There’s a big difference when you meet your clients as a game developer, and as an I.T. tech.

The latter only seems to warrant disdain.

A few weeks ago at the Game Developer’s Conference (and every conference I’ve been to prior) I heard the usual guff about how games now need more innovation. I’ve honestly come to the conclusion that this isn’t actually true. Yes, innovation is nice. Innovation builds more innovation which leads to the next… innovative thing, but I don’t think it’s what will attract more people to gaming. What will? In my opinion, emotional content.

With innovation, people tend to get bored once they explore all facets of the new feature, and for the average clever player, this takes less than a week. Currently, when playing a game (specifically an MMO) the primary attachment is the time investment put into your character. This can branch out into different subsets, such as your l33t items, or level, but essentially they’re all a factor of the treadmill. Yes, there are other aspects that hold people to games, such as the ‘community aspect’ I mentioned in a previous post, but there’s no real emotional attachment to the game itself.

What this leads to is players who will, on a whim, cancel their accounts. No thought goes into the process; they’ve become bored with the game. The latest ‘innovation’ is now just another aspect that they’ve gamed to death. Creating an emotional aspect to the character or the game is what keeps people coming back. You see people playing Meridian 59 ten years after the fact because of the emotional impact that it’s had on their lives. This can manifest itself in a myriad of different ways, of course, whether they met some good friends in the game, or it was simply their first foray into the world of online gaming, or perhaps it inspired a career in game development.

Now that MMO’s are becoming old hat, the options for innovation are becoming fewer and fewer, so focusing on a different aspect could be the solution. There’s been a lot of chatter about the future, and a few comparisons between Second Life and WoW and this got me thinking why people where focusing so much on Second Life. With the option to buy your own land, build it from the ground up, create content that’s unique to only you, I think this is creating some of that emotional attachment. There’s a personal bond between player and game which is a lot harder for people to leave behind than a hollow game experience. So maybe all the latest rants are right. Maybe it’s time that developers stop waiting for the next innovation, and focus on another way to keep gamers interested.