Nothing New

[Eddy Fate]

This is just some rambling - if there has been a similar thread in the past, go ahead and point me at it.  :-)

For the past two or three years, I've been slowly collecting research on a game I have had stuck in my head for a while now - a game about angels.  However, with the suddenly pending release of Engel by WWGS, I'm stuck with a dilemma that has plagued me at a lot of points.

There's nothing new.

Of course, this is somewhat of an obvious concept - of course there are a lot of games that aren't new, yet are popular/loved/whatever you define as "success".  But my question is a bit more esoteric.

At what point does a game stop getting compared to other games like it?  And is that comparison good, bad, or other?  What consitutes "innovation"?

[deadpanbob]

This is just some rambling - if there has been a similar thread in the past, go ahead and point me at it.  :-)

There has been a lot of discussion related to this topic going on over  here.

There's nothing new...

...At what point does a game stop getting compared to other games like it?  And is that comparison good, bad, or other?  What consitutes "innovation"?

Well, I thought I had some original Ideas before I came to the Forge - and realized that my bold new path was in fact well trod by pioneers stretching back all the way to the beginning of our hobby.

I think, however, that a game may stop being compared to other games when it reaches a critical mass of players - and thus the game may come to be seen as a source of those concepts, even if in fact the game's concepts were derivative of other games.

And I think a game that puts a unique mechanical, setting, premise, or color twist on something that has been done before can also qualify as unique and new.  I'm thinking about the explosion of Indie super-hero games like Godlike, SAS, Wild-Talents et.al.

Cheers,

Jason