| abstract
| - So you're reading a review of the latest game to come down the pike, and you find a line that states said game is just like another title. And it is. Sorta. It may have been "inspired" by a more successful franchise, or it may be that the more successful franchise so changed the face of its medium that all future works in that medium demand a response. One thing's for sure, though: The reviewer will act as though the similarity is all you need to know. It was Better by a Different Name. There's a high demand for innovation and new ideas, so if a new work has similarities to an older or more popular one, expect those similarities to be the dominant subject in discussion about the work, even if they're entirely superficial. Some people go on to say "if you can't come up with an original idea, don't even bother trying to make the game." Despite the fact that most original works get ignored because of lack of advertising or that it's just not something publishers recognize and they're afraid to give it a chance. You can see the obvious Catch-22 situation, here, when genuine attempts to shake up the market or are ignored, whereas Strictly Formula works that copy much more than you did fly off the shelves merely because of the familiarity. Of course, many times creators do borrow ideas from another work as inspiration to create new stories and concepts. Considering that just about everything has been done, it's difficult to properly think of something new and fresh. This is not always the case, however, as sometimes creators deliberately try to copy off a particular franchise as soon as its success becomes evident. They will immediately try to make something to compete -- and most of the time it will fail miserably, because it was rushed or just implemented poorly. Other times it might come up with a really cool and ingenious new spin on the idea, and still never reach the same kind of popularity as its competition because somehow being too much like the original is deplorable. The error here is the automatic assumption that just because something is similar, it can't have any value on its own merits. If everything that was derivative was that bad, it wouldn't be done so much. Some can actually be quite good on their own. And enough followers can even make From Clones to Genre. This assumption can be infuriating to creators of products that are similar to products being designed simultaneously. Your options are to either reduce the quality of your work in order to get it out first, or be written off as a cheap imitation of your competitor's product (which they probably watered down to beat you out of the gate). Many "ripoffs" were in fact in development at the same time, but due to the development window for most modern media, could be released months or even years apart. This can also make the fans of the more "popular" feature look really hypocritical if the alleged victim of ripoffs wasn't all that original to begin with. The absurd extreme of this is when old-timers show off their long memories by dismissing new shows as rehashes of older productions which don't just fall outside Small Reference Pools but at least have been out of public release for many years, and possibly don't even survive except within the old-timers' recollections. There are some things that don't typically get called out on it despite using it merely because it just works. Such as say, several RPG Elements and control schemes in general. You'll notice that sometimes this trope is invoked not only by rival fans and trolly haters, but people who actually aren't fans of the genre, even so much as hating it in its entirety. You'll notice that when people are typically not fans of a genre or series, similar to its cousin Its the Same So It Sucks. The two almost go hand-in-hand, this way, since a non-fan would not really notice how many subtle differences since, after all, they see it and aren't looking for that stuff, that is, if they actually see the work they're invoking this trope, on. Sometimes people are actually calling out things based upon meta-concepts of the genre. This is the justification behind Sequelphobia. Compare Older Than They Think. Compare and sometimes contrast with Seinfeld Is Unfunny when the original suffers due to amount (and sometimes the quality) of similar works released later. Not to be confused with They Changed It, Now It Sucks, where a sequel or an official adaptation changes an aspect of an original work for better or worse. Also not to be confused with It's the Same, Now It Sucks, the polar opposite. See also It's Been Done.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)