List of Game Clichés

[edmundito]

Guys,

I thought you might find this very useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_and_video_game_clich%C3%A9s

Don't do any of these when you make a game...!

[Nikolas]

Interesting but it's quite difficult to avoid all of these. If you're making an rpg, for example and you don't have to save the world, or your other hald, or someone has killed your family, or burnt down your hometown, there's no reason really to go after thebad guy (who has to exist, generally speaking). If I was the main character I would just stay home, with my loving family...

Unless the main character is just a mazochist who loves, adventures... In which case, well, it sounds a bit silly to me.

[TheYak]

I would argue that a game using all of the cliches would be quite enjoyable. 

It would be an interesting challenge to come of with just such a scenario (the non-cliche RPG), though I envision I'd only end up with a rip-off of Don Quixote.

[jetxl]

Cliches are part of the succes formula.
Look are music and you will see that pop music (about cliche lovesongs) dominate the charts.
The reasons why people use cliches is because they work.

Avoiding cliches will not make your game succesfull, just weird.


http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article255.asp
I think this link contains every motivation a character can have.

[Chrille]

More weird games!

[simulacra]

I agree. The mainstream bores the hell out of me. I never listen to the crap they play on the radio, as I have heard that song thousands of times before. The same with goes for games.

Clichés are for the fools who are not smart or experienced enough to figure them out.

[Nikolas]

Clichés are for the fools who are not smart or experienced enough to figure them out.

i think that some of us could be offended by this quote.

Anyways, what would be really interesting and maybe it's allready happening to Hollywood, is to make a research on what makes a movie, game or song a succes and construct one according to the research.
For example, if the research shows that you need 12% nudity, 25% violence, 13% romance, 50% sponsorship, try that for an indie movie: Make 12 minutes of sex, 25 minutes of the guy kiling everything in his way, 13 minutes of him talking to her and the other way around and 50 minutes of ads. 

[IM NOT TEH SPAM]

Those "video game cliches" are cliched for a reason-- they've worked out well for the games.  Why do you think those phrases the word cliche originally describes are so tired out?  They display exactly how people feel about something in a few easily understood words.

I feel many of those cliches are good to use, but you can't have them all at once.  In the quest for glory games each "quest" had similar motivations behind them, "do it or it will destroy the world!".  It worked out well, and didn't seem like a copy of some celtic/egyptian/african/german/greek rpg game that came before it.  The whole reason so many games are great is because of the characters, plot, and puzzles.

  But then again there are only two RPGs I ever played, as these cliches seem to best apply to a Role Playing Game, which were Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and the QFG series.  Zelda was as whitebread as adventure games could be, and Quest for Glory (as I know I've said before) was the greatest 5 games I have ever played.

[Ghormak]

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that it'd take a group of adventure game fans to defend clichés.

[Nikolas]

If you really sit down and think about it, there is so little to begin with:

In order to do something, and to have a game, the hero/heroine must have a motivation. Well what could drive a guy/gal go against the whole world? Love, Hate, Revenge! That's all. And then you can add anything you want to it.

After all one of the greatest book of Fantasy (Tolkien), was full of cliches (or maybe now it seems this way, after it's been copied so many times). And if you think about it all Mythologies, seem to have very much in common. The Earth, the Sun, The water, blah, blah, Vengful god puts rain on the earth. Only one will survive to save the earth (it is there with Noe, and in Greek Mythology and I think also in Indian). So really there is so little originality everywhere.

Can anybody tell me the most original game played? Is there a thread for that?

Eg. After Tetris there is the Chaos...
The same with Dungeon Master... etc.

[simulacra]

One is definitely Executive Suite, another is The Incredible Machine. Not to mention Alter Ego, The Sims, Sim City, Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Populous, Noctis, Silent Hill 2, The Ring and Uplink.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/theme.php?id=27

[TheYak]

Not exactly anti-cliché.  Some of those games have something that puts them outside the world of cliché: Lack of plot (TIM, The Sims, Sim City).  They do have definable goals that may buck the usual trends somewhat, but having no characters or not having to provide motivation for the player (other than passing a puzzle), isn't something easily implemented in an RPG or Adventure.  Similarly, some FPS games could be said to avoid cliché (rarely), but it's usually the ones that more-or-less forego the plotline altogether.

The others have very clichéd motivations, even if the overall concept or development thereof is unique.  You still have characters who are transported to a strange new world, whose world has gone askew, who have to fight an ancient evil, etc.  If Silent Hill 2 counts as a non-clichéd game then a multitude of games are less restricted.  While I haven't played 1/3 of the games on the list, I still think saying TIM is without trite elements is like saying the same for solitaire.

[Kinoko]

I agree. The mainstream bores the hell out of me. I never listen to the crap they play on the radio, as I have heard that song thousands of times before. The same with goes for games.

Clichés are for the fools who are not smart or experienced enough to figure them out.

As said by Squidworth from the Spongebob movie: "You can't fool me! -I- listen to public radio."

I think the biggest cliche of all is people talking about how they don't listen to popular music, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but if your motivation for that is because you want to appear outside the square, then I'd rather be a Britany Spears fan any day.

As has been said before, cliches are fine. That word gets banded about all over the place as the horror or all horrors, but it just means that something is used a lot. I'll occasionally say that something in a game is `SUCH a cliche` but when I say that, I mean that on top of being a cliche, it has nothing else to offer. Whereas 99% of other cliches used out there don't get a mention from me because they're used well.

My RPG is gonna have, yes, a cliches storyline. Saving the world. If people don't like it, that's fine. If they don't like it BECAUSE it's a cliche and for no other good reason, then I feel sorry that they're going to go through their life missing out on tonnes of great experiences for the fear of being seen as `mainstream`.

...and dare I point out the irony of these people that avoid popular music and instead favour, *ahem*, `alternative` music.

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter WHAT you like, as long as you like it because you like it, you enjoy it, it makes you happy, whatever.

[TheYak]

There's a big difference between *having* a cliché and *being* cliché.   If you're gonna avoid 'em, there's very little left to enjoy.   There are also somethings that aren't cliché but thought of as such.  For example, your character's parents die and he seeks vengeance.  Neither parents dying nor wanting revenge are clichéd but extreme examples of real-life happenings and the reactions they cause.  Using such an occurance as your only plot device of merit. . . that's cliché.

What matters is that the experience as a whole surpasses the limitations imposed by being common.  DOTT is comprised primarily of them but the game is anything but.

[bspeers]

Excuse my lack of accents over e's.  I don't want to bother with ascii or the character map.

1.  It is important to distinguish between cliche and trope.

It is possible, for example to have a story that is about a princess kidnapped by an evil dragon that is not cliche.  It is not, however, possible to have a story about a helpless princess captured by an evil dragon saved by a handsome knight that is not to some degree cliche.  Even Shrek, which bent the trope, still ended up feeling a little cliche.

2.  Cliches are never good in good writing, unless occasionally when being parodied or commented upon.  However, cliches are occasionally necessary.  Trope are virtually unavoidable, and often desirable.

3.  Popular does not = good, any more than it is equal to bad.  They are two separate concepts.  In adventure game language, we can agree that adventure games are currently fairly unpopular (at least compared, say, to FPS game), but that does not make them not good.  Therefore, unpopular is not equal to bad.  However, in its time, Monkey Island was relatively popular.  Popular is not equal to bad.  I don't want to get into popular but "bad" games, though I would argue there are many.  I'm sure you can think of your own examples.

4.  There is no reason to set your highest sights at the lowest art that exists.  Your game could be the best in the world in some category.  Unless you are Igor or Loominous or someone similar, you're unlikely to ever have the best graphics (in terms of generally appreciated artistic quality).  As has been pointed out, few games have yet made the same level of artistry as the average film or published novel.  Some games have, as I would argue say Grim Fandango (in style, if not substance), Final Fantasy VI (in emotional content if not characterization) and a few others.  But all games are capable of being great expressions of "gameness" (like Tetris, pure beautiful gameplay, or Mario-Kart) or of art (say, for starters, at the 2001 A Space Odyssy level, or Homage to Catalonia, or Pride and Prejudice, or They Might Be Giant's "Flood" or whatever your favourite piece of art is).

5.  It is therefore possible that a great RPG could be made that was not about saving the world (this is a trope [an archetype, actually, ed], not a cliche, in my view) and be great transcendent art.  Terrinigma was one RPG that started to build against the more cliche aspects of saving the world.  It is also possible to avoid many other well-tread realms of game making and create something new and truly "out-there"--Too many writers start from tropes or cliches and do very little to challenge or build on them.  RL & BAT is a good example of "out there" -- though today it is buggy, a little rough (with some weak humour), and it is not everyone's cup of cocoa (here I twist an old cliche), the game pushed enough boundaries and questioned enough Adventure game tropes [archetype!] and cliches to be on my very small list of truly experimentally artistic games.

Myself, I would like to start from tropes [types, I think, possibly archetypes] and then dissolve them, corrupt them and wedge them apart until nothing is left but aspects under a magnifying glass, recursive reflections on a genre, a feedback loop that either must become parody or dark irony, though I have largely failed so far.

6.  That prejudice towards unique art that stands apart from the mass, the culture melange does not exclude one from self-consciously making a genre piece.  It just is meant as encouragement (and self-encouragement) to open up more creative avenues as well.

To sum up:  Cliches almost always bad, tropes [archetypes/types] often unavoidable, but it is possible to collapse them, most easily from the inside than without.

----------------

How to Avoid Cliches

I just wanted to add this edit.  It's a trick I learned in First or Second year creative writing at University, and I've adapted it a bit into a system.  It's pertinent to this conversation so I thought I'd take a moment to share it.

First of all, there is also a distinction between cliche and hack.  Hack (hackney), in my view, is closer to plagarism than cliche, which is closer than trope.  If you have this feeling that something has been done before, it's probably hack.  Hack is often unintended, but is harmful.  If you write something that feels too wonderful to be your own first thought, ask yourself if you've heard of it before, and then ask your friends.  Chances are you saw it somewhere obscure, but they stole it from the muppet show.  Or something.  If everybody's heard of it, then it's cliche.

Anyway, this technique fixes hack, cliche and reliance on tropes.  Take something that could be cliche.  Let's say Princess kidnapped by wily dragon, saved by prince.  A trope with cliche aspects.  Now break it down into its component parts.  This is step one.  You have a kidnapping, a dragon who kidnaps, a princess who is captured, and a rescuing prince.  This next part is called "riffing" according to my prof.  You take one aspect and "riff" off it until you have something relatively new.  I could say shuffle the order and just make the dragon rescue the prince from the wily princess.  But that's more of a simple twist, it could go further.  Robert Munch would make the princess rescue herself from the stupid dragon and then from the stupid prince.  Those Shrek guys would make the prince an ogre and the real prince a monster.  But it could go farther.  What if instead of a dragon, we have a garden gnome.  That's parody.  Okay, what about if we made it a snake.  Say in a garden instead of a castle.  Now that's leaning towards symbolism.  What about if we set it in modern times.

The more you riff, the more you see what alternatives are out there.  You can riff each aspect or the whole idea.  Once you do your riffing, think, "could this work this way."  If not, why not?  Is it just because it's too weird or too original?  Or does it break the tone you want?  If none of those, maybe you're just getting too stuck in pre-concieved ideas.  Really think about what it would mean if the prince was being rescued from a princess by another prince?

So isolate aspects, riff, consider and analyze, riff again.  Decide whether you want something wholly distinct from the original cliche/hackneyed idea/trope, or whether you want something reminiscent.  Once you have a jockey rescuing a german fishmonger and his daughter from their pathological fear of snakes in modern times, you're maybe losing the original idea, but possibly onto something new.

So that's how I was taught to break cliches (though I don't always do it-- because I'm lazy).  Try this one:  "Post-apocolyptic future in  the desert with images of the "big brother" figure on the wall.  An uprising starts from a dark, unwilling hero"  -- what could change here and what would it mean?

Just trying to share!  Sorry if this is too off-topic!

[Gilbert]

As always I couldn't read all the content of a thread, but it's quite interesting to me that this thread had become a GTD.



As point & click adventure games are outdated, they won't be any more cliched than any other surviving game genres like FPS, RTS, RPG, etc., not any more, at least... So you don't really care about this aspect if you're really brave enough to create an adventure game which is expected to be outdated, ancient and unpopular.









Just kidding, of course.

[Kinoko]

Nice! It was an interesting read, bspeers. But, could you clarify what trope and hack mean, as well as exactly what the distinction between them and cliche is? I've never ever heard of trope before.

[simulacra]

I really liked your post bspeers. Great analysis!

I am sorry if I sounded a bit grumpy earlier in the thread. Clichés can be fine, but it depends on how they are used. The morfology of the narration remains the same (which can be said to be cliché), but as bspeers points out so nicely - it all depends on how it is constructed.

After having played many (or all) game genres there is, I have noticed that clichés have stopped working on me. Instead of being awed by the prospect that I need to save the world, I keep thinking "Why does it always have to be the whole world, why not just save the suburb I live in or that sad kid in school nobody cared for?" Though there still is the saving the ... goal, something more innovative would raise my interest in the game.

Now, have a look at this: http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html

It applies to RPG clichés mainly, but is still applicaple to other games as well. Many of these clichés happen because of limitations in the medium. For example, when talking to the same character several times, you get the same replies. The character is supposed to be a human being but certainly does not act like one. When designing System Shock, Warren Spector said that "If we can't make them act like humans, we won't have them" (not the exact wording) and made a devoid space station with traces of humans to tell a story. He avoided a cliché by surpassing it.

Kinoko: I never said that I didn't like the mainstream because it was mainstream. I dislike it because it is so predictable. I realise that there are many people that like the comfort of predictability, but I get bored of it whether it is music or games. The french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written an interesting book: "On television", which has lots of thoughts on why mediums are locked into the mainstream. The main theory is that investors want to be sure that the product is received well to get revenue. I'd say the same goes for many indie designers - you want to make something that you are sure works, not spend your time on some strange experiment.

[bspeers]

Hmm, it seems I have the wrong definition of "trope" at least in the classical usage (though I am using it how I have seen it among other writers).

Trope is actually any use of figeratives, metaphors, similie, synechtoche (my spelling may be off) that changes the meaning of the word, but that's not how I'm using it here.  Perhaps, instead of "trope" I should have said "archetype" or "type".

Archetype you probably know, but just to be absolutely clear, here is a list from most general and widely used to most closely copied:

Archetype: Broad idea, the original concept from which copies are made.  Joseph Campbell was always obsessed with these, saw them shared  in all societies.  I disupte his research methods, but it was in part his analysis of basic archetypes that led his friend George Lucas to create the film of archetypes, Star Wars.  Basically everything that happens in episodes 4-6 is an archetype.  The hero's journey is the most famous of these among filmmakers.

Type: A generally understood person, or event or whatnot.  Like the older librarian.  We know the type and little more has to be said to recognize them.  So the forlorn prince is a type that may be in the archetype of the hero's journey against an evil foe.

Stock/Flat: An event or a person is one of these if they are basically just a mesh of types and stereotypes with little or no variation.  The overweight schoolyard bully is a type and is often a stock character.  He is flat if he never changes or breaks from the mold in any way.  The quest to find one's father is a bit of a stock quest, and it would be flat if not twisted in some way.

The above are all borrowed, un-riffed ideas.  As we move down the list, though, there are more clearly stolen ideas, if at first unintentional.

Cliche:  In literary terms, this is usually something so overused that it has lost its original meaning.  The stock character of the bully of course has a couple of goons who are afraid of him.  And the hero says "You can't get away with this!" -- what does the villain say?  It's so obvious it is beneath comment.  A lot of sayings are cliche when used in art, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned" --but that is not a cliche in itself.  It's just a saying.  If, however, you used it as the moral of a story, or as a character's realization, it would be cliche (accent over e).  For example.  "It was that day [hackneyed] that David learned that a penny saved is a penny earned [cliche]."  Or if you were to work one into a description, "Jennifer was as cold as ice [cliche], but Jeff played it cool as a cucumber [cliche]" or into a situation "In this puzzle the hero [archetype] must outsmart the stupid bully [stock] to save his girl [cliche]" -- these can all be okay if you're commenting on them--like to have a 50's character, he might actually say "Cool as a cucumber" -- but even then it might be worth riffing a bit.

Hack: Comes from hackney, which originally had something to do with horses, but now refers to something that is used, or over-used.  You can spot a hack comedian or performer because everything they say is funny and none of it sounds like it came from their own experience--it all feels familiar.  It's hack writing to say "The sun came up in a blaze of glory" --it's not quite cliche, but it is over-used.  Hacks sometimes unintentionally use a common idea or theme that is just floating around, sometimes actually steal a line or an image or a way of doing something and then just change it slightly so it isn't plagarism.

Plagarism: One step down further from hack.  You know what this means.  Stolen material, uncredited.   Usually fairly original material ripped off directly.  This is different than a sample or sampling, which just takes a bit and re-contextualizes/decontextualizes it.

Even a plagarized idea can work--many great writers and artists admit to stealing an idea--but most who are truly better than hacks and thieves actually riff quite a bit to create something more original.  They may not call it riffing though.

[Nikolas]

Now, here we have someone (bspeers), who has obviously tried really hard to avoid cliches. (like goefkhan??). But I feel that I need to add, just one little comment.

I'm giving here a definition (though maybe not correct), to have somewhere to stand on:
Originality is the opposite of cliche!

So, generally speaking it's always good to be original in your ideas. But the fact remains, that the more you know, about a subject (or an art, music, poetry, games, movies, all), the more you can avoid repeating something allready said.

Meaning: I have been studying music from the age of 5 (now 28). This gives me 23 years of experience in music. I have heard a lot of music. Well! And as a composer I give my best to being original (not allways, true...). But with all this knowledge of music comes the alteration of ourselves, without really knowing it. Ask yourselfes: What kind of a game, would someone make, if he had never played any adventure game before. Would his puzzles be original, crap?

All I'm really saying is that the influences we have are always strong. When they are too strong, or when we are part of an , then we have cliches. When we are an indie, small company that does what it does for the fun and not for money, then we get probably originality.

And one last thing: Since I've scratched it, what about sensorship? And self-sensorship? Do we make things in a different way than we would want to, just because we're afraid? I have to admit, that I do...