Who innovates video games?

Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT noticed many products that are manufactured are refined and modified by the users. These refinements and modifications are then put back into the manufacturing business to make a product that better serves the customer’s job.

This is called User Innovation. Some of the best examples of User Innovation is from the invention of scooters and skateboards. Skateboards were made by surfers who wanted to surf when the waves were flat. For a while, skateboarding was called ‘street surfing’. Various advancements in wheel and board technology, all of it done by users, created the modern skateboard. The invention of skateboard parks and tricks were done by skateboard users.

When we look at video games, almost all the innovations are from user innovations. When Sid Meir played a crappy airplane game and said, “I can make a better game than that,” that is user innovation. When Nolan Bushnell played Space War and wanted to improve on that and other games, along with the people in that era, that was also user innovation. Richard Garriott, the inventor of the Ultima series, was nothing but a user trying to innovate on various products around him from Lord of the Ring books to board games resulting in the Computer Role Playing Game.

The very first ‘video game designers’ were actually users of games and other mediums (like toys, Nintendo was a toy company before a video game company). Many people who got into game design were due to them creating user innovations (e.g. modders).

One gamer was named Jay Cotton. He wanted to play Doom over the Internet. So he devised a way for Local Area Network to be tricked over the Internet. He eventually spread this technique to other PC games and sold a service of it called Kali.

What is relevant about that? One of the games that found profound popularity over Kali was Warcraft 2. Blizzard was so impressed that they included Kali with the Warcraft 2 CD. Without the user innovation of Kali, there would be no Battle Net. And there would be no WoW.

User innovation is one of the big reasons behind Blizzard’s rise. Did you know that in each Blizzard game, there is an outlet for user innovation? Most of it revolves around the map editor. Without Warcraft 3’s map editor, there would be no tower defense games. Defense of the Ancients didn’t rise from a particular individual or several individuals. It came from all the Warcraft 3 map makers (much of it was stealing each other’s spell codes, but whatever…).

Even in World of Warcraft, there is the customizable interface. A user can install many various add-ons. Many of these addons, these user innovations, make their way into the full game. One of them was the map quest helper. One guy, early on, created a business by trading WoW accounts (not legal of course). But Blizzard eventually absorbed that and made it possible to transfer accounts across servers. Most recently (like in days ago), there were various websites that allowed people to put in all the mounts and pets they had or wanted. The user could then share this list with their friends (mount collecting is big in WoW). So days ago, Blizzard announced an addition to their armory page where it lists all the mounts and pets the user has and doesn’t have. User innovation is so important to Blizzard that they routinely hire modders. One third of Starcraft 2’s development team were modders, I believe.

Doom, Quake, Half-life and Unreal also have their share and examples of User innovation that found their way back into the games. These examples are numerous, but I’m not as well knowledgeable about them.

It is really impossible to imagine video game innovation without user innovation. Game developers know they must put themselves in the user’s perspective in order to make the game. The fuzzy issue is “When does the developer stop being the user, i.e. the young gamer, and become separated from gaming?” Making games you want to play works wonderfully when you are a user. But when you cease to be a user, this does not work so well.

The reason why Aonuma’s “innovations” do not work with Zelda is because he is not, and never has been, a user of Zelda or of video games in general. In a similar way, Sakamoto’s “innovations” to Metroid are not welcomed because these ‘innovations’ did not come from a user’s perspective. Sakamoto never talks as a player, only as some mythical god-like ‘creator’. Contrast Metroid: Other M with Metroid Prime and you can see that the Metroid Prime developers were great fans of Metroid’s playstyle and atmosphere.

When Gunpei Yokoi thought of the Game and Watch, the idea came when he observed a bored business man fiddling with a calculator’s buttons on a train. While this isn’t an example of user innovation, it is an example of the developer looking at users’ behaviors for innovation. It didn’t come from his ‘creativity’ (whatever that means).

Who innovates video games? It is the users. And where does a developer look for innovation? “His creativity!” No. From observing users. The DS Lite, with its larger stylus, was done through observing older people struggle with the small stylus. These older people often bought a larger stylus. So it was user innovation in effect.

The Wii was designed around user innovation. It was users who were comfortable with a TV remote but not a game controller that led to the Wii-mote resembling the TV remote. The creation of Wii Sports revolved around watching users play these motion control games in arcades and how they responded well to sports games. Ironically, of all the games that became popular during the Wii Era (Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Brain Age), none of it had anything to do with ‘creativity’. There is no story, no imagination. I contend that is why the early video games, such as Super Mario Brothers, succeeded as well.

Early video game makers were too busy struggling to make the computer do what they wanted it to do to worry about ‘expressing their creativity’. They were happy to get the computer to run their program properly.

And this is why I believe Nintendo must be in a state of crisis. The West understands the concept of ‘user innovation’ and accepts it fully. Nintendo no longer does.

Nintendo really does believe they are ‘Game Gods’, that innovations spring from Miyamoto’s head like Athena did from Zeus. They may even think there is a divine hand at work at giving them these ‘eureka’ innovations.

Nintendo sees itself as playing Game God and watching the market react to their ‘creativity’. They get very excited when the market reacts favorably.

One thing I know for sure is that this is not how Nintendo acted in the 80s or during the creation of the DS and Wii. Yamauchi assigned Miyamoto to make Super Mario Brothers 4 for the launch game for the Super Nintendo because everyone knew that game would sell hardware. Whether or not Miyamoto wanted to make it was irrelevant. In the same way, whether or not Nintendo engineers wanted to make the Wii the size of three DVD cases stacked together was irrelevant.

How can Nintendo say they are a unified hardware and software company when they apply different standards to their hardware and software sides? The hardware side is never allowed to be ‘creative’. Everything is functional. The controllers are functional. The console is functional. Even the aesthetics are designed to be functional, to mesh in with a consumer’s TV equipment. They are not allowed to be ‘creative’ and for good reason. But the software side follows almost entirely opposite rules. Every software must be ‘creative’ (i.e. surprising). Nothing is designed to be functional. While the hardware is designed to perform a job, the software is not designed around a job.

The innovator of video games is the user. If a developer wishes to ‘get ahead’, he needs to become a user, observe users, and see where the users are heading.

The crisis affecting Nintendo is that they wish to desire themselves as the creators instead of the users and their behaviors. Nintendo will come to the conclusion that user innovation is the only innovation in gaming, but the question is how expensive will the lesson be? It took a Gamecube for Nintendo to make a Wii. Will the lesson require the destruction of Nintendo’s handheld market? Will the lesson require the collapse of both Nintendo’s home and portable markets? Will it be one generation or three? This is the question before us.