Everyone Is Clones

The people behind the Indie Games Winter Uprising are promising to provide an alternative to the “massage apps, clones and garbage” that (apparently) make up the bulk of the Xbox Indie Games Marketplace. Let’s set aside for a moment the sour grapes underlying the whole premise (which again undermines the notion, beloved of game journalists, that indie devs are a bunch of cool guys who are above the usual games industry nonsense). What’s so bad about being a clone?

Try to think of a completely new style of game. Go on, really try. Don’t just mix genres, or come up with a scenario that nobody has used within an existing genre. No, try to think of something that nobody has ever done.

Can’t do it? Don’t feel bad, most people can’t. Moreover, most people don’t really want to, including the people who developed the Winter Uprising’s line-up of shooters, RPGs and adventure games. They were happy to work within existing genres, but they also seem happy to take cheap-shots at others for doing the same.

There’s nothing wrong with being a “clone.” For years, all first person shooters were called “Doom clones,” even by people who liked them. Dungeon-crawls like Shiren the Wanderer and Zettai Hero Project are called “Roguelikes” because they’re like Rogue, the progenitor of that particular type of RPG. If you wanted, you could call the seemingly endless parade of modern dual-stick shooters “Robotron 2084 clones.”

None of this is insulting. People like Shigeru Miyamoto, David Crane, John Romero and John Carmack, Roberta Williams, and so on weren’t necessarily the most creative game designers of their time—they were just in the right place at the right time to get their ideas out there first. That others explored the same concepts after them may make them “clones” in a strict sense, but it doesn’t necessarily make them uncreative.

People who think that being unoriginal is necessarily bad are deluding themselves in a couple of ways. First, they think it’s possible to do something that nobody has ever thought of before. Miyamoto’s game designs are original as far as games go, but they borrow ideas from popular fiction like King Kong and Alice in Wonderland. Second, they’re ignoring the long artistic tradition of imposing limits in order to spur creativity. Are poetic forms like the sonnet less creative than free verse? If you’ve ever attended a bad poetry slam, you know the answer.

As for massage apps, Justin Le Clair’s original entry into the genre, Rumble Massage, was just that—original. It was followed by a number of clones, and while I haven’t played any of them, I’m willing to accept that most of them are garbage. But it’s not necessarily true that all of them are.

So what is the uprising really against, since it clearly isn’t really against clones. If it’s against low quality, then more power to those behind it, but they’re being elitists by pretending that it’s impossible for certain products (e.g. massage apps) to be high quality. And if what they really want is for XBIG to contain nothing but traditional gaming experiences (like RPGs and shooters), then they’re actually against originality, since those traditional games are, by definition, derivative.

Anyone who is enthusiastic enough to make a game is probably enthusiastic about games in general, and therefore can’t help but be inspired by the work of others. In other words, everyone is ripping off something, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with slamming your peers for a lack of originality while promoting your own entries into well-worn genres as somehow better.