 Moore's Law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Colloquially, this is understood as computers getting more powerful at a steady rate, enabling more computational complexity, rendering fidelity, advanced simulations, and AI. Video games are a computational medium as well, and so at the onset of every new console generation, details about hardware make an implicit promise about new kinds of experiences never before possible. This techno-optimism drives the early adoption of new consoles, and permeates much of how we think about the relationship between technology and games. Is this necessarily the case though? Sure, there are games like Super Mario 64, the revolutionized movement and interaction in a three-dimensional space, only made possible by the jump in hardware, but there are also plenty of games at the beginning of a console's lifespan that are just slightly more refined versions of what have come before. hardware does of course frame what is possible on a console, and pushes design in interesting directions. For example, the PlayStation console used CDs as opposed to the cartridge of the N64, granting it more static storage space. However, the N64 had better transfer speed, the ability to load data into RAM. Hence, the PlayStation could have a game like Final Fantasy 7, with hundreds of static background images, with the caveat that it took a while for each screen to load, and also required multiple disks. Conversely, Super Mario 64 allowed for rapid shifts between a hub world and levels, facilitating its dynamic exploratory play. There are other differences of course, but the point is that each of the console's hardware enables specific kinds of design. There is a subfield within game studies that analyzes the intersection of hardware and design, aptly named platform studies. The most prominent work within this is the book Racing the Beam, which documents how the Atari's hardware constraints led to specific kinds of games, and technical challenges when it came to design. Racing the Beam refers to how VCS programmers had to make sure that each individual line of every frame is ready, as the electron gun starts to light up the lines of the TV. Racing the Beam as it travels down the screen. Two games illustrate different aspects of the relationship between hardware and design. Pac-Man for the VCS had many difficulties, owing to how the VCS Pac-Man cartridge has only a quarter of the ROM in Pac-Man's arcade incarnation. Engineering techniques had to be employed to adapt the game, including vertical positioning, horizontal strobing and flicker, used to enable the AI to move in distinct patterns independent of one another. The aesthetic compromises made this port inferior to the original though. However, constraints are not just hard limitations, sometimes they force designers to conjure inventive solutions that can push the medium forward. The Atari VCS could not represent text very well, and so when Warren Robinette tried to adopt the text-based adventure game to create adventure, he had to translate room-to-room navigation in words to a spatial medium. The book states, Robinette's main innovation in adventure was devising an approach to the graphical representation of a player's movement through a complex space. Robinette explained, I had a scheme for adapting the text-dialog of adventure into a video game, used the joystick to move around, show one room at a time on the video screen, and show objects in the room as little shapes. This inspired games like The Legend of Zelda and Ultima, essentially generating a design trend. They continue. Games have moved to 3D, and programmers have become more concerned with polygons than pixels, but movement and collision detection remain the primary building blocks of adventure games. Comparing the PS1 and N64, we see how technology both limits and enables specific kinds of games. And with the Atari, we understand that constraints can both be detrimental, but also inspire creativity that leads to new avenues of design. The relationship between technology and games is thus a complicated one, not simply reducible to a linear or exponential progression, but rife with instances of human ingenuity and effort interfering with the evolution of games. Technology often gets politicized. We saw how Sega's marketing campaign for the Genesis positioned itself as a faster, edgier console than Nintendo's, and this even extended to the design of its mascot, Sonic. Regardless, technology in games is not just a console's hardware specifications. It is also the production technology used to create them. What started as a medium with individual creators quickly turned into an industry dominated by massive corporations, assembling teams of specialized practitioners. Each of these disparate disciplines, from design to animation to sound to programming, has to coordinate with one another to manufacture the games we see today. It isn't as simple as an artist's painting on a blank canvas or a writer jotting down words. Games require more sophisticated production technologies, as computational power continues to increase alongside consumer expectations. In her essay, How We Design Games Now and Why, Catherine Neal outlines how technology and industry has shaped the evolution of game design, first outlining the way large studios produce games, from a pitch to concept art to pre-production and then production. She highlights how the massive scale of this undertaking requires explicit scheduling, costing, and sequential development that makes it vulnerable to shocks or sudden changes in design made way through development. She says, the problem is a conflict of interest between the increasingly demanding needs of production and the needs of design. It was a broken relationship. The production technology of games is not only antithetical to design itself, but creativity. It encourages an unreflexive design by committee approach that plays it safe, inheriting practices without questioning their validity. Despite the rapidly increasing technical sophistication and production values of video games, game design itself remained relatively underdeveloped. The call here is for a more universal language for game design, so that the development process is not beholden to an assembly production. This stage-based process is some chimera, combining the sequential software development of the Waterfall model with a massive engineering project. As we know, though, new production technologies have emerged, chiefly in the independent games landscape. Smaller teams means more decentralized democratic control of a project. Widely accessible game engines made getting into development much easier and cheaper, and digital distribution platforms like Steam allows developers to circumvent the need for publishers and physical distribution. This also bleeds into new design conventions like games as a service, where games can be released in early access and then chained over time, allowing a more iterative model of production. Neal is skeptical of some of these developments, suggesting they are similarly antithetical to creativity. Evolution and innovation is being driven not by intellectual or technological advances in design itself, but by the sheer volume and speed of designs produced and tested, within a design culture increasingly characterized by mass participation game jams and intensive player metrics harvesting. The essence of the argument here is that technology, hardware, software, and production can inhibit creativity by becoming encompassing, substituting genuine understanding. Jonathan Blow mirrors this idea in his talk preventing the collapse of civilization, suggesting our functional competence at interfacing with computers is decreasing as we move further into abstraction in how we interact with computers. The idea that the AAA space lacks in creativity is not novel, but many will contest that the indie space still rewards innovation and design. People have mapped how the costs of game development are also increasing due to the demands of increasing fidelity, but surely the indie sphere is free from these expectations. The problem here is what we even mean by innovation in games. When we talk about the evolution of games, what exactly do we mean? Is it the genesis of new genres, new design conventions, more sophisticated themes? It isn't exactly clear. Moreover, once we do specify the parameters, it isn't obvious what led to the development of certain design trends. As much of what takes place during the production of a game is not transparent to us. Space Invaders has aliens that descend at an escalating speed, but this was a glitch that was kept in the game because it was determined to be more fun. What the designers uncovered by the intersection of hardware, chance, and ingenuity was flow theory. The idea that increasing the difficulty in conjunction with the player's ability keeps them engaged. This innovation then seeped into all games from Tetris to Doom. Was it technology that prompted this revelation? Well, yes and no. The reason the aliens sped up is because less aliens on screen meant more processing power for the remaining aliens, whereas a full screen of aliens slowed down their collective much. It's as if technology itself wanted us to discover this now pervasive concept in game design. But in reality, technology and human ingenuity cannot be separated. The combo in Street Fighter II was a discovery that came out of a bug that allowed players to string moves together because of the dynamics of frame data. Again, serendipity. But in this instance, technology had less to do with presenting us the problem. Bugs can arise, emergence can manifest. A counterpoint to this is to contrast games to other artistic mediums. An essay on the subject of the evolution of games reads, saying that the history of video games is the history of technological improvement is tantamount to saying that the history of literature is the history of writing implements, from Cuneiform to Shakespeare's Quill to David Foster Wallace's Microsoft Word. Word didn't invent infinite just. Such a history mistakes tools for art. Creativity often flourishes under constraints. This is well known by people who study the subject. But necessity is also the mother of invention. Hardware limitations and industry demands might create the context, the canvas for us. But perhaps we should give more credit to the human being. Also, Picasso said we should know the rules like a pro before we break them like an artist. The artist, designer and practitioner aware of their own history and methods is more situated to find valuable solutions to design problems. Hideo Kojima popularized the stealth genre in Metal Gear when he realized the MSX could not handle more than a few sprites. Instead of an action game, he thought of avoidance instead to work around the limitations of hardware he was dealing with. However, the opposite happened with Metal Gear Solid 4. He overestimated the power of the PS3 and conceived of design ambitions that could not be realized with the hardware he was given. They had to scale back some of these ideas and construct a game that worked around what was possible on the system. Considered one of gaming's most notable art tours, we see how even someone as eccentric and creative as Kojima has to conform to the demands of technology as well. Moreover, we see how a model of creativity in games that places so responsibility with the human is also flawed. Games can have the signature of a designer, sure, but they are constructed by hundreds of people. Technology and mechanics isn't what makes Kojima's games notable though. He's revered by many because of his exploration of complex themes about war and colonialism, genes and memes, the military industrial complex and cybernetics. He also exposed these ideas using interactivity, the infamous psycho mantis boss fight, blending games with cinema to create an experience that is more than the sum of its parts. And this in turn reveals a bias in our understanding of the evolution of our own history. Mechanics and genres that derive from them take precedence over themes, emotions, and ideas. This is why some were baffled in called narrative experiences walking simulators. Perhaps if adventure didn't convert text into space, we would have been led down a different trajectory, one where a consensus about games as a form of literature developed. The technological origins of our medium may be framing our analysis of our own history through the lens of technology itself. Mechanics and design innovations are a continuation of the discourse surrounding memory and processing power. It is about abstract systems of logic and interaction, exactly how we think about the computer itself. Literature and cinema have moved past an analysis of innovation through the lens of mechanical formalism and towards integrating those tools with thematic relevance. We think of games as technology first and an art form second, because video games were born out of technological and industrial research and production. AAA companies are making strides in rendering technology and ray tracing and cloud-based processing and workflow. But this is hardly what anyone thinks about when we think of innovation. I could just as easily suggest that there have been few meaningful developments in artificial intelligence in games, in experiences that take advantage of SSDs and streaming technology. Part of this is due to what we explored before. There is a cost and production conflict as games get more technologically advanced, stifling creativity. But also because the question of innovation itself is being asked incorrectly. Doom wasn't the genesis of the first person shooter, or even the perspective, but it inspired countless clones with its design. Technical and artistic ingenuity aside, it was influential. The same can be said for early RPGs like Ultima and Final Fantasy. If we dig deeper though, we see how these two games were influenced by the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn was derivative of both war games and fantasy literature. The jump in Donkey Kong was a specific mechanical innovation, but the actual conceptual revelation, according to some, was a delayed and modifiable response to an input. Half-Life innovated once more with FPS games by creating immersive, set-piece-oriented design with an embedded narrative. But it was a mod for the game that created Counter-Strike and the tactical FPS subgenre, creativity from the top down and then bottom up. In fact, mods, which exemplify low-risk, easy tools and working within constraints, have been instrumental in the genesis of many subgenres. The Battle Royale coming from PUBG, a mod of Arma, and the MOBA, Dota, being a mod of Warcraft 3. The point is, there are many different dimensions across which we can measure innovation and creativity, and the methods by which these come about are not self-evident. So what does a theory of innovation look like in games then? It is one that understands how games are grounded in hardware, software and production technologies, that these are the paintbrushes we use to craft our games, but also abstracts design principles and innovations that are not determined exclusively by them. It sees the human in the machine, in the process, and also separates art from technology and its conception of its own relevance. There are many ways we have tried to do this, mapping specific design innovations, genre birds, situating progress in the context of control, emergence, aesthetics and expression. Ultimately, the question of whether technology determines the evolution of games may itself not be determined. It might depend on whether or not we seize a role for ourselves in the progression of our own art form.