I do feel a little bit of the same thing–that games these days feel the same more than they used to–but I don’t think it’s because they’ve become inbred trying to appeal to the same tiny crowd. Genres and conventions within genres are pretty established by now–jump with A in 3rd person games, move with the left stick and aim with the right in 1st person games, and so on–but it seems to me that when they change it’s in the direction of streamlining and the lowest common denominator and away from obscurity and complexity. Look at how quickly and universally Halo’s health recovery got adopted, for instance.

As for why games aren’t more open-ended–and I’ll freely admit this is my professional bias speaking–I think it’s because fewer games are built from the ground up by programmers these days. It’s kind of odd, really. Part of it is that producers and lead designers increasingly come from level design or outside; part of it is probably a feeling that the job of programmers is to put together Engines, and what designers do with them is really none of our business.

It’s also hard. People bounce back slowly after failures (how many years between Trespasser and Half-Life 2?) and learn the wrong lessons from successes (GTA succeeded because it had prostitutes!)

The last news release they had was October 2007—and I suspect they’d be hyping it if anything new had come out since then.

But game designers may well be the last to understand this lesson. Look at how few designers have actually shown any interest in the design direction laid out by the Sims, after all.