Maybe it’s bad of us. Disrespectful if not downright sinful. But the truth is whenever we games play a new game, we’re constantly comparing it to games we’ve already played. Maybe we are just trying understand and assimilate what we’re seeing, but I think we are just trying to get ready to shoot our mouths off. We want to be able to put down the controller, call our friends up, and sound awesome. “Have you played _________? Well it’s pretty much a mixture of ____________ and ______________ with just a splash of ___________.”

What I’ve noticed after listening to many of these conversations is that this is how we perform nerd-duels. We want to determine top gamer, but we can’t always just play videogames to determine that title (especially if we might lose). But at any party, any class, any place where one gamer might run into another we can always throw around our knowledge of game lore. We aim to impress by the depth of our experience and the accuracy of our comparisons.

What I want to know is when do we stop mentioning specific games in these conversations. When does an innovative feature become a convention? When do you have to stop mentioning “Gears of War” and “GTA” and start using “over-the-shoulder third-person” and “sandbox”?

“Sandbox” is a really good example of what I’m talking about. So we remember that it was Grand Theft Auto  3 that really introduced us to the concept of an open world that we could either progress a story or do whatever we wanted. It was a world shaking break-through in game play and was such a good idea that many games picked up on the idea. We saw open worlds open up in all sorts of games, even in some franchises you wouldn’t expect (I’m thinking Simpsons Hit and Run here). However, even though it’s important that we all remember the founder of the legacy, I highly doubt anyone described Infamous as “like GTA where you can run around and stuff.” The statute of limitations has expired. Rockstar can no longer claim “immersive city scapes full of people and  events to be interacted with from a third-person perspective” as their sole intellectual property. So we’ve had to invent some terms to describe this emergent genre: enter the terms sandbox, open-world, non-linear  game play, etc.

So here’s my take on this process. Specific game feature can be linked to a game indefinitely. For example terrifying, shambling unhumans coming out of the dark exactly when you want them not to will always bring Silent Hill to my mind. That’s the way I roll. These abominatoids are not, however, required for the genre (survival-horror), nor are they the point of the game. They’re just in the game. And in my head keeping me awake at night. But that’s a good thing. This means that any game with a comparable dark-and-monster motif will be connected with the innovating game. Silent Hill retains it’s claim!

In contrast with these individual features are the more macro aspects of a game. Things like genre, perspective, or focus are much more frequently replicated and are the most easily seperated from the innovating source. This is funny to me. Going back to the earlier GTA example, the first few games to use open-world formats were all labeled “GTA 3 clones”. Whenever one of these macro aspects is used in other games, they are ‘clones’ of the original. But the ability to be cloned also just means that the game is in danger of being conventionalized, at which point it loses it’s inate connection to that feature.

Clone shouldn’t necessarily mean bad, either. A big reason that innovating games get features conventionalized is that the features are so often improved in later games. Going back to the earlier example again, we probably wouldn’t compare Infamous to GTA not only because of the time difference, but because it’d be a better comparison to use Spider-man 2 or Crackdown; those are open-world AND super-power games. Having many games with a feature that is evolving and improving demands the creation of a new label, a genre or convention. Once there’s a label, there’s no more need to mention the specific game that innovated the concept.

And that, I think, is how games leave our comparative nerd-duel arsenal. They’re cool enough to get copied. They’re copied enough that the cool takes on a life independent of the game. The game goes uncredited (but hopefully not forgotten). So now that you know the rules, be careful with the comparisons you make. And duel responsibly, boys and girls.

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