There’s not one simple answer, but I think there is a very important factor that affects the kinds of risks willing to be taken in modern games development, and it’s perhaps something we’re not very comfortable admitting: that the majority of discussion about games is dominated by a small group of people, and that group is increasingly well-understood by game developers and publishers. `Core’ gamers are a tamed breed – companies know how they think, what they want, and how to make them feel like their needs are being met. They are the people who never ask why a door can’t be opened, they never ask why Mass Effect characters can only die in cutscenes, they never explore the same conversation tree twice expecting new dialogue. At the start of this piece I talked about playing with people newer to games, or the people who are routinely made to feel embarrassed for playing ‘casual’ games, and how it can seem that they make strange decisions that break the conventions we would never dare to. This is not a reflection on them for playing without preconceptions – it should be a reflection on us, as people too entrenched in what games are to be able to think about what they could be.

We need new ideas, new communities, new groups of people making demands about their games, to diversify what is being made and what is seen as important for games to do. This is not just true for games technology, of course – games as a whole need this diversity badly. But it applies here I think, because the kind of games being made right now don’t require much innovation. They have found a niche that most are willing to accept, and the only way to push them out of this comfort zone is to introduce a lot of new voices. The fact is that we’ve stopped asking for things that aren’t easily done. We’ve learned not to ask for things that we’ve not seen done before. We clamour and petition for co-op mode to be added to our favourite shooter, or for Valve to update Dota 2’s UI with a new button, or any other variety of trivial nonsense. These things are easy to conceive of, and when they’re fixed or added the Internet gets to enter full “We Did It, Reddit” mode and feel powerful and significant. In reality, however, we’re incredibly powerless – easily placated by having little successes thrown at us from time to time.

I’m not going to promise you that by asking for the impossible we’re going to suddenly revolutionise the games industry and see new ways of thinking filter into all the games we play. Ubisoft are not going to try and solve wild new problems in the next Assassin’s Creed, because they spend too much money at too large a scale to even consider doing something risky. I do think, though, that if we are more ambitious and open-minded as players, then we can help grow and nurture new cultures besides ones that whine about how many frames per second a game runs at. If we celebrate experimentation more publicly, and ask more interesting questions when we talk to developers, then we create positive pressure on games as a whole. We encourage developers to shed off some of their assumptions when developing games, we motivate journalists to push these ideas in their writing, and we pull cutting-edge games research closer and closer towards what games are doing right now.

Games as a creative domain look very different today to how it looked ten years ago. Twitter, Twitch and YouTube bring us closer to the people that are creating games than ever before, and sites like itch.io and Patreon are making it easier to support creatives working on small-scale and personal projects. We can reach out and touch the people whose work we care about, and watch them develop their work from the very first line of code in many cases. Lots of developers are asking their playerbase directly to suggest improvements, new additions, or areas they’d like to see expanded or worked upon. Most of the time we ask for new weapons and a local multiplayer mode, but we don’t have to. We can ask for anything we want. We don’t have to be reasonable, or sensible, or logical. We’re not being asked to do that. We’re being asked to dream up the technology we want to see, so that other people can decide how or if they can achieve it.

(The title of this part comes from a talk I gave at Videobrains last year on a similar topic – you can watch it here, and if you’re near London you should come to Videobrains’ future events! They’re amazing.)