E3 and the games industry's failure of imagination

Like many gamers and journalists, I’ve spent the past couple of days mostly digesting the mountain of gaming news that’s come out of E3. Frankly, it has been pretty boring, but the torrent of information about “new” games has helped me put my finger on what’s bothering me about the industry these days: a total lack of imagination.

I’m not talking about sequels, either. Sure, it’s true that most major studios these days seem virtually allergic to creating new IP, and that sucks. But it goes deeper than that. Even the new IP on offer from most studios isn’t particularly original or imaginative. In fact, most new IP can be summed up just by squishing together a couple of industry buzzwords. For example:

Sunset Overdrive = third-person shooter + open-world + mobility

Destiny = Halo + RPG elements + social gaming experience

And sure, you can boil virtually any game down to its basic elements like that. But think about the truly original, truly imaginative games that you’ve played. It gets a lot harder, and the equations sound a lot less boring:

Katamari Demacy = rolling + ???

Papers, Please = dystopian bureaucracy + life simulator + text adventure

The most exciting thing I’ve seen so far at this year’s E3 was this:

In the middle of Sony’s boring, seemingly never-ending press conference, this woke me the fuck up. Procedurally-generated universe? Sci-fi exploration with survival elements? Space flight simulator? Alien botany simulator? The game might end up being terrible, but it sure looks amazing.

No Man’s Sky—which of course is being developed by an indie company because none of the majors have the balls to make something like this—reminded me of what games can be, but often aren’t: a window into worlds that we could never explore otherwise.

It’s actually pretty sad, when you think about it. There are dozens of big game companies around the world with great artists, animators, coders, and designers. These people literally have the skills to take anything that you could imagine and render it as an interactive three-dimensional world. With the advent of the Oculus Rift and the rise of VR, these companies have the capability to quite literally turn dreams into reality.

Yet 99 times out of 100, they use those capabilities to take us to the same places we’ve been countless times before.

Hello, war-torn middle eastern village. Hello, derelict spaceship full of monsters. Hello, medieval castle with fantasy elements. Hello, stereotypically “Asian”-looking temple.