First, a brief preface: this deals primarily with games that have stories, and the developers who work on them.
Before I explain what I mean, we’ll conduct a survey to see whether you’ve felt the effect of this problem.
Do you ever feel like you’re creating a system (Lib or Game side) for something that has been done before in other games?
Have you rewritten similar systems multiple times for different games?
Do you ignore your writer out of necessity, because you’re having enough trouble making your systems as robust (and bug free) as possible to bother with their special requests or to spend a significant amount of your time with them – in order to realise the story as best as possible?
Do you feel like the systems you create are never utilized at (or even near to) their fullest potential?
Do you often feel, at the end of creating a game, that you’ve just scratched the surface of what you could have achieved? That the game always ends up being somehow less than the sum of its parts?
Now, the title above is a bit of an exaggeration. Your medium does exist. You created it, before – and, more dangerously, while – you were working your current game. And when this game is finished, the next game that you make will no doubt modify your medium so that it’s not quite the same as before, and the lessons you may have learned the last time around will have to be learned all over again.
It is important to understand the extent to which you have created your own medium – this can be done by drawing a parallel to the medium of film.
You see, you haven’t just created your own camera with its own special tricks and render modes. You’ve created your own movie theatre, which isn’t like any other in the world.
In this movie theatre the people who visit have to learn how to sit in your special seats and learn how to watch your special screen. You have your own unique, distracting doodads that pop up during the movie (but are necessary to pull the viewers with short attention spans, of course) and you have spent fewer hours on perfecting your story and methods of storytelling than you’ve spent making sure your seats are the most comfortable in town.
When the viewer leaves your movie theatre and goes to another, it is most likely so wildly different to your own that they have to learn it all anew.
This analogy falls down if you take it further – what is the equivalent for something not story-based, like Geometry Wars? A movie theatre that’s somehow also a playground? But even that illustrates the absurdity of indentifying any narrative-focused game and playground-like game as within the same overarching, all-encompassing medium of “Games.”
We are not story tellers, not yet. We don’t have the time, and cannot afford the focus.
We are inventors – and that will always be an element of who we are as game developers, and of the work that we do. But it won’t be until we quit our ridiculous race for the nicest chairs and the flashiest screens that we’ll be able to concentrate our efforts on taking what we already have and spend our time utilising that relatively static medium to its fullest potential.