Trope or Nope: Innovation and Familiarity in Game Design

Helldivers 2 continues to impress. Between the constantly changing events in the dynamic live war, the friendly community, and the engaging core gameplay, it feels like a game built to last.

Helldivers 2 innovates in several areas, but the setting is not one of them. Like the original Helldivers, it’s a thinly veiled riff on the Starship Troopers movie’s tone (with a pinch of the Terminator franchise in the Automaton enemies). The same tonal notes are hit – faux-fascist imagery, excessive military protocol, and a goofy pseudo-fifties vibe in the intro cinematic and in-game commercials. 

Indeed, it does as good a job of capturing the movie’s overall feel as the actual Starship Troopers game – maybe even better.

Of course, the Starship Troopers movie wasn’t breaking new ground either. On paper at least, it was an adaptation of a science fiction novel from the late 1950s, one of author Robert Heinlein’s most well-known works.

Unlike its namesake movie, the original Starship Troopers novel doesn’t play its futuristic fascism for ironic laughs. Heinlein leaned far right in his politics; the military deification that’s presented as near-parody in the movie is presented straightforwardly in the book. “Citizenship equals service” was a credo Heinlein believed in.

The novel, though dated and flawed, laid the groundwork for a lot of modern military science fiction tropes. Mech suits, hard-fighting space marines, a swarming and faceless enemy – so much of what we see in games like Halo and movies like Aliens owes a debt to Starship Troopers.

Creative folks often have a burning desire to make something innovative and new. It’s an admirable goal. But something prospective game designers should consider is that there’s almost nothing new under the sun.

Just as the Helldivers team used Starship Troopers as an obvious touchstone, it’s okay if your game recombines, repurposes, and recycles well-known tropes. If a major chunk of your setting and design feels familiar, it buys you the audience’s trust and comfort – and gives you space to genuinely innovate in other areas. 

Slow Burn in the Desert

I always have an in-progress board game on a folding table in my office. This week it’s Sands of Shurax, the third of four games in the HEXplore It series. It’s the usual kind of thing I like – a sprawling cooperative fantasy game, with lots of bits and bobs and cards.

The four HEXplore It games are mechanically similar but diverse in their settings. The first game had a traditional fantasy vibe; players were tracking down a necromancer who threatened the world. The second game was fey-themed – centered around a mysterious cursed forest – while the recent fourth release has a gothic vampire theme (think Dracula and Ravenloft).

The third game and my favorite of the bunch, sprawled across my too-small table, takes place in a desert. It plays with the tropes of traditional Arabian stories – jinn, flying carpets, peaceful oases, and magnificent cities rising out of a baking wasteland. 

So it’s nothing innovative as far as a setting goes. The Big Bad Guy for this particular HEXPlore It iteration is a giant Ravager – a close cousin to the sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune, periodically emerging from the ground, destroying the landscape and leaving crystal towers that cook the land in its wake.

A setting inspired by reality or history is common in traditional science fiction. The best authors understood that grounding their stories in the familiar let them push the boundaries in other areas.

Dune itself drew from a deep well of human storytelling – Middle-Eastern influences, the concept of Islamic Jihad, and the same Arabic legends that inspired Sands of Shurax. Yet Frank Herbert pulled off some comparatively innovative tricks with his characters and plot. 

His hero, Paul Atreides, appears to follow a traditional hero’s journey but is not a traditional hero. In sequels, the idea of what it means to be a Messiah is thoroughly deconstructed, until, by the fourth book, the revolution that Paul starts collapses in a final, apocalyptic way.

Sands of Shurax saves innovation for its gameplay, rather than story or setting. HEXplore It games feature dry-erase character whiteboards, a set of black markers, and a surprising amount of math. They’re not for everyone, but the dense mechanics foster a sense of freedom and accomplishment, as well as the classic RPG feature of watching a lot of large stat numbers get even larger over time.

If Sands of Shurax had a less-familiar setting for its complex blend of slow-burn gameplay, it would have been a much harder sell. But when I hunch over my gaming table puzzling over rules and calculating the results of combat, it’s easy to get immersed in the unfolding story of caravans, buried tombs, and magic carpets. The setting’s familiarity frees up my brain’s bandwidth for the game’s complex mechanics.

Wisely Spending Points

The flip side example of Sands of Shurax is one of my favorite games of recent years, Disco Elysium. The mechanics of ZA/UM’s narrative masterpiece are straightforward – dialogue trees and skill checks of traditional RPGs and early text adventures.

The plot and characters, too, are in line with genre expectations. The down-on-his-luck detective, his steady partner, and a collection of quirky, sometimes dangerous villains and bystanders wouldn’t be out of place in a traditional noir story – a well of genre fiction that Blade Runner also drew from.

The setting is where the creators of Disco Elysium spent their innovation points. The unusual blend of futuristic and weird, a robust and detailed recent political history and the presence of supernatural elements at the fringes have analogs in the real world but are just off-kilter enough to be wholly unfamiliar and fresh when the game begins. 

And then, to get the player in the right mindset, Disco Elysium leverages one of the most traditional tropes around: the amnesiac main character who has to learn about the world alongside the player.

If you dig a little deeper, Disco’s creative and vibrant setting has obvious inspirations in literature and history. Its deeply-held political messages are worn on its sleeve. The game’s lengthy discourses on communism, liberalism, and a host of other topics wouldn’t be out of place in a college course on the philosophy of government.

But it’s a great example of a game that knows where to innovate, and when to lean into a trope – to straddle the perfect boundary between the familiar and the new.

Seek the Source

Human creativity involves a lot of remixing and reusing. I’m not talking about outright theft or plagiarism – rather, selective and thoughtful revisiting of common themes, inspired by the work of others.

Whether you love Lord of the Rings or are deeply tired of it, there’s no denying that Tolkein’s work was hugely influential on the fantasy genre. But modern fantasy works draw from a host of other sources as well. 

Deadhouse Gates, the spectacular second book of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, pulls its setting in part from some of the same concepts that Dune and Sands of Shurax do – stories of jihad, revolution, and myths from Arabian culture. In tone, plot, characters, and setting, it feels nothing like Lord of the Rings – yet it’s a branch of the same fantasy literature tree. 

Of course, Tolkien himself was inspired by other works – the legends of King Arthur, the Welsh tales of Rhiannon, and the epic story of Beowulf. 

It’s valuable to be able to identify the direct line leading from 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 to System Shock’s SHODAN and Portal’s GLaDOS. It’s even more valuable to go a step further and see the line stretching back to older stories of creations that turned on their creators – Frankenstein or the old legends of golems.

One takeaway is this: game designers benefit from a broad education in the tropes of both fiction and the stories of history.

Familiarity with diverse settings, identifying common themes, and choosing where and when to push the boundaries of innovation will help a team avoid building something too generic – or so weirdly unique that it can’t find an audience.

If you enjoy reading fantasy, you owe it to yourself to pick up Erikson’s Malazan series. Tom Chick of QuarterToThree covered the first HExplore It game in detail several years ago; if you’re interested in a more thorough deconstruction of the first game in the series, his article is worth checking out. If you like cooperative board games (and dry-erase markers), the HExplore It series can be found at the usual online retailers. See you next week!