The Price of Innovation

January 23, 2006 on 10:40 am | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, Innovation

Throughout the history of MMOG-related conversations, three topics emerge most discussed: Innovation and Quality.

Unfortunately, it's been fairly rare to get both in a game.

Part of the problem, I think, is that regardless of what a company attempts in a game, their path to success is measured against established parameters. These games take dozens of people working with potentially hundreds of specialists over many years. All that time and money requires a great deal of planning. Projects don't just get slapped together in a week, nor without a great deal of planning. Core competencies are aligned behind a singular vision, all reviewed and approved by management, and honed over time to some sort of workability.

So even before a project is approved, the development process is established.

How it's measured is based on a lot of things, including legacy. Basically, what has worked and hasn't worked prior goes into the evaluation of what's being attempted. Is it done fast enough? Cheap enough? Efficiently enough? All of how success is measured is a combination of best practices and risk taking.

Every company is different. While all creative companies thrive on pushing the envelope, there's many envelopes to push. Innovation is possible in every facet of a project, from a new way of coding to a new way of creating a character to new ways to manage the finances that pay for it all. Teams are not well-oiled mechanical automotons guided by a hive mind. Individual people are responsible for individual goals, whether writing code or guiding the entire experience. The results of these efforts are not a perfect execution of a vision defined during the Concept phase, but rather an amalgamation, a long series of momentary decisions culminating in much more than a mere sum of parts.

Every company measures their own success different too. Gamers will say one game is more "successful" than others based on how many subscriptions the game has. This alone does not take into account the very many inputs into the number of subscriptions though. What is unique about their channel of distribution? What was their overhead? What sort of game did they deliver?

An innovative title is a risk. Teams take chances introducing stuff that isn't easily recognizable nor iterative. Innovation is hard to communicate. The more innovative a title, the less references can be drawn, to a point where unless the target listener has complete faith in the leader of an endeavor, the innovations being attempted can get lost in confusion (for example, who but Will Wright could actually even sell the concept of Spore to deep-pocket publishers?). How many stories and post-mortems have we all read where a person or a team had to change their message to ensure their target audience understood what they were talking about? Iteration is easier to communicate.

It's also easier to achieve. If someone is iterating an established concept, then chances are they can do so with greater efficiency than those who created the concept. Their ability to plan a project is made less difficult by having a clear and demonstrable reference to measure. It's not like any team looks at another MMOG and says "make it just like that". But there is a big difference between making an existing title easier and more fun to plan than it is to completely rethink how to motivate players in a completely new title.

It seems to be easier to make a quality iterative experience than it is to make a quality innovative one. I do not attempt to claim to understand the thousands of challenges that befall these teams every day. Rather, I simply go by results. The more chances a game takes, the harder it is for them to deliver and maintain a quality experience. And it's not just about the game itself, but rather, any number of features therein.

All of this, I feel, links back to how projects are assessed and managed. Companies and specialists have established practices. If one project took 3 years and another comes along that can be summed up as a similar experience, then that second one should also take 3 years. Everyone knows the differences are in the details, but at the macro-view level, at the level where people are driving larger multi-million-dollar goals, sometimes it's easy to get caught in a trap, trying to force-fit new thinking into established paradigms.

Now, this all could sound like a simply plea for more time for developers. That certainly is part of it. However, it also is a plea for more quality, or, importantly, prioritizing it. The days when an MMOG could launch as an Alpha and have it's development continue with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers are fast approaching their end. There's two many games out with too much quality for that many people to suffer poor-quality experiences.

I've long felt innovation can be integrated throughout the life of a game, in Alpha, in Beta, and post launch. It's very much not efficient to integrate a derivative feature knowing it'll be replaced down the road. That requires parallel paths be taken, double the money for arguably know extra gain. However, when time and again what amounts to early-development decisions are replaced after launch because either the early decision was wrong or not innovative enough, then the question has to be asked: how much time and money is being spent anyway?

There has to be a better way to balance it. Developers and publishers are not going to suddenly drop their spreadsheets and measurements. But as we're long past the point where poor-quality launches work, we're also past the point where pretty graphics sell. Graphics atop a game we played ten years ago is not working anymore. Gamers are getting older and broader in demographic. People remember this stuff, and photoreal in a 2"x3" photo on a game box doesn't communicate the key poiints a gamer wants to know. Photoreal is the expectation, even though we're still a ways off from it.

So innovation needs to be integrated into the schedule. It's basically planning for risk points, places where an idea is attempted for X period of time with a parallel path in process just in case it doesn't work. Some would call this planning for failure, but I always tell them to think of it the other way: One of the two parallel paths will be what the project moves forward with towards success.

This isn't easy by any means. A few hundred words cannot possibly communicate the complexity of parallel-pathing innovation and iteration. But it's a workable model I imagine many companies already do anyway, even if some don't call it that. Projects of this scope are all parallel paths, like movies, like television. It's not everyone riding a train. It's more like a fleet traveling, autonomously, to a single destination.