After 16 years in the game biz, I've been around long enough to here every bitch and moan many times. One of the more frequent (and well justified) is that publishers are so risk-adverse as to rarely support new, innovative ideas in games (although they nearly all claim to be in the business of innovation and creativity).

I came across this column in Communication Arts and thought it addressed the issue well and thought I'd share it as grist for the mill. The section that applies here:

"The bean counterculture
John Moore, former Starbucks and Whole Foods marketing executive and author of Tribal Knowledge: Lessons Learned From Working Inside Starbucks, runs a blog called Brand Autopsy. Last year, he wrote a post titled, “Is it Making Money or Making Meaning?” While the piece was referring to what’s more important to an employee, finding meaning in a job or making money, John could just as easily have been discussing the role that risk aversion in the name of making a profit plays in the growth of ideas.

Most of us would agree that this is not exactly the golden age of filmmaking. Citizen Kane would have a hard time getting made in 2007, but a Citizen Kane remake, sacrilege though I know it is to even suggest the thought, might stand a better chance.

Why is that?

Because the bean counters have stormed the control room and bean counters know where their bread is buttered and they aren’t taking chances on something new and different. So we are subjected to Scooby-Doo, Starsky & Hutch, the Mission Impossible saga, S.W.A.T., The Brady Bunch, Charlie’s Angels, Lost in Space, Thunderbirds, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Hulk, Little Rascals, Mod Squad, I Spy and McHale’s Navy.

There is nothing wrong with caution. Creativity is a hard thing to measure. It could soar. It could crash and burn. No one ever really knows for certain. So it’s understandable that any company, movie studio or otherwise, is going to be more willing to stick its neck out for the familiar, the comfortable. Creative societies are courageous societies. If we’re not willing to risk failure, if we’re not willing to encourage it, our ability to keep pace creatively with the rest of the world is going to be dangerously hampered.

The war on creativity is real. If you have not felt it yet, you will. It grows by the hour. But it’s not too late. As Ebenezer Scrooge can tell you, these are not the images of things as they will be, but things as they might be. We can turn it around. We can open our minds. We can give the inborn creativity in our children water and light and nourishment and give it room to grow and become brilliant and mighty. We can dig a hole in the ground and we can bury fear and suspicion and preconception and intolerance.

We need to stand up for creativity.

We need to rally the armies of innovation from wherever we can find them.

We need to win this war. "

Now, he comes from the perspective of a graphic designer/illustrator and the rally cry doesn't do devs much good except to make us churn all the more. Still, it begs the question of how do we break out of the cycle of developing the same old 5-6 games over and over again?

The rest of the article is here: www.commarts.com/ca/colad/ernS_342.html