Take the Nintendo DS. With its emphasis on new types of gameplay and control mechanisms that appeal to a broader audience than the usual hardcore gamer demographic, it's a poster child for fruitful experimentation. The DS has everything from cooking, surgery, detective stories, library management and sailing to breath-based interaction and, yes, romance. People who wouldn't otherwise touch videogames love their DSs. But the DS's diverse game library was born from an awful lot of trying and failing. I remember meeting with a Nintendo sales rep a few years ago to play some first-generation DS titles. They were unusual. They were interesting. Nine out of ten were god-awful. It's easy to forget that, like the Wii, the DS was a huge, unwieldy risk at a time when the evolution of gaming meant little more than better sports games and shooters.
The DS is proof that it's still possible to find the next evolutionary leap in games - something totally unexpected, from far left field, that will bring whole new audiences to gaming and make vast amounts of money.
So who will be the next to step up?
Imagine, for instance, a serious effort to bring romance novels into Western videogames on a AAA scale. It wouldn't be easy: Romance novels have highly-developed creative formulae that celebrate passion and commitment. Spreadsheet-based monster slaying and laser rifles wouldn't exactly cut it. Nor would cobbling together a team of traditional developers and romance authors - the many failures of cross-media gaming mash-ups show that throwing creative processes together and demanding instant results is foolish. So, dropping Victoria Dahl into a development team would likely result in a very bad videogame. The next attempt wouldn't be much better. But over time, if the conditions were right, something new would emerge that could never have been created by either side alone. Gaming would take a step forward, reach a vast new audience of avid romance fans and make money hand over fist.
The Western games industry already has successful studios accustomed to bringing in outside influences. It's no coincidence that Bethesda Softworks was founded by someone with a background that combined virtual reality work and broadcast news production. Or that BioShock, one of the most thematically unique AAA titles in recent memory, was helmed by a former screenwriter and playwright who didn't play games growing up. Even designers steeped in the traditions of the industry can successfully forge into new territory, as evidenced by Peter Molyneux's Fable 2, where marriage is a key component of the gameplay. Bioware has also been extremely successful in taking Japanese-style relationship elements into their own RPGs. But such experiments are still the exception. Far more typical are those studios too dominated by the industry norm: young men with comp. sci or design degrees, raised on similar games and other media, who create solid but repetitive titles with mild variations on the Same Old Thing. These creative monocultures produce faster results and quicker profits, but in the long haul, they could be fatal.
