So I've been thinking about the value of ideas in today's culture, and I'm wondering what you guys think.

This concept has been rolling around in my head for a week or so, and I think I've finally got it to the point where I can verbalise it fairly concisely.

In the past, it seems like if you got a great idea for a game, then you could sell it and make millions. Tetris is the classic example -- the world had never seen a game quite like Tetris and as soon as it came out, *boom*, the market loved it and clamored over it.

But is that really how things work normally? I mean, I hear wonderfully different ideas all of the time -- many even sound feasible, but none/few of them ever go anywhere.

So what what makes a "great idea for a game"?

I'm not sure that there is such a thing. There are good ideas for games, sure -- but what is it that turns a good idea into a great game?

I think it's implementation. How well does one execute the idea? How much polish, how well organized, how user-friendly, how does the challenge scale? I argue that that's where the real heart of good game development is. It's not like all a game needs is a great story to be a good game -- there are plenty of games with horrible stories that made great games -- just look at Super Mario Brothers. "We're sorry, but our princess is in another castle!" Big surprise plot-twist there. But SMB had polish, it had finesse -- it was well balanced. That game was just... fun. And it didn't have anything to do with the core platform (Nintendo, good for the time, but had plenty of poor games made for the system as well), the core genre (platformer, of which there were dozens for the NES, plenty of them not-fun), the graphics (other NES games had much better graphics at the time but many weren't nearly as fun), the sound, or the story (as we've already shown). But I would say that it was a combination of all of the above factors that can be simply summed up by saying that what separates a *good* game from a *great* game is by how well the various pieces are put together.

Let me show you a few more modern examples. Was Myspace the first place where people could go to create their own websites and develop communities with other people for free? Certainly not! Geocities did that way back in the mid/late 90's, so did plenty of other spots. But Geocities got "acquired" by Yahoo! and is still festering in some corner of the 'net, usually plagued by heaps of 404's. So what did MySpace do that Geocities didn't do? I don't think there's any one particular thing that a person can point to to say "that's why MySpace succeeded where Geocities failed", but rather, it was a combination of many many things.

There aren't any new ideas. People just rehash old ideas and implement them slightly differently. People talk about the "classic" movies like Wizard of Oz and Ben Hur, but you know what? They were both remakes, and so were most other classics I know of.

But while we shouldn't necessarily copycat old works, I get a general feeling from people that they're often hesitant to share their game ideas because they're afraid someone's going to "steal their idea" and beat them to market. Yes, this can happen in some cases, but I would say that by and large, if someone else can so easily make your game better than you can, then you didn't stand a chance in the market anyways. It's not your idea that counts, it's how well you put it together.

So in thinking about things like the next community project, or about projects that I work on elsewhere, it makes me think that I don't need to worry about having an idea that's different from other people's -- I just need to implement that idea better.

Just some rambling thoughts. I know that I sometimes get frustrated with other people posting their misc. blog-type thoughts on the boards here, but I thought that this one was relevant enough to game development that it was appropriate to post here for discussion.