Member rant: What is a Unique Game?
(note from @ddrfr33k: This is likely the start of something new. We're kinda testing this out, @ahmadmanga offered to write this for us. With my help, I helped him refine his writing, and this is the end result. We're doing this instead of a weekly discussion post, but I hope you respond to his question at the end!)
Hello OPgamers!
@ahmadmanga is here! Days ago, I was asked by a friend “What is unique game?” While thinking of an answer, I figured the answers will be different for each person. How do we define a unique game? What’s the meaning of the word Unique in the first place?
So I did some research and wrote this article. I should mention that I got some help from @ddrfr33k, he’s a great guy!
Unique
Being the only existing one of its type or, more generally, unusual, or special in some way.
There are many games that are called unique. Even though that as medium, video Games usually are usually improved clones of each other. There is barely a game (especially in AAA scene) that is truly “the only one of its type.”
GTA popularized the open world that almost every game have these days. Call of Duty series created a generation of Online Mode Shooters. Battle Royale games are basically reskins of each other (Fortnite, Overwatch.) There are even game genres that publishers & fans demand to be exact the same of each other.
But there’s some hope. There have been many innovations through the years. Snake Pass is a platformer without jumping. It’s probably the first of its kind to use its #unique game mechanic of moving the Snake.
There are many games that are unusual or special compared to its genre. There are the games that offer new types of gameplay, or strange stories. Sometimes by mixing different known ones in a strange way. Slay the Spire & Hand of Fate fused multiple genres together. Spelunky created a whole genre by mixing roguelike & platformer to create endless exploration experience.
There’s also another layer of this, People value uniqueness in different ways. Some players want a new type of Gameplay, a new system Some people want an exciting story, something they never heard before or a new twist on a familiar plot. Some players want the game to feel different, even if everything of the game is copied from other games, books or any other medium.
It doesn’t matter if it’s due to the style, the art or just the way everything is pulled together. If it feels different than anything I’ve played before, I will call that game unique.
Life is Strange is unique for its time manipulation and its quirky teenagers. Bastion’s uniqueness comes from its narrator and the feel of the world. Since I enjoy Visual Novels, I find Higurashi series unique in how it switches the between funny and horrific moods without warning.
Games that had unique elements at their release period are too many to count (even of most of them had those elements copied.) Pepsiman is a prime example of this. Everything is so copied it makes the king of plagiarism cry!
What is a unique game in your opinion?
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Hey @admadmanga, nice post yah got here. Resteem’d. Anyways, instead of answering what’s a unique game to me, I’ll just answer the same q you spent answering here in this post.
Well if we’re completely honest: we need to look at all essential components like story, gameplay-gamedesign and gravitas in the gaming landscape. Gameplay-gamedesign was already covered here by this lovely post. Story, I say, is-as essential to gameplay-gamedesign - my wild statement is this one: yes Doom had a story, we just filled in the gaps by playing it - a personal ludonarrative if we must, which hyprocritically can be found in the original Half-Life as well in exploration and small talk with NPCs. (If you couldn’t take what you saw on the screen and subjectivize it to make sense of it and justify such, then Doom would’ve been dropped on the first kill since you wouldn’t understand why people find satisfaction in killing Dæmons other than their death sprite and death noise.) Which leaves me, in this anti-dissertation, to finally talk about gravitas: the influence/gravity a game has on the gaming World, regardless of any popularity it may have at any given point of time. This category matters a lot since it’s essentially the excess of the two previous categories working together while still having an independent aspect to help develop or make new trends in gaming. (Without gravitas, a trend dies out or gives way to other subtrends that’ll carry the game industry forward.)
Which leads me to speak this statement without issue: if a game is lacking or fails to develop one of these essentials, then it fails to be unique, but it doesn’t mean the game is exceptional. I could go on with a Wolfenstein3D-Doom-DukeNukem-Quake-Daikatana diatribe here, but lemme just restate what I already said in another way but in parts. Gameplay should be obvious here, but lemme add one complexity to this: the prospect of clones to and upgrades to an existing trend-defining game. Duke Nukem 3D, which was a clone of Doom which that was an upgrade and clone to Wolfenstein 3D, would in my eyes get a pass because it shows that Doom-styled games can have real 3D unlike Carmack’s psuedo-3D (which for all intent’s and purposes might as well count to be the only 3D game without 3D support) and still screw around with sprites. Moving onto story - Doom gets a pass on its story and still be unique for a variety of reasons, but two core components ring up: playfulness with ludonarrative and environment (which Doom succeeds in both, just like Half-Life which has a semi-established story in that game alone). But if games have no story (Doom has a nugget of story - we’ll avenge you DoomGuy’s rabbit!), or frankly bad ones, and makes no effort to allow a ludonarrative to happen unconsciously, then it fails to be unique. Finally leading to gravitas, for which the actual reason I think I still invoke that Doom and Duke Nukem 3D are unique games since they both affirm the shooting genre while being trend-definers for the gaming industry and their company as well. For which it allows me to say Fortnite is unique in a genre of clones similar to Duke Nukem being unique in a genre of Doom-clones, it knows how to make these two essentials work together well that its excess, gravitas, was radiating across the gaming landscape that it absolutely made game companies wish they made clones of battle royales now.
And now leaves me to this: whenever someone talks about a game that appears not unique but they invoke that it has unique elements yet untapped by the gaming industry, they really mean to talk about that aspect and care not for other aspects. For they desire to make that unique aspect have gravitas which will make new trends or define existing ones. The Timesplitters series had some unique gameplay and a unique story, but its gravitas was either lacking or overshadowed by Goldeneye so much that it could be a game that gave Goldeneye-esque games a loud bang when they died for the time being. Yet what I really would care about Timesplitters isn’t really it but the components of it that I wish to see thrive in the gaming landscape - Sgt. Cortez I know you’ll be able to fight again someday if they ever finish Timesplitters Rewind!
Totally agree with this one, I do it all the time. Especially in my Pepsiman example in the post:
Your comments are always insightful!
UwU
well, that was short...
Length and profoundness have a coincidental relationship, for the common person can make more truth in a sentence than can an ivory pillarist in a dissertation.
So true.
You. I like you. You're awesome.
Dziekuje!
Dude, are you in the OPG groups? Because you are the kind of OP writer we want in our ranks.
Seriously, come join our Discord if you haven't.
I will send you my discord tag sometime later today. I’ll warn you ahead of time again.
No need! If you scroll up, there's an OPG logo at the end of the post. click on the logo, that links to our discord.
Alright will do so later today!
I think that there is so many games, hundred thousands of titles so games can't be unique in 2018 like in 1994, because even if now now game will be unique... Still it uses something that we had seen in other games.
I think Unique game is completely new type of game. Games who had massive impact on next games like:
First Dota - Entire MOBA genre
PUBGy - Battle Royale games (to be honest h1z1 was first but King of the hill mode and PUBGy is built by the same person)
Doom - not first 3d FPS but have so massive impact
ect.
Wow, I didn't know that.
Also, about the latest version of Doom it had a unique mechanic that encourages player to fight monsters in close combat. Or so I heard!
There was guy who "discover" Battle Royale, and Sony hired him for h1z1 but then he quits and he make PUBGY
Yeah, I heard about him.
Post writer here:
Thanks for the help, great to see it on @Opgaming page, upvoted & resteemed! If anyone has comments and/or suggestions to me please put them under this comment.
Upvoted myself to stay on top.
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