Evaluating ideas and concepts

The way I go about getting ideas for new games is by looking at existing games, finding the unique or successful elements and then thinking of how to integrate them into a new piece of work.
Usually I only evaluate ideas that I know that I’m capable of executing/realizing but if that was not a concern then I would also think about new, original ways of integrating the use of existing hardware into the game experience as well as more complex types of player interaction.

New Hardware:
Electronic games are intellectual games, played out in our mind. Our arms and hands are simply the tools which we use to carry out the mental responses to the visual and audio input. Now thinking of the future, with mind control over the computer, it is possible to remove the challenge of perfect motor control and gameplay get closer to the core of competition between computer players: who’s the smartest and quickest thinker.
Remove motor control and you’ll open up a whole new level of competition. The next limit will be the cognitive speed in which input is recognized, processed and responded to.

This idea is a bit ambitious but could be used as a basis for a research project, as such it is not yet ready to be directly implemented into the game design process (of commercial games).

Social Interaction:
There should always be a variety of activities available to the player, ranging from challenging, time constrained tasks to something to do while having a relaxed play session. People like to play together in a social, friendly environment, it can have a competitive side but should also cater for those who want to spend some time by themselves. This points towards the need for well defined rule sets and letting the player control which set of rules he wants to use. Switching from PvE to PvP rule sets would be a good example. Sandbox type of multiplayer games which don’t adopt this type of player control over rule sets are usually plagued by ‘griefers’, people who find amusement in ruining other people’s experience.

This is one game design aspect that is used in many MMO’s because there are so many players in a relatively small area and those players don’t necessarily have the same goals. The buddy system has been adopted by many other games in the form of inbuilt instant-messengers with community functions for grouping up with other like-minded players.
The concept of choosing rule-sets on the fly is a good example of how players can draw that ‘magic circle’ around them and play the game differently while they remain within that zone. It would be interesting to explore within multiplayer games other than MMO’s.
One example could be counter strike, if two players decide to knife instead of shoot each other. Usually thats pretty hard to to because other players that don’t play along with the ‘knifes only’ shoot them.

Technical limitations:
If a player does something on his PC in relation to what he sees on the basis of server-supplied data then the server must acknowledge the action, no matter what, and modify the game state accordingly. If there is a conflict because of PC/server/network latency then it must not be compensated/accounted for within the game code, this would introduce randomness and confuse the player. The player will figure out how to deal with the result of such latency issues as it will be a constant to this actions.
In case of a server-client based environment there should be a way to have localized servers in order to provide the player with the lowest possible network latency and thus improving his experience of the game.

These are technical aspects that have to be considered in the game design process. Some of the rules might need to be evaluated against this sort of technical constraint.
One prominent mistake in this area was in World of Warcraft. They opted to use a certain algorithm which worked fine in low latency environments, but once the latency increased in cases like inter-continental connections the algorithm artificially inflated the latency to a multiple of the real network latency and the game became very unresponsive to all the overseas players, such as Australians (all WoW servers are located in USA) and certain parts of Asia. This artificially high latency affected the rules that allow/restrict players to perform certain actions.