Let's cut to the chase: most people in game design ghettoes should just take an existing game and modify it to do what they want. There's nothing wrong with this. I remember back in the day pretentious nerds on The Forge making up fancy terms for it like "drifting" and "hacking", but in the end it just means house rules. If you take a bundle of house rules and codify them so other people can use them, though, a lot of the time you end up with a pretty nice product. Elder Dragon Highlander's (EDH) Magic format was an awfully nice example of this: made by some guys who were allegedly bored in Alaska, EDH ended up becoming so popular that the company that produces Magic started making products aimed specifically at players of the product. Predictably, official involvement by the parent company had a negative influence on the format and game as a whole, but that's another topic. Another great example is Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (HotAC), a fantastic modification of the X-Wing miniatures game that converts it from a multiplayer skirmish game into a cooperative campaign game. It's phenomenal, and while the website is unfortunately down and FFG also "expanded" X-Wing into the garbage, my fondest memories of playing X-Wing are pretty much all from our two four-player HotAC campaigns, and I've played (and still play) a lot of X-Wing.
These modifications of games are impressive achievements; they've taken an existing product and addressed a desire to meet different needs that the game originally did. I think often, this is what people designing games from the ground up might actually want. There's a game out there that they like, but it's not quite meeting their needs, so they set out to make their own version that addresses their grievance. Unfortunately, this is how we end up with vast tracts of half- or unfinished games in game design ghettoes. Making a game from the ground up is hard and often boring. But working within an existing game? Much easier, faster, and in ways often more rewarding anyway. |
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