Entertainment Genres
2020-01-20
It’s common to hear old-timers complain that today’s movies/music/tv/games aren’t innovative, and aren’t even as good as something 20+ years old.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it, and I’m going to use video games as an example.
Prior art
Video games didn’t really come into their own until the 90s, where most genres of video games that we know today were invented in a very short span of time. RTS, FPS, simcity (sim-everything really), 4x (civilization-esque), "space game", horror, pokemon - etc. We could sit here all day and list totally new formats and styles of games that were created between 1990 and 2000. One could quibble about whether or not some games were derivative of something prior or not; but what we can all agree on is that the 90s spawned almost every single mechanic and "formula" of video game that is in use today. And if you don’t agree, ask yourself how many games you’ve played that were so totally different from what came before that you couldn’t even explain what the game was without showing someone footage of it.
The 2000s and 2010s saw a dramatic drop in new kinds of games. While i don’t have data on-hand, it really shouldn’t need to be shown how many games have their core mechanics, gameplay loop, visual style, or storytelling copied straight from some game in the 90s.
So, aren’t I just reinforcing all those old-timers’ point about how everything is derivative? Well, yes - but I don’t think there was ever an alternative.
Video games in the 90s were a small industry. A half dozen guys could spend 10 months building a game that changed the course of the whole industry, because the whole industry was tiny. There was no prior art - video games in homes were hardly even 10 years old (if we assume that the release of the Macintosh in 1984 or NES in 1985 was the start). Level design, gameplay, visuals, sound, storytelling, even basic mechanics were not set in stone. Nobody had any idea what they were doing, they just made whatever seemed cool to them.
As more and more developers added more and more cool ideas to the industry, it became harder for them to build ideas in isolation. If you started building video games in the year 2000, you’d likely already played all the major genres from the 90s - your idea of what was possible in a video game was tinted by that. If you’d spent the last ten years playing action games, you’re probably going to slap a healthbar and projectile system into your game just like everyone else. Maybe the feel of your game was very different (compare Quake vs CS, for instance) but ultimately it’s the same game premise. Fast-forward to 2010, or 2020, and you can see how the same ideas get "recycled."
Consumers / Saturation
It’d be easy to simply blame "businessmen" for the major publishers shipping sequels and copies of the same games we’ve played for 30 years. But when you go into something as a professional, it means you want to make money doing it. That’s not an evil thing, you need money to pay your rent and put gas in your car. If the things you make aren’t selling, you’re going to make something else. Businessmen may have done a lot of bad things to a lot of bad companies, but we can’t blame "elites" for how the industry is today. They sell them because we buy them, and we don’t buy the more niche stuff. I know we’re talking video games, but Hollywood has been having the exact same problem since the 80s. It affects all of entertainment - people have to buy what you’re selling.
While we could analyze what goes into consumer purchasing, I’m not that interested in it. But let’s just content ourselves by saying that consumers want something better than what they already have. It has to look better, play better, be fresh or more fun, have more people to play with, or do the same thing as a previous game better in order for consumers to want it. If you get any of those things even a tiny bit ahead of what came before people will buy it.
That makes professionally-made games extremely expensive to make. What took a half-dozen guys under a year to churn out in 1992 (Doom) takes three years and a team of >200 to do in 2016 (Doom again). This isn’t because the base gameplay is so complicated, it’s because consumers wouldn’t buy it if it didn’t look awesome, sound awesome, have lots of content, smooth animations, and excellent multiplayer. These are ridiculous goals, but when was the last time you saw a successful game that looked and sounded like a literal child made it? Not good ideas executed poorly, I mean like an actual child made it? Or maybe put another way, if you put two games with identical gameplay in front of someone, one with awful aesthetic and one with awesome aesthetic, and told them to pick, which would they go for? Almost always the pretty one. So every professionally-made game needs to be pretty, now.
You might think to yourself "well I’d pick the shit-looking game", and maybe that’s true. But that’s because those games are rare, you’re valuing the scarcity of a game that doesn’t look like the others. If every game looked awful, you’d probably be blown away by the good-looking ones. And if you’re at least 30, we can prove this notion by noting how advanced graphics got year-over-year from the 90s onward. So trust me, even if you think you’d ironically go for the bad-looking game, you wouldn’t if that’s all you had.
Consumers demand more work go into each game, so each game is a bigger financial risk, meaning that if you were a full-time game developer who wanted to remain that way, you’d be much more likely to make something that you know will sell, rather than just some cool idea you came up with in the shower one time.
Iteration instead
The core conceit that entertainment today is derivative of what came before is true. But inventing things out of whole cloth isn’t how new things are introduced today. Instead, an old formula is given a new ingredient, or tweaked a bit, to create something original. It’s still leaning on generations of prior art, and still likely to sell to consumers who demand high production standards; but it’s just different enough to stand out. You can see that in something like Battle Royale games. It’s not like 64- or 128-player servers didn’t exist before games like PUBG or Fortnite came out; far from it. We need only take a glance over to things like Battlefield or Planetside to know that they did. Third-person shooters, looting, permadeath, etc - it all predated battle royale. Even the concept of "Last Man Standing" was done decades ago in Unreal Tournament (and mods for other games). What made these titles different wasn’t some new cool idea, it was the combination of old ideas. A tweak of the standard third-person shooter formula.
Diverting back to movies, we can see this mirrored closely in MCU movies. In the beginning, all the Marvel movies were pretty standard moviegoing fare. But more recently, they each take their own tone; Spiderman movies are teen comedy-dramas, Captain America does spy thrillers, Guardians of the Galaxy are family-centric space comedies, etc. Even though they’re all "superhero" movies that boil down to a five-act structure with action and big boss set pieces at the end, they all feel different, they say different things. Instead of trying to invent some entirely new genre of film, films iterate on emotions and ideas. All entertainment does.
Art is always derivative
There’s a notion that art can be wholly original - that someone will sit in a dark room, do a ton of drugs, and come up with something the world has never seen. It doesn’t work that way.
All of art is mixing and remixing influences. Even things that seem totally new (looking at you, Impressionism) is really just a reaction to what existed before, and toying with things that were contemporary to the artist. Every song, every instrument, every painting, every way of making paintings, every movie, every video game, every fancy dish a chef ever dreamed up - it came from something. It required the creator to go "I wonder what would happen if i did this but different?"
Even if we look at video games from the 90s, which I based this whole diatribe on, we clearly see that they came from something else. 4x games were influenced by tabletop games, FPS games grew out of the idea of moving the perspective of a top-down arcade shooter to the actual character themselves, Pokemon was inspired by insect collecting - no matter what thing we consider "original", a quick interview with the creators shows that they actually thought the idea was pretty obvious, if one only looked.
So are old-timers wrong?
No, this is just a case of old-timers ending their thought process at the beginning of the journey. Someday I might write a whole piece on that later. Suffice to say that asking the question "is entertainment derivative these days?" is not bad - what’s bad is taking a "yes" or "no" and assuming the question is answered.
