Design diary: The problem with games that are ‘too unique’
Make your game unique… but make sure it ‘fits’.
Famously, the movie Alien was pitched as ‘Jaws in space’.
That simplistic pitch didn’t just sum up the movie. More importantly, ‘Jaws in Space’ communicated how Alien would sit with moviegoers. How it would ‘land’.
As a society, we place a premium on uniqueness.
However, a game (or book, or painting, or whatever) that is entirely different than everything else rarely ‘lands’ in the market. People just don’t know how to think or feel about it.
The human brain goes to a lot of trouble to streamline its processes. We tend to ignore things that are too unfamiliar, because that would mean ‘work’.
Inventures, for example, is a board game that offers light roll playing experiences powered by symbol interpretation instead of dice. Going into the design process, I figured that it wouldn’t matter how ‘different’ the game was from others in the market. I underestimated the power of a few drops of familiarity.
It took me a while (and I’m not sure if I’ve yet succeeded) to figure out how to balance the ‘uniqueness’ of the game with an approach to get it to ‘land’ with audiences. It would have been easier to have made a game that targets a specific core audience (RPG players, coop gamers, etc.), because they ‘know what they’re looking for’.
Advice: When working on a game, marry your passion for innovation with a strategic appreciation of familiarity. Think: what is familiar about my game? How can I make it easy for my game to ‘land’ with potential players?