[gilbetron]

What I'm tired of is articles like these that try to make out the video game development past as some artistic endeavor, when it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun. There is far more "art" in games these days, which I think is cool. We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily. Plus people that want innovation have developed very niche tastes which means to mean that niche you have like a few hundred people as a market.

Additionally, this "what happened to game design" is a refrain I've literally heard every year for 30+ years now. Here's the thing: if you have fun with a game, most of the time you want to keep playing that game. I just finished Mad Max (late to it!) and it was awesome, and I want to just keep playing it, but there is nothing else in there except finding the few % of places that I didn't completely explore before. But I'd kill to have a DLC for it or a Mad Max 2 that is just more of the same.

There is far, far more exploration and experimentation now than ever, and if you think otherwise, you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.

[AlexandrB]

> We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily.

The RTS genre is a perfect counter-example because RTSes arguably peaked with Homeworld in 1999 and since then we have had nothing but sequels and re-treads of fundamentally the same concepts[1]. We went from a game that had fully three-dimensional battlefields and complex formations to, basically, rehashes of StarCraft/Warcraft with differing mixes of micro/macro. There have been a few[2] cool indie games, but the concepts they presented never gained traction in the mainstream.

With mobile gaming on the rise, the genre seems to be devolving to Clash Royale-likes.

[1] Honorable mentions for Company of Heroes (2006), which had a lot of cool ideas as well.

[2] http://www.achrongame.com/site/

[drittich]

> it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think many artists would find this fits quite well as a definition of an artist, in process if not in intent.

[AlexandrB]

Agreed. "Fucking around" with music/movies/games/images is where the new ideas come from. Once you have an audience you need to satisfy you're locked in to their existing pre-conceptions of what "good" is unless you're very brave.