As long as we’re talking about the Incredibles, I thought I’d point out a nice Onion AV interview with Brad Bird, Writer and Director of what may well be the best movie of the year (nod to Looka for pointing it out). In it, he explains why there’s precious little innovation in your 25 million dollar budget games.

Money quote:

Film is an expensive medium. It’s hard and expensive to get a bunch of people together to operate all this equipment to create the illusion of a dream. The more fantastic a dream is, the more machinery needs to be involved. Businessmen want to feel secure in their investment, especially when they’re spending millions of dollars, so they’re constantly trying to avoid the scary reality that a story is an ethereal thing. It’s too vague. It’s too ill-defined. No one wants to hear, “Who knows? I think this will work.” Which is basically what films are. They’re gut instinct, you know, “Let’s give it a shot.” Any good filmmaker will tell you that they don’t know what’s going to succeed. They’re just trying to make a good film, and hopefully it’ll catch. All of the best movies are ones that defied a certain amount of conventional wisdom.

But business is all based on conventional wisdom. There are far-thinking businessmen who manage to see things new ways and think ahead of the curve, but they’re always in the minority. Most people are playing catch-up. Any time Hollywood can glom on to the illusion of security, they go for it. So if two films have been made where the lead character was wearing a red shirt, and they both succeeded, you can bet they’re going to slap a red shirt on their guy in the new film. “Red shirts! They like red shirts nowadays!” Well, no, they don’t. It’s a coincidence. Now, everybody thinks that if they buy a computer, they are guaranteed success. You can buy a computer. You cannot buy a surefire story. That requires instinct, and instinct is scary. So they do anything to give them the placebo they need to make it through the night, what with the large amount of money and resources they’re rolling the dice on. Because they don’t like the idea that they’re rolling the dice.

For the animation industry, the last part is a pointed dig at Disney, and how they’ve pulled out of the 2D animation market in favor of pursuing 3D computer generated movies in the future. As we all now know, it doesn’t always pan out.

But as surely as what they’re talking about is true for games, it’s also true for fun. Fun is an elusive, sneaky bastard. It’s almost impossible to predict and plan for. Ideas which sound like fun on paper die in the vine. What’s more, fun takes time to iterate. Iteration is unpredictable. Hard to schedule. Hard to fund. And definitely hard to take to your board of directors.

Some are afraid that we’re doomed to only make EQ clones in the future, and that this ‘elusive nature of fun’ thing supports that notion. I don’t buy it. Based upon the troubled launch of UO, EA was able to bet repeatedly on finding alternate versions of MMO goodness: say what you will about Earth and Beyond, Sims Online, Motor City and Majestic, but they weren’t EQ clones. And they were all big financial bets. Electronic Arts may be slavedriving chowderheads, but you can’t knock their willingness to take chances.

The future will see more MMOs, and a wider variety of designs. However, as these price tags go up, there will be a higher expectation for designers to completely put executive minds as risk. Execs needs to feel like the risks they are taking are reasonable and within reach of something ‘fun’ before they commit huge budgets to them. How this pans out is anyone’s guess, although two easy conclusions would be: (1) Designers of hugely expensive games will have to fight harder to make MMOs that are more than just evolutionary and (2) Greater experimentation will happen in the cheaper games.