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Kavir is definitely correct, and it applies to games generally, not just MUDs. In MUDs generally (text and graphical both), the overwhelming success of WoW is attributable largely to giving people a very familiar and relatively simple experience, just with more polish.
Look at the best-seller lists for games sometime. The top 10 is usually 70-80% sequels and licensed games with completely generic gameplay. It's just what people want.
However, the exceptions can be HUGE. When a game does break out of the standard molds, it breaks out in a very big way. Doom and the Sims are good examples of games that at least seemed new at the time and managed to be phenomenally successful.
The first instinct of many people is to bemoan this and to wish that people would play "innovative" games. I'm part of a little indie game developer mailing list/community, and Marc LeBlanc (worked on System Shock and Thief at Looking Glass Studios back in the day), whose indie game won the 2004 Independent Games Festival's top prize, posted something during a discussion we were having over the state of the games industry and innovation. I think he's spot on.
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Marc wrote:
This whole innovation argument seems like it's all a matter of semantics. It seems like people use the term "innovation" to imply some sort of vast quantum leap from games that are "merely evolutionary" to games that are "truly evolutionary." In my opinion, *innovation* is a red herring; that kind of distinction doesn't really exist in practice.
I heard a story about how Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday." He told his friends that he had a tune stuck in his head, and he couldn't identify what song it was or where he had heard it. When he played it for his friends, they told him that he must have made this tune up, it wasn't any tune they had heard. He added lyrics and it became "Yesterday."
So was "Yesterday" a new song, or an old one? Did McCartney make it up, or did he regurgitate some long lost cousin of "greensleeves" that most people had forgotten? More importantly, does it matter? Would it make a difference as to whether "Yesterday" was "innovative" or not?
Was Tetris innovative? It started a whole genre of "action puzzle" games. But really, there were games before it where you caught falling objects, and other games where you had to pack polyominos tightly in a space. Couldn't Tetris be fairly described as a hybrid of those games? Isn't hybridization the opposite of innovation?
Look at board games. Surely, the input devices haven't changed since the industrial revolution. Yet, somehow new games keep coming out. But aren't they just syntheses of old mechanics? By and large, yes. But that doesn't stop them from contributing something new and unique to the genre. One of my current favorite board games, LotR: The Confrontation, contains no mechanics that can't be found in Stratego or Magic or Poker, but the resulting mix is something unique, something worthy of study, something that can entertain for hours. But is it Innovative? Who the hell cares?
If there is a sickness in the game industry, it's not the lack of innovation, it's the obsession *with* innovation, the notion that there's this vast chasm between "trite" and "fresh," between "old" and "new." It's a lie. Get over it. All games are syntheses. All games are old. All games are new. Sim City is just Hammurabi, and yet not. Katamari Damacy is just Pac-Man, and yet not. There are no great innovators in our industry, only great synthesists.
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--matt
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