Technology is the only limit to the ideas we can push. But that limit will ensure a continuous stream of new ideas into our games, even after all of us are dead :P

Most aspiring game developers get into the hobby or industry because they fell in love with a game or games. They probably have a list of features that their beloved game should have had, and so they set off to make it a reality. Along the way, they realize the job is much more difficult than they first imagined. This is where most run away.

Those that push on realize that the work involved merits even more originality to make the struggle worth-while. Simply copying a game and adding new features is kind of like those neighborhoods you see with ten identical houses. The value of each would be much, much higher if they were more unique, and each one had to be built from the ground up regardless. The comparison isn't really fair, considering the same workers built all of the houses, which sped up the building process :)

I don't believe that summing up story plots in a few words means those ideas have been done before. You can call both Fallout and Zelda role playing games, but you'll have a difficult time finding anyone who would say they are even similar.

The misguided role playing title itself proves that generic titles are no match for categorizing sories or ideas. Nearly all games are role playing games, so you could easily say we've already used up the only idea for a game we've had.

In other words, we'll never run out of ideas. Just like music, artwork, or clothing, the more we get used to certain tastes, the more dramatic things become to change the flavor. Eventually we'll be listening to screeching sounds and wear nothing but nose-rings :P -People of that time will look back and call us weird for wearing animal remains and living in structures built from tree carcasses.

Quote:Original post by XVampireX
What happens when the world runs out of game ideas and all ideas have been used up by other games already?

Then we declare computer games to be finished and all move on to something else [grin].

However, I don't think we'll run out of ideas soon. While it can be argued that there are a finite number of possible computer games, the number of possibility is so staggeringly huge we will never reach the limit. I've got at least three dozen ideas of computer games that haven't been done yet (well, to my knowledge [wink]). Granted, most of them could be considered modifications of what currently exists, but they still involve the evolution of new game ideas.

There's still millenia of innovation left before we're stuck with creating "Pong: The Next Generation".