Generational games

I was discussing this topic and figured I would share my take aways here.

There are a lot of different type of games in different genres. But what types are the most likely to go generational?

Competetive games

In this category of games we find games that have a long shelf life, mostly because of a balance competitive scene that keeps bringing fresh blood to the games.

Here we find games such as League of Legends/Dota, Counter Strike, Starcraft & Fighting games.

These games all managed to go generational becuase they became sports; playing the game is an inherently competetive thing and the satisfaction comes from beating your opponent(s).

Even a game like tetris which in a by itself looks fairly non competetive is being played on a competetive level.

I suspect that a large part of what makes this category of games have a long shelf life is the inherent marketing that competitions produce. Which is probably also why we see relative little movement in these games.

I also note that most of the games here never started out with an intention to build a competitive game - but rather the developers created tools and features in the game that afforded the competive scene to grow and prosper. In the example of Dota/Counter Strike some of these features would be the spectator modes and ability to download replays of matches.

Not only does those features afford the production needed to create a flourishing competetive game, but they also afforded their players to acquire game knowledge without playing the game it self.

For competetive games the shelf life is long, but so is the maintenance life, the developers keep tweaking the games by changing existing features or adding new ones, but the constant evolution of the game seems necessary for the spectators to continue feeling like its not always the same old (Which is a bit perplexing when comparing to regular sports that change relatively slowly)

Network games

This category contains behemoths like World of Warcraft, EVE Online.

In this category I suspect the main draw is less the game and more the social interactions (or rituals) that the games afford.

If all your real life friends are playing WoW then you're much more likely to play WoW over a competitor like The Elder Scrolls Online.

These games also tend to become social rituals; ie. you come home from work on a friday and it's raid night - for many people that played WoW in the early days this ritual of gathering around the game was a large part the draw.

What puzzles me the most with these type of games is how to start the network (much like any network business really) - if nobody played WoW it wouldn't be very fun to be the first player.

For WoW in particular the answer was probably good marketing and timing to market (by the time WoW was released there weren't that many MMO's).

Just like the games in aforementioned category the games in this category require somewhat constant maintenance by the developers.

Games that facilitate play

These games stand out from the two other categories in that the shape of the game is not really game shaped, they rarely have a story or a beginning and end, rather they are sandboxes that caters to the imagination of the player and give them tools to play in the game world.

In this category of games we find Roblox, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld and arguably the best known of them all; Minecraft.

These games are not played for their competive nature or because of their social aspect (Though Minecraft can also be considered a network game). They are played for a much simpler reason; it's fun to exist in the game. The game gives the player an often very loosely defined experience and lets their players create their own goals/features in the game. Immersiveness in these games however breaks from the traditional thought that immersiveness is correlated with graphical fidelity. Rather these games all bring in immersiveness from the affordances they lend the player, be it creating your own Red Stone based CPU in minecraft or generating stories through in depth simulation like in Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft

And it's this feature of the games that is interesting - they are massively popular games that refuse to be games - they are much more akin to creative tools or sandboxes. A prime comparison in non-digital games would be Dungeons and Dragons, a DnD campaign can be anything as long as the players and the DM are enjoying their time.

And contrary to the games in the previous categories I think these games could survive and see play without much if any dev maintenance (of course the games have to be playable on new HW)