An idea without execution is still valuable, but execution without an idea is worthless.
FIFA?
(Not trying to be snarky, but genuinely motioning to something I believe to be execution without novel ideas.)
FIFA the organisation was much more corrupt than you'd expect, and so I suppose to the extent this organisation was novel (there are a lot of international sports bodies) the novelty was apparently undesirable.
But I think the FIFA video game may have been the first to introduce several awful ideas, which were nevertheless novel. Blind buy "lootboxes" were introduced to the FIFA games fairly early because fans were familiar with the idea of buying a pack of "trading cards" in the real world which are also blind buy.
And that's ok. I love garbage sometimes, there is absolutely zero harm in garbage. But that doesn't make it anything other than garbage. The harm comes when you think the garbage is gold.
Novelty and ideas are golden. There would be no good execution of said idea if the idea wasn't put first first (of course).
That's easy - Johnny Depp in black eyeliner.
> Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows how to come up with them reliably.
The operative word there is "good ideas are rare". The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on (which seems plausible, and at any rate you haven't contradicted that), and that good ideas are rare, so most ideas are crap (which you yourself just asserted). Thus, the expected value of a given idea (absent execution) is very low, aka cheap.
> The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on
I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.
Eh, I consider "Ideas that are known for a fact to be good (ie useful) are useful (ie valuable, provided they aren't already devalued by ubiquity[0])." to be sufficiently tautological that I would not expect someone (intellegent and good-faith enough to be worth engaging with) to be arguing against it. Although note the distinction between merely good ideas, versus ideas that you actually know are good, since the work of turning the former into the latter was what I assumed they were attributing to execution.
> I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.
Fair enough; I'm not sure we even have a disagreement over facts so much as over how we're categorizing things and the terminology therefor.
0: Eg, "writing" or "general-purpose computers" are almost incalculably valuable ideas, but they're not worth anything in a supply-and-demand sense because everyone in the world already knows about them.
This definitely applies to board games. Dominion was the first deck-builder board game and is still fairly popular, but it has been superseded by many other superior deck builders that came out afterwards.
It is so pure and focused that it is absolutely the best deck builder there is IMO.
So many other deck builders either completely mess up the extremely careful calibration of chance that exists in a deck builder or the 'other' game that is tacked on to the deck building engine interacts badly or in very swingy ways.
If we use logged plays for the past month on BGG as one datapoint, Dominion has more than than Aeon's End, Ascension and Marvel Legendary combined.
Sure, there is a specific population of people who log their plays and it differs from the gameplaying public as a whole, but if anything it veers more towards "cult of the new" and away from people who still play an older game because it's what they have.
EDIT: It looks like Star Realms has almost as many logged plays this month as Dominion, but I would still maintain that Dominion is in no way "superseded" even if it is no longer the only relevant game in its genre.
Adding in a feature that say previous winners become the new boss and losers get a bonus inheritance from their prior run could be hailed as novel and doing good things for pace.
Having to randomly roll 10 dice x 365.25x days x 18 years for events to create your starting character would be very novel. Especially if it is a commom occurance that all four players to die before turn zero due to childhood disasters resulting in the winner being the one who lived the longest at eight years old before dying of cancer would be terrible to actually play.
Regardless, I think we both agree we want novel games. No one still wants to be playing Senet. ;-)