially pushing, pulling or popping something to get closer to the end of the game.

Personally I like games like Dues Ex, No One Lives Forever, or Max Payne (recently played Max Payne 2, almost flawless as a game) that focus on story content as the primary means of emmersion, and games that do this either stick to certain formulas or conventions or they come across as unconvincing. 

that upcoming game where you run a movie-making company? you get to start from the ground up, direct your own movies, import actors/props, customize storyboards, etc. That has to be the most original game i've ever heard of (at least in recent memory.) I mean you're not building an entire empire or building railroads or rollercoasters, so as far as sims go it seems original. 

you don't have to get all postmodern about this. All I'd personally like to know about are games that you yourself felt were different, or unexpected in someway from the games you've played before. 

I guess this thread is still going. Here's my take: "Sequel" doesn't automatically mean a game isn't innovative any more than "not a sequel" automatically means a game is innovative. The fallacy here is the belief that games are are like movies: that the creative essence of a game is the plotline and characters. The truth is that plot and characters are usually just window dressing, and the meat of a game is the gameplay! So you can drape a tired old plot about a knight rescuing a princess over an innovative set of game systems, and you have actually made progress. 

I cant remember who it was exactly, but it was one of the devs behind GTA3, he said something like this -

"GTA3 is like pacman, you are the yellow guy, you navigate around a maze of roads, the ghosts are the police and the white dots are civilians"

So with this in mind you COULD say that there hasn't been an original FPS since wolfenstein, nor an original RTS since Dune 2. All games these days are based on older games, its just that some games have original ideas thrown into the mix. 

Well, if you strip stories down to their most basic there's but a few basic categories, as far as I can remember. man against man, man against himself, man against nature, man against god...

This is of importance and interest to one category of people. Not readers, not writers. The only people who care about it this way is academics. So you could say that all games are variations on pong, pac-man or tetris. But how does that take help you forward? An analysis is nothing without a conclusion. Academic analysis of game development has some upsides, and breaking a game design down into functions and input/output can be of immense use to you -- especially early on in the design process. But it can also lead to games that go meh. Black and White is a great example of this. Had they not fumbled something so fundamental as game progression, in a game with only five missions -- no less, maybe people would be more curious about BW2 than HL2.

There's no fail-safe blueprint you can follow when designing games, so the best you can do is to keep your eyes on the prize and ask yourself "Is this fun?" and if it is, weigh the cost for implementing it against you budget and make your call.

metl;
The truth is that plot and characters are usually just window dressing, and the meat of a game is the gameplay!
True, and false. There are exceptions. What you're saying here, when I translate it into the dev-speak I raised a warning flag for, is that the short-term goals (solving a puzzle, killing the enemies in the room, overtaking the car in front of you..) should be more important than the long-term goals (finding out what happens to our protagonist, finishing first in the star cup circuit, saving the planet). In principle of course, this makes sense. If the player doesn't feel that her short-term goals makes sense and rewards her she'll never get a chance to beat the long-term goals.

I like to bring up ICO alot, and I'm gooing to again. What keeps you playing that game is not the gameplay per se. The short-term goals (solving puzzles, scaring off enemies and helping Yorda) aren't all that innovative. The puzzles are mor often than not just you moving some crates around, combat is a button-mashing excersise and once you learn what Yorda can- and cannot do it's not that hard to figure out how to progress. Once you'r two or three hours in, you've gotten a taste of most of the things the game will ever throw at you.

But I kept on going anyway, because the long-term goals were interesting enough to outweigh the tedium (albeit very minor, I enjoyed that part too) of the short-term goals. I wanted to see the next part of the castle, I wanted to experience more jaw-dropping visuals and find out what would happen to the dynamic duo, as they were.

In short, ICO is a game that judged on the gameplay alone, should be average at best -- the only innovation (and that's slightly stretching the definition) is you having to help Yorda around. But it isn't -- the gameplay is great because it integrates so seamlessly with everything else.

Video games are not board games, we don't have to use top hats and shoes to represent actors, or an event card as a stand-in for in-game functions. Video games aren't just about gameplay, they're about experiences. We can use up to 60% of the players available senses and a boatload of the player's brain functions, and any good game takes advantage of this as far as the game setting and design document allows it. 

when I bring up ICO, I often goo a little bit. It's just that good. 

okay, good point. But, (on the topic of dev-speak,) a better way to translate what i intended to say is:

The guy who wrote the article is missing the point if he thinks that a movie license or a sequel is unoriginal just becuase it's based on existing IP. A game isn't original just becuase it's based on original IP. Innovation in games happens elsewhere. 

http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/

RPG: "Or maybe I just haven't played any original games lately because I'm too mainstream."

I think this is a misconception. IMO right now the ratio of original-games-to-not for mainstream and independant devs are probably pretty close. DDR, Sims, Ribbon, etc have been quite popular over the years, while the indie devs have certainly made huge amounts of clones. It's been said that the publishers stifle creativity, but imo, a lot of the time people don't produce creative stuff regardless of how much freedom they're given.

zwiffle: yeah, a lot of lionhead's games do have the potential to be interesting. we'll have to see how it turns out.

wrath on academia: some good points here, and something I've been very self-concious of whenever I post topics here, since they tend to be more academic-ish then I like. The natural question that comes to my mind though is, where/how do forums like this one fit, in all of this?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but currently most of the posts here seem to be one of 2 things (!damn school!), idle chat or troubleshooting. There's typically not a whole lot of analysis or whatever. So whenever I'm thinking of submitting a topic, I'm always aware of the question: would it be better to try discussing this, or let the maps speak for themselves and have people figure things out on their own? 

What happends way too often though is that games aren't very original AND (here comes the important part..) the production quality isn't good enough. This happends all over again when publishers try to play it safe with proven concepts but then not giving the developers sufficient time/resources so in the end they'll end up focusing all PR talk on the one semi-original idea they've thrown in to make it stand out at least a bit and of course the latest technical achivements be it ragdollphysics, dynamiclights or whatever.

This post was probably very confusing and stupid but so am I... 

Spamming inevitably shit mobile games is a fair indication the games industry might be in some sort of crisis ;)