I have an odd questions which is prone to often misunderstanding.
why is it that the games which people know how to play on an instinctual level are often the most loved and the most challenging, but in their over use cause all attempts to further the field to all but dissipate?
the industry has radically changed in recent years and no one can deny that mobile devices have come to dominate the gaming industry, for better or worse. many of the games produced are derivative, to put it mildly, but when you get past the copy upon copy upon copy and look at the concept itself, the mechanics that make it possible, why is it often so incredibly difficult to create the basic ideas that form the backbone?
I have been trying to understand this for years because, despite the fancy graphics, the basic concepts used in games are the same now as they were decades ago, you can represent the exact same puzzle, with the exact same solution, in many different ways but the concept is the same wither on a gameboy or on the latest bleeding edge hardware.
so the two questions i wish to pose.
is there a term for the study of this kind of innate gameplay?
and why is it that the industry exists in a horse shoe of extremes in which the same basically game play is being repeated over and over again but we keep coming back for more wither its candy crush make overs or shooters with different guns but the focus on creating new content and mechanics is near absent?