Serious games

I wonder how much game creators really think about the future of their games and how the players will view them.  Case in point:  Magic the Gathering, a tremendously successful game that rapidly spawned a worldwide following and large international tournaments with really substantial prizes.  While the game was soon to be analyzed and taken apart meticulously by players all over the creators clearly had no idea this was their future when the game shipped.  Initially it was packaged as a game that was always for ante, that is that you flip over a card from your own play deck when you start a game and you lose that card to your opponent if you lose the game!  This is obviously not suitable for repeated games and tournaments but it works fine if you intend your players to just be random dudes playing for fun against each other at lunch hour.

The opposite case is true for Starcraft 2.  The game came packaged with several features specifically targetted at high end players and those who do substantial game analysis.  Blizzard obviously went to great pains to make a game that would be accessible to the masses of casual players but would have all the tools needed for advanced players to improve their game.  For example, after you play a game you can look at a replay of the entire match so you can see exactly what each player did and when.  The last ranked match I played I had some real issues in that my opponent seemed to be psychic.  Every time a force of mine moved out he had his units in place to avoid or attack at just the right time and I could not seem to do anything he could not handily counter.  Eventually I made an all-in attack at his expansion and took him completely by surprise - in the ensuing battle he played rather badly and I wiped him out easily.  I decided to check the replay to figure out how I could do the early skirmishes better and discovered that he was not psychic or even very good at all; he simply had an observer hidden over my troops the entire match and I accidentally killed it just prior to my final assault.  That knowledge is going to make me a much better player and the ability to go back and understand my mistakes and find those gaps in my game is absolutely key.  Blizzard wants people to take their game very seriously and they programmed it to meet that goal.

I certainly think about the future of FMB a lot, not quite to the extent of creating tournament rules and such but I really have a good idea of what I would do to continue to keep the game fresh and how I would further challenge advanced players.  It seems like a rare thing to have the combination of game creating skill, the drive to publish and the insight to try to appeal to many different demographics that would be required to create a game that can both capture the interest of casual players and challenge the professionals.  It is challenging to manage the expectations of so many very different people since they don't place the same values on things at all and the company that does it is going to make a fortune.  I think if we look at the most successful games out there they often have that component in common - easy to learn, hard to master.