A version of this article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

There’s an urban legend that, in the early days of the space program, NASA determined that ball-point pens wouldn’t write in space, and so they pressed their engineers to design a pen that could, which after months of time and millions of dollars in research, they finally did.  The Russians, when presented with the same problem, simply had their cosmonauts carry a pencil.

As a veteran in the industry, this myth is compelling because it speaks to a problem that plagues game development teams throughout the industry, that of mismanaged innovation.  We have finite resources – limited time, limited budget, and limited engineering cycles – and these resources dwindle as the realities of development occur and unexpected problems arise.  Given these challenges, even well-funded teams stumble, resulting in failed innovations and often doomed projects.

Failures of Innovation

Failures in innovation can take multiple forms.  Most designers worry about innovating too little, which is a good concern to have.  Innovation is important to gaming – in many ways, we are a research-and-development industry, and novelty is hugely important to break into a core market that is by now deeply jaded.  Clones and me-too products are unlikely to score with the public consciousness and break into megahit status, unless they are themselves sequels to a megahit.

Most designers know this, but they still fail in the pursuit of innovation, stumbling into all-too-common design pitfalls that plague both shipped products as well as those that get cancelled before they see the light of day.  Common mistakes are innovating too much, mistaking content for innovation, going too weird, failing to execute, and failing to innovate in a direction of value to the market.

Too Much Innovation

Students I speak to always seem surprised when I complain of design teams that try to innovate too much.  This reaction is natural for young designers – it is their impulse to look at every feature in the game and ask how every possible feature can be improved, if not replaced entirely.  How could too much innovation necessarily be bad?

But often, it is – even one truly ambitious new feature can be difficult to build, balance, test and deliver at a high level of quality.  Attempting to do too many risky things at once reduces the likelihood that any of them will be executed as well as they could.

Too much innovation can make the game harder to sell, as it can cloud your marketing message.  New features that are unpopular, unfinished or just unfun can dominate reviews and online chatter about your game, stealing focus from the ambitious game elements that your team actually succeeded in delivering.

Failure To Execute

Creating game systems that are innovative is hard.  Areas of true innovation are typically full of engineering risk and design uncertainty.  They require tons of iteration and playtesting to get right and are almost impossible to schedule accurately.

Having one truly innovative feature on your schedule makes life difficult – having multiple can make it a nightmare.  This is most true when the new features interact with each other directly – the cost of adding these features can increase exponentially as designers, programmers and quality assurance have to deal with unexpected edge cases related to how these systems mix.

Even one innovative feature can wreck a schedule if it is heavily content driven.  A system in which a player can only stealth in the dark, for example, requires worldbuilders to build maps and levels to specifications that arise from iteration and playtesting the system.  If that system comes online too late, content built early may have to be completely rebuilt or, in worst case scenarios, discarded entirely.

One typical result I see when innovation is poorly managed is that when schedule realities hit home, all aspects of the game end up getting shipped underdeveloped.  Even in the unlikely case where most of the bugs and edge cases are found and handled, it’s unlikely that the innovative feature will be able to get the iteration time and polish needed to truly shine.  Then, the game ends up not selling, but if you’re (un)lucky, maybe some designer at another company will see your idea, figure out how to steal it, and do it right in their own game.

Going Off The Deep End

Sometimes, designers try to take designs in new, interesting and altogether weird directions.  This can be as simple as changing the core UI paradigm of the genre, such as reversing what mouse buttons do, or changing the genre’s standard hotkeys.  Or it can be more substantial, adding a new feature to the game that doesn’t actually improve the game but just makes it different for the sake of calling yourself innovative.

Such changes often presents a learning problem for the player – if your genre has a strong market leader, then that genre leader has effectively taught people how to play your game before they even pick up a copy. Games are artificial environments, and players must frequently get over the unfamiliar and uncomfortable before they get what the game is all about.  Changing core genre conventions without good cause simply makes your game a more alien experience to fans of the genre.

Anytime a new, major innovation is proposed for a game design, a lot of questions should be asked: Will the feature actually be seen as better by fans of the genre?  Will the feature confuse people expecting the gameplay of the market leader?  And will this feature blend gracefully with the game’s other features into a coherent whole?

One mistake common to MMOs in particular are innovations that are more interesting to academics and designers than to the players.  I know of one game that wanted to allow players to set other players’ houses on fire, in the name of creating ‘interesting social dynamics’.  Design innovations should always be player-centric, with a real focus on what impact they will have to all of your target markets. A new feature that pleases your hardcore but alienates any newcomers, for example, is one that is probably best left on the cutting room floor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”  The trick is defining ‘better’ – what makes a better mousetrap depends on what the rodent-hunting customer finds valuable.  It’s the designer’s role to identify the top problems the customer has and focus his energies on finding a design response to those issues.  At the end of the day, it’s not innovative unless it’s better.

Mistaking Content for Innovation

Laundry lists of content have long been seductive bullet points for the back of the box of any game, perhaps because it’s so easy – if the market leader has 10 races, surely 12 or 15 races will be better.  This mentality permeates almost every genre.  RPG’s are the worst offenders – with race, class, creature, spell, quest and zone counts being common – but they are by far alone in this regard.  RTS’s like to boast on unit counts and the number of factions.  Fighting games love to sell on number of combatants and arenas.  For a while, FPS’s would sell on weapon counts, or by adding dual-fire modes to effectively double the weapon count.

However, more isn’t necessarily better.  The market leaders in almost every genre still have a relatively small, constrained set of races, classes, combatants and/or weapons.  Quality is the key – the more classes and races you have, the more combinations you have to balance.  Further, this problem compounds itself in player vs. player arenas – each character you add to a fighting game increases the variables to balance against exponentially.

At the end of the day, though, ‘more of the same’ isn’t true innovation – at least not on its own.  In all of the above examples, players are eventually going to choose a favorite class, a favorite army or a favorite gun, and tailor their own game experience in that direction.  Designers are almost always better off ensuring that each individual choice the players could make is as rich and interesting as possible.  Doing less also ensures that the choices that are innovative can truly be balanced and allowed to shine.

Focusing Your Innovation

All the above should not be mistaken for a plea to innovate less – the industry needs better, smarter games to move forward, and you will need new cutting-edge features in your products in order to be competitive.   Games that fail to innovate are, in general, destined for the bargain bin and general ignominy. So designers have to take chances, but you can’t take on too much risk in your project.  Games need highly targeted innovation – ensuring that you are focusing your energy on features that really matter.

Innovate, but identify features that are high in demand by your core market.  Try new things, but prototype and iterate on them early, especially if they have high content demands.  And don’t innovate too much but do ensure the features you choose to innovate on are well-executed and polished to a glossy sheen.

A lot of designers think that gamers want you to show them something new.  They don’t – they want you to show them something better.  Good designers understand that innovation is inherently risky — ideas are cheap, executing on them is hard, and managing that risk is often the difference between a project succeeding and it collapsing under its own weight.    It may not feel natural for designers to focus on one or two key gameplay features with homerun potential and discard the rest, but designers that can do so almost always make better games.