The Ideal and Universal Game

Growth of the number of games

The number of video games released each year continues to grow. Steam statistics https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/ clearly demonstrate this increase. With the rise of generative AI, the number of games will grow even faster. The number of players is growing as well, but not as rapidly. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult for new games to attract attention and achieve noticeable sales.

How to make a successful game?

In the industry, the usual approach is simple: follow current trends and propose original solutions by combining ideas from successful projects.

Trends and technologies have changed across decades. Roughly, the picture looks like this:
1990s: 2D platformers
2000s: 3D graphics, MMORPGs and online games
2010s: mobile games, social farming games, auto-battlers
2020s: sandboxes, open worlds, survival, crafting, activity simulators, horror, cooperative games
2030s: likely games with real-time generative AI content

If you are unsure what game to make, common advice would differ depending on the era:
- in the 2000s - MMORPG if you had the budget, or a browser game if you had fewer resources
- in the 2010s - a clone of a successful "social farm" or a "battle royale"
- today - an original cooperative game that evokes emotions, often with a hybrid of mechanics

As a result, three main approaches to game development can be identified:
1. Experimentation, the "dream game" - highly original projects. A very risky approach, but with a chance to create an unusual hit.
2. Cloning - producing games with minimal changes. The lowest-risk path.
3. A hybrid approach - combining proven ideas with new elements. This is the most common approach among publishers.

It is also worth mentioning the growth of indie development. Over the past 10–15 years, many important ideas have appeared precisely in small teams or from solo developers. This increased competition and changed the industry.

The problem with the classical approach

Whichever path you choose - experimentation or cloning - the development process remains evolutionary. You choose an idea that seems promising at the moment and try to implement it. The result is unknown in advance, and success cannot be guaranteed.

Even if you manage to create a successful game, when working on the next one you again face uncertainty. Even sequels, considered the least risky option, often fail. Large publishers with significant budgets, marketing, and experience also sometimes end up in this situation. Resources and proven formulas do not eliminate risks: any company can enter a difficult period, lose its audience, or even shut down.

Another approach

Is the success of a game necessarily a lottery and a matter of trial and error? Or can it be made more predictable and consistent? I'm not yet one hundred percent certain, but it seems to me that such a path is beginning to emerge.

I propose to consider another method based on a systematic engineering approach, particularly the TRIZ methodology. It allows us to treat the creation of a successful project not as an evolutionary trial-and-error process, but as a rational one.

The method is not new. Since the 2010s, some researchers have tried applying it to game design, but due to the complexity of game development it has not yet become widespread.

Goal-setting

The methodology suggests starting with defining a goal. What do you want? What is your ideal final result? If your goal is to create a game, even purely for commercial success, you need to understand what your ideal game looks like.

Understanding the ideal final goal matters a lot. How precisely it is defined influences your ability to understand the direction of game development, forecast trends, and evaluate the potential of different ideas.

The ideal game

The topic of the "ideal game" has been known in philosophy since the Middle Ages and is usually perceived as speculative. In this article I will not delve into philosophy. Instead, let's try to extract practical value from this idea.

The ideal game is usually described as a simulation indistinguishable from reality, where the player can do anything. This is a broad definition, but it highlights important aspects such as:

• The player may be both a participant and an observer of events.
• There are no predefined genres, settings, or plots - the game adapts dynamically to the player's requests.
• There is no clear division between single-player and multiplayer. Any NPC is perceived as a player.
• The world reacts naturally to player actions without artificial constraints or scripts. A routine trip to the store can become an epic adventure.

Obviously, such a game cannot be created with current technologies. It is more like a guiding point that helps understand the direction of the industry.

Forecasting

Despite the unattainability of the ideal, the industry is gradually moving toward it. Over time, games become more advanced, and earlier limitations disappear. To simplify, we can imagine this movement as a trajectory.

The current state of game development can be considered the starting point on this trajectory, with the ideal game being the endpoint.

Next, we can take any new game mechanic or idea and "map" it onto this line. Does it follow the direction of movement, stray to the side, or even pull backward? For example, games that offer a new level of freedom fall on the line. Games that combine familiar mechanics with limited freedom diverge sideways. Games with reduced possibilities represent a step back.

Ideas and technologies closer to the ideal game have greater potential. Those that move away from it have less.
The rise of sandbox games with high replayability and mod support is one sign of the industry's movement toward the ideal game.

Another factor influencing a game's potential is its expandability. For example, games with abstract gameplay, like clickers, are difficult to meaningfully deepen. The nature of their abstractions resists increased depth.

It is important to understand that high potential does not guarantee success, just as low potential does not guarantee failure. Marketing, visuals, luck, and the idea's ability to attract an audience all matter.

Rising player expectations

Players want more freedom, replayability, and possibilities. They seek new emotions and unique experiences. Player expectations grow, intuitively approaching an ideal gameplay model.

They want to experiment, combine things previously considered incompatible, and challenge logic and common sense. Established genres and mechanics increasingly blend into original hybrids.

There are still many themes that could interest players. But in my view, the main driver of game development is the growth of freedom, depth, and possibilities. Yet the most promising directions turn out to be the hardest to implement. Creating truly deep games becomes increasingly complex. Building a powerful sandbox can take years.

The universal game

There is a genre of games originally conceived as the basis for an infinite sandbox. This is the genre of universal games. It has existed for a long time, but has not yet been fully realized in computer games.

The classical definition of a universal game is:
A game with unified rules that allow implementing almost any genre, setting, or experience.

The world of such a game is assembled like a construction set from whatever the players want. For example: what setting is it - present, future, past, alternative history, fantasy, post-apocalypse. Is there magic? Superpowers? Psionics? How gifted is the character relative to the world? Is he a new hero or a hopeless wanderer? What is his biography and motivation? What flaws does he have? How does the world react to him? What fate might await him?

Such a system can fulfill one of the main conditions of the ideal game - "where the player can do whatever they want".

How this may work in practice: at the start, the player defines the experience they want. For example:
- "I am an astronaut during the colonization of the solar system"
- "I am an advanced zombie during a zombie apocalypse"
- "I am the emperor of the Roman Empire during its fall"
- "I am a cucumber in a greenhouse"

Depending on the request, the system selects a genre, setting and a set of mechanics. For such a game, a large amount of content and universal mechanics capable of combining and reconfiguring for different scenarios are needed.

Complexity

Implementing such a system is not easy. The classical "let's add another feature" approach does not work here.

The main difficulties:
- Exponential complexity. Even small expansions of rules create a cascade of new behavioral combinations.
- Loss of focus. The player may not understand what to do.
- UX and learning problems. Universality overloads the interface.
- Balancing issues. Highly diverse scenarios begin to conflict.
- High development cost.

For example, how to organize a world in such a game. Suppose there is a small forest. It must function adequately in all possible combinations of genres and mechanics. Why does it exist? How does a forest differ across biomes? What parameters does it have? What actions are possible with it? How does it react to interactions from single characters or large groups? How does it react to tools of different technologies, including extraterrestrial? What happens during drought, parasites, fire, or even planetary bombardment? The game must be ready to correctly process any development of events.

Attempts to adapt the tabletop system GURPS into a computer format have not resulted in a full realization of its universality. Partial universality appears in games like Minecraft, RimWorld, or Dwarf Fortress, but these are only individual aspects.

Solution

This section contains technical aspects of implementation - they are harder to read for people unfamiliar with game development.
In my view, a universal game can already be created with current technologies. I came to this conclusion after nearly ten years of studying the topic - I described it in more detail here: https://clarusvictoria.com/blog/almost-ten-years-of-search But the solution lies outside the usual tools of game development.

From the perspective of code and game design, game content is usually divided into hardcode (features) and content. For example, a combat system or an event system is hardcode. An archer or a chair is content. Content is easy to add and scales well. You can create thousands of chairs with different characteristics or even generate them procedurally.

Hardcode, however, is harder. It is manual work that changes the structure of the game. Combinations of different features increase complexity explosively.
The solution is to turn traditional hardcode into content. In the example above, the combat system or event system should become content just like chairs. Rules themselves become content.

To make this possible, the game's architecture must be built on principles similar to those of human language.

There are implementations of logical systems that work on similar principles. For example, semantic networks used in Web 2.0 projects, search engines, and machine learning systems.
Semantic networks allow describing knowledge of almost any complexity in a meaningful way. For example: "A human is a mammal". The entity "Human" is connected to "Mammal" through a relationship of belonging. More details - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network

The content of the game can be organized similarly. Objects, characters, events, rules and other aspects are described as knowledge. But this is not static knowledge: the player becomes an agent who changes the state of the world through their actions.

This can be imagined as a dialogue between the player and the AI-world. Each time the player presses a button, they send a request to an interpreter. For example, the player controls ancient Egyptian builders and wants to build a pyramid. A simple sentence is formed as a request: subject - builders, object - pyramid project, action - build. The AI analyzes the world state, processes the command, and sends the builders to build.

Technically, this can be implemented through a data-driven architecture similar to ECS, but adapted for semantic structures.

Continuation

This article is not an exhaustive description of the concepts of the ideal or universal game. My goal is to outline the general framework and show the direction. A full explanation of architecture, semantic structures, AI generation, and data-driven systems will require separate materials. In future articles, I plan to gradually break down the mechanism of a universal game into more concrete components, so as not to overload this introductory text.