Unless you mean “create your own game engine”, that’s not a real solution.
If you watched the videos I linked, especially the first one, you’d see a lot more about what I mean by this, since I was leaning a bit on that to fill in some of the gaps in the logic train, here; Choice of Games are restricted by their medium, and we all know this, even if we don’t openly acknowledge it.
The notion that these games are “fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of our imagination” always makes my eyes roll, since it’s not fueled by the reader’s imagination at all. The only thing the player’s imagination is allowed to do is imagine a different hair color for your player character or maybe wearing a different hat. The actual story the game takes place in, however, leaves nothing to the imagination, because it’s strictly written to follow along the rails of the linear storyline that the author laid out. There are “branching paths” with choices that are generally meaningless that just lead back to the same plot. You are allowed to have exactly the choices that the author allows you to have, and they have results that the author foresaw. The story plays out the way the author intends. Now, maybe you could say that the game is fueled by nothing but the vast, unstoppable power of the author’s imagination, but that doesn’t sell copies quite as well, now does it?
In fact, in games like Dwarf Fortress or Crusader Kings or The Sims, you have a vastly greater latitude for the player to use the “vast, unstoppable power of their imagination” (in fact, it’s pretty mandatory in Dwarf Fortress, considering it has classic roguelike-style ASCII-like graphics), since the simulation doesn’t create a strict linear narrative, but a series of events into which it invites the player to draw meaning and create their own stories. All of these games, too, manage to be greatly expanded upon by continuing refinements of their simulation. Adding new rules that create geometrically more permutations of possible situations that create greater gameplay depth.
And it’s not like authors of these Choice of games have unlimited creative freedom, either. Once again, you can’t make any sort of meaningful interaction in any way other than picking a dialogue box in a game like this. You can’t play Tetris with text prompts, the medium dictates what kind of interactions that the player has. You can’t even really have meaningful conversations in a text-heavy game like this, since the actual interactions are reduced to multiple-choice where the player simply picks the choice that will get them the result they want, not the one they would actually feel the need to say in the heat of the moment. (It is, for example, never a good idea to say anything angry in response to being insulted in-game, because that just makes your relationship bars drop, and higher relationship bars are always good. There’s never any negative consequence for being a doormat, and players can always take a breath and keep emotional distance to avoid making rash decisions in the heat of the moment.)
And likewise, backend-heavy math is still meaningless because I couldn’t convey it in any sensible way to the player. Spacial simulation is so powerful a tool in the toolchest because it vastly simplifies the information going on in that math in the background. Meaningfully describing the physics and math in a game like Mario or Angry Birds would require the player to understand calculus and throwing out a physics equation math homework for them to solve with only text, but you can just show the results of your physics equation graphed out in real time through intuitive understanding of physics just by rendering them as pixelated characters in spacial simulation. And that’s just jumping. Sure, you might say that it’s a triviality, and that you can just make some text that says “there’s a jump, do you try to jump it? Y/N” “You don’t have enough jump stat, you fail.” but if you can’t see how that’s losing some tremendous capacity for world-building or player interaction or meaningful engagement or even sheer capacity to be creative, and dismiss it all by simply throwing out “just be MORE creative”, you’re just fundamentally not mentally engaged in this concept at all.
Spacial simulation is an incredibly powerful tool for player engagement, which is why its use should be employed to maximum effect, no matter the game. The limitations of games making it fall into the rut of always being combat just beg for more, to use your favored term, creative use of spacial simulation to represent more than simply black-on-white battle-to-the-death situations because saying you’re trapped in a room with brainless killing machines excuses the lack of any kind of compelling mechanics regarding trying to have conversations with a bot by making conversation impossible to start with. If you can’t have conversations in any way other than to simulate outcomes through either die rolls or simply having enough character points in a conversation stat, then at least you can make a game that finds some meaningful abstraction through, again, some form of puzzle game that uses the strength in spacial simulation to cover up the flaws in dynamic conversationalism that computers can provide.
In this very thread, for example, I point out how the Humanity score becomes a functional restraint on the author’s capacity to tell the story they want to tell. Humanity is in some ways meant to be just a reflection of how close you are to your human roots, but so many of the choices are so clearly framed in ethical problem ways or where whether it should have any impact on your character at all basically mandates adopting a certain philosophical outlook on the world that very much sees those actions that raise Humanity as being inherently ethical (such as avoiding Chinese batteries and instead running on “green” power because Environmentalism Is Good) that it ruins the effect that Humanity was supposed to have. Now, there’s the stigma of moral condemnation on any choice that drops humanity, even when it can be argued that the action was morally neutral or even ethical, because showing ethical behavior has no or even negative impact upon the Humanity score, but if you’re looking at your end-game scorecard, low Humanity basically always means being thoroughly evil.
And it isn’t even always by mistake, either. Particularly in games like Versus, your player choice of how to deal with different situations basically always boil down to calculations based upon your already-extant character build. You basically pick powers or tech at the start of the game, then, in every conflict, just look for the option that reinforces that choice to get the maximum “you did good” points by the end of the game. There are many prompts for player input in the game, but you only really made an actual choice ONCE, right at the start of the game, when you first picked either using a gadget or using a power in the very first fight. In this way, the existence of these meters that push players to reinforce early assumptions about what character they want to play functionally undermine the meaning of choices that the author may want to introduce. The existence of all these stats condition players to only think in terms of their stats as a bunch of hammers, then look for the most nail-like choice to reinforce the character they already have.
Things like Achievements to encourage multiple playthroughs make this even worse. Now, you aren’t even letting players make a meaningful choice to develop their character the way they want, they have to specifically make the character that will have the stats that will trigger the one particular section of text that gets you an achievement. I.E. if I want to get the achievement for my robot singing either of the special songs for having either high autonomy or high empathy, I have to go through the entire game up to that point min-maxing for those attributes, which in turn requires playing through the game using every choice permutation so I can actually understand HOW to min-max my robot’s stats. This heavily dilutes the game from being a matter of making ethical choices or expressing my own ability to custom-build a new thinking being in my image to just being a number-crunching calculation, and drains away the emotional investment and impact such narrative carries with it.
So far as “reinventing the wheel” goes, if you’re suggesting that the best way for me to create a game without making a large portion of my writing time become useless in writing the next block of text is to simply start copying text from previous games even when they were on different subjects, or possibly just flat-out plagiarize from other games, then the problems should be self-evident. If you’re suggesting I create a computer script capable of procedurally writing novels on the fly in response to player prompts as well as a human can write a cohesive narrative with months of planning and years of writing experience, then you clearly haven’t paid attention to the capabilities of real-life computers and procedural generation.
This is, again, why being able to use spacial simulation in new and different ways is what interests me more than just writing a new narrative. The Echo Bazzar discussion I linked in the previous post covers a game that gets over the problem of it being easier to make a game where you murder a man than shake his hand by simply making everything use the same mechanics. The problem is, I don’t find those mechanics fun or engaging in their own right, they’re just a stamina bar and trying to spend your time maximizing payout per unit time. Instead, I’d like to see something more like Puzzle Pirates, an MMO where a diverse array of interactions are handled with abstract puzzle games, making meaningful interactions from things that aren’t usually capable of being rendered in a game meaningfully. The first game, for example, is just “bilge pumping”, whose whole effect in the greater game world is just to keep water off the ship so a ship doesn’t suffer movement penalties, but you’re playing essentially a Bejewelled clone doing it, and that’s an enjoyable pastime in and of itself to the point that people will just sit on ships bilging without any care for what’s going on in the greater world around them. Because players with different talents will fill different roles to be able to play the puzzles they enjoy most, it’s a game that allows a much more diverse array of functional playstyles. There isn’t an actual “have a conversation and persuade someone to your point of view” minigame because it’s an MMO, but it’s not hard to see how turning to making abstract puzzle games that still maximize upon the use of spacial simulation to relate information to the player.
I’m more interested in finding ways to make procedural generation tell more engaging stories than telling a one-off story in and of itself. To use the words of Tarn “Toady One” Adams, he said he “was not interested in making a crappy fantasy story, [he] wants to make a crappy fantasy story generator.”