The Low Hanging Fruit Of Invention
About ten years ago I invented a game called Person Do Thing: players are given a very small number of simple words they can say to describe more complex target words. For example, lazy might be person no want do thing.
It took me ten years to get this game professionally manufactured, and in the intervening time I lived in fear that I would eventually run into someone who'd say oh, that sounds exactly like [already existing boardgame X you didn't know about].
I actually did run into people saying this a vast number of times, but when I looked up those games afterwards they did not seem especially similar.1
Fundamentally, this is pretty surprising. The concept and implementation of the game are both extremely simple and even home-makeable; I think in principle Jane Austen characters could have played it in their parlours. I have met people who are shocked to learn I created it, because they think of it as like rock paper scissors or hopscotch, games that were somehow Always There.
Meanwhile, there's a ton of people searching in the idea-space of Fun Games – professional designers or highly invested amateurs, desperately seeking new and original ideas that will stand out in the market. So there are obvious-in-retrospect ideas lying out in plain sight and motivated people trying to find them, and yet somehow the twain are not entirely meeting.
I think this points to a fundamental tension in the world of invention and discovery at large. While I do love games, "why are great game ideas left undeveloped?" is less important civilizationally than the same question for clean energy / materials science / hard tech.
And in the science and tech spheres, "why are we leaving low-hanging fruit unplucked?" is at minimum a massive opportunity and at maximum an urgent crisis. A vast amount of human flourishing and/or suffering may hinge on whether we can make e.g. nuclear fusion happen ten years sooner. And yet.... as best I can tell, we're not doing a great job of figuring out why we're not doing the best job of figuring new things out.
One theory about why we struggle to pick low hanging fruit in science is about the incentives in academia. Basically, if you're a PhD student, you need to research something unobjectionable. If you work on something paradigm-breaking you will often annoy the people who ultimately grade your work, and most big ideas inevitably don't pan out anyway. (Perhaps it's even worse for you if your idea does pan out, making your committee-members' lifetime work obsolete!)
That's before you even get to the Looking Silly Effect, where grad students are embarrassed to bring a crazy-sounding idea up, or to stick to it after they float it and other people tell them it sounds crazy (which many great ideas initially are).
As such, you're much safer working on a small, unimportant extension of the existing paradigm than a big hairy audacious goal. A 90% chance of making 0.1 unit of impact is more valuable than a 1% of chance of having a million units of impact, so we get a lot of small incremental improvements while world-changing inventions sit uninvented for decades.
But I think the world of board games is an interesting counterpoint here. It doesn't require advanced training to do,2 and there's relatively low barriers to entry for new creators (certainly compared to academia). And for obvious structural reasons, "this idea sounds silly" is not a big obstacle for games (although certainly other people's enthusiasm can make or break people's willingness to keep exploring a certain avenue).
And yet, the outcome in games-design world seems similar to me as in science: many unpublished games I see feel like small, unnecessary tweaks on a great existing model, and yet people will spend vast amounts time and treasure on bringing them to market. And I believe (though can't prove) that many extremely lush fruit are hanging un-plucked and well within our grasps.
Which makes me think that part of the issue with invention is something more social or psychological; that we're just not doing a good job collectively of directing our attention to the right places. I don't know how to solve that, but I think it's one of the most important collective questions for all of us.
Thanks to Ben Reinhardt via James Dillard and to Adam Mastroianni for getting me thinking about this question.
[^1]: E.g. I understand why someone was reminded of the game Concept — ~To get others to guess milk, the team might place the question mark icon (which signifies the main concept) on the liquid icon, then cubes of this color on the icons for food/drink and white~ – but also these are very clearly different games.
The most common comp I hear is Poetry For Neanderthals, which came out in 2020 and briefly gave me a heart attack when I heard about it and thought that six years of dilly-dallying had cost me my baby. But the actual rule in Poetry for Neanderthals is that you can say any one-syllable words you like (or: in Ode for Cave Man game, you can say just words with one beat and you can't say words with more beats. If you say words with more beats, that's bad!).
Not to be redundant but: this is in fact a different game from one where you're given a few specific simple words you can say, some of which are bisyllabic, and you can't say any other words (see: in Person Do Thing, person say no-many no-big thing. Person no say other thing, say other thing no good!)
[^2]: that said, there's a ton of insights and tacit knowledge among experienced designers that makes them much better at finding the fun in stuff; it's wild seeing great designers looking at a prototype, they can immediately say "this part isn't going to work" and "this mechanic will cause you this other problem" and be right. But still, this comes into play more for complex games with interlocking parts, and anyone can still stumble on a great idea for extremely minimal, "one rule" games.