I'm curious about something. Suppose for a second that going forward, games will no longer have either innovation or refinement. They'll have one for the rest of time, but not the other.

In the first case, you wouldn't see any new genres but you would see ambitious attempts to push current genres to new heights of excellence. You would see old ideas combined in some interesting ways, probably with better production values than in the past, but that would be it.

In the second case, you'd still see pretty games. But because people are so obsessed with innovation, the pretty games would be mostly optional as developers focused on providing something totally unique. Naturally, the number of games produced would decrease drastically and a lot of them would have irritating flaws that no one would ever bother improving upon with a subsequent release, but at least you could be guaranteed a thoroughly new experience with every game that you purchased.

What scenario appeals to you most? To hear a lot of people talk, innovation is the only justification for a game to exist, yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would choose the first situation. There's a lot of room for great gaming without real innovation. The games I enjoy most are often nothing more than polished reworkings or mixtures of things that I enjoyed years before.

Fortunately, we don't live in a world where we have to choose between innovation or polish. Yet I routinely see great games bashed because they lack true innovation. To me, it's a bit like complaining about Coke because it doesn't reinvent itself often enough. I like new flavors of pop, sure, but sometimes all I want is Coke.