Reading
somewhere that Keita Takahashi would be dissatisfied with Noby Noby Boy got me thinking.
My hypothesis was that you can make a fun game without clear goals. Noby Noby Boy proves that this hypothesis is incorrect. It only became about 40% of what I expected.
I adore Noby Noby Boy. I also think it is one of very few games that would hold up in an art gallery next to other contemporary fine art. But I must admit that I don't play it very often.
I've had similar experiences with Ico and Grand Theft Auto 3. In both games I loved the non-game aspects of being present in the simulation and interacting with the virtual world and characters for their own sake. But once I had completed the game, I hardly every played it again, despite of desiring to experience those aspects again.
So even though the non-game aspects were the ones I enjoyed most in the game, the removal of the game also removed my desire to play.
In a way, I'm ok with this. I think it is fine for a game to offer a limit amount of amusement and that it is over at some point. Games are more like live performances anyway. There's no point in regretting that the theater or the ballet or the concert is over. The finiteness is simply part of the medium, and of the experience.
But on the other hand, I am attracted to the potential
infiniteness of a procedural simulation. I like to think that the video game medium can provide a solution for the sadness that occurs after having finished a lovely novel: one wishes one could stay in that fictional world forever, or at least revisit it once in a while.
By offering extensive replayability, the structure of a rules-based game generates a motivation for the player to spend time in the simulation. I think this has been the key to the success of video games. I deeply believe that it is the simulation that draws people to these games. But so far we have only been able to keep people in these simulations by providing them with trivial tasks.
We have all experienced the problem with this: the tasks can feel so mechanical that performing them becomes a goal onto itself. And such activity disconnects us to a large extent from the experience of the fictional world of the simulation.
But simply removing the gameplay doesn't seem to work entirely. Or at least it requires too much discipline from the player. It is not seductive.
Keeping the gameplay is not an option, since we know it ruins and replaces the experience of the simulation that is our focus. But maybe we need to
replace it with something.
We don't really want to provide players with a hard goal to achieve, because then we risk losing them again as they work towards this goal. Instead maybe we should offer the player a sense of
purpose. A sense of belonging in the virtual world, perhaps even being needed, not necessarily to save everyone from annihilation, but maybe just to keep things going. Or maybe the virtual world clearly enjoys your presence.
Pet games (like Tamagotchi) come to mind as games that feature such activity: your pet really enjoys your visits, and in some cases requires it for survival. But there is no real goal to the game. Animal Crossing is another: the villagers know when you haven't visited them for a long time, and things change in your absence.
These are fairly trivial examples. Because the fictions of these games are rather shallow, artistically. But I'm sure a similar non-goal oriented sense of purpose can be found in other stories.
Maybe it's as simple as thinking of the avatar for the player as the protagonist in the game's story. In most games, the player's avatar often feels more or less like a bystander, a tool that is being used by the other characters to accomplish their goals. Or the character knows nothing about the world and the game involves discovery of the story (rather than telling it). But what if the player really feels a sense of responsibility for the virtual world, or at least for some character(s) in it?
I guess management games like Sim City do something like this: your influence as a player is crucial to the evolution of the story, in a way that is not so predefined as in most -linear- games. You're not playing the role of a character whose destiny is already foretold. You create your own destiny, and the world really needs you to do this. It's easy to create such emotions when the player is given god-like powers. But I don't think this is necessary. And it probably makes for a better story if the power of the player is limited.
Anyway, I'd like to hear your thoughts about motivation to play in a non-goal oriented way. And what you think about this idea to give the player a purpose in the fictional world, rather than a goal in the game structure or and end to achieve in the story structure.
