Inspiration or Creative Plagiarism

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about where I get my ideas for games from. One primary reason for this is that I haven’t really had any good ideas for games recently, so instead thought I should at least understand what prompts my thoughts. In attempting to examine my creative processes, I’ve realised two things about myself:
1. I get many ideas for games based on wanting to improve elements of games I play; and
2. I get the majority of the rest of my ideas from good books
This highlights some important facts: I rely on other media (such as novels) as a form of inspiration for ideas, and I’m most likely to end up developing something that is either a direct or inadvertent plagiarism of someone else’s work.

I find that other games are a great source of inspiration for either foundling ideas for a game as a whole, or for general ideas for game mechanic developments. I’ll address books in a later post.
Just recently, I decided to whip out the credit card and see if World of Warcraft was still as unstimulating as it was a year ago when I stopped playing it (actually, I fired up my friend’s account and used a ‘Try the Burning Crusade for 10 days for free’ pass to save my credit card). What I found was that in general terms, yes it is still as unstimulating as it was. In roughly a year, and about three patches, the game appears to have changed little. This once again got me thinking about some ideas I’ve had for World of Warcraft.

Firstly, the idea of factions. Factions play a significant part in WoW. Several thousand people spend countless hours playing and killing the same group of monsters to build up enough reputation with a certain faction, to be able to buy the latest cosmetic upgrade to their wardrobe. In addition to that, the narrative and game-play is strongly dependent on the two primary factions of the game, the Alliance and Horde.

This got me to thinking about different faction mechanics that could be implemented in the game. What if, as a player, you didn’t want to remain as a member of your designated faction? Change your character? What if you felt no particular allegiance to the Alliance or the Horde? Prompted by one of the early WoW background pictures, I came up with the idea for an ‘Outcast’ faction, a faction that a player could choose to join by forsaking their own faction.
I’m sure there would be several organisational headaches with implementing such a model, but I can’t personally think of any reasons why it ultimately wouldn’t work, and I believe that it could be quite a successful addition to a game such as WoW, giving players even more choice in how they play the game.

I have also been thinking recently about the possibility of allowing players to join the already existing in-game factions, such as the Argent Dawn, or Cenarion Circle. This could be used as a alternative mechanic for allowing Horde and Alliance to work together (for those who say this is against the narrative of the game, just have a look at these factions – it already happens with NPCs, why not players), and could also provide a means for expanding the immersive experience for players. Being a member of a faction such as the Argent Dawn for instance, could open up avenues of the game that are not available to other players. In my opinion, that would be a more worthwhile reward than a chestpiece (no matter how epic).

The problem with these ideas is that they are rather specific to an already existing game. They do, however, have merit as starting points for the development of other game ideas or mechanics.