On Tuesday March 21st, I will be keynoting at the Serious Games Summit at GDC.
The title is “Broadening Our Idea of What Games Can Be“:
It may seem that all games have goals, but a number of recent hit games have demonstrated that a game can be interesting because it has weak or non-existing goals. Hits such as the GRAND THEFT AUTO series, WORLD OF WARCRAFT, and THE SIMS may be very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform actions that do not simply work towards a single game goal. If serious games are to reach a broader audience, they must learn from recent developments in game design.
In his presentation, Juul demonstrates how weakening or removing the game goal works can make a serious game cater to a wider audience. He discusses how to open-up a game to different styles of playing, how to make it more expressive, and how to increase playing time and the variation that a game can provide. Juul also outlines several tips for when to remove or weaken the goal of a game and how to create serious games systems that can sustain the interest of a variety of different player types.
This is what I like to do these days: Work on theory that is practically useful. And having worked on the question of what a game is, I have become interested in what happens when games change and become something new, catering to new players and playing styles.
Hey, Great stuff!
I couldn’t agree more. People have a knee jerk reaction to GTA but it is an amazing experience. I was inspired by GTA and some FPS to make an educational game for teaching languages. I wanted to take to power of the open world and the first person perspective to make what is basically a language/culture simulator.
I?ll give anyone who reads this blog a free copy of the full version. Just shoot me an email at ddunlap AT 3dlanguage.net.
Keep up the good work! We indy developers need evangelists!
This is definately something I’ve been playing with in my head – the idea of games with no explicit goal, but which reward the player for interesting use of the core mechanic, no matter how similar or different the kinds of expression are. I had also been thinking about this in order to make a “passive game” – one with no start or end other than the one you choose. In essence, it’s like giving the player a freeform toy, but RECOGNIZING the ways in which they use it to express themself. Thus, it’s a sort of marriage between agon and paedia.
Successfully identify the core methods of expression, and more complex, composite (emergent?) forms of expression are naturally rewarded since they still draw on the fundamental expressions. If you wanted, you could even give some form of “chain” or “multiplier” to any methods of expression used to compose more complex expressions.
It’s an approach which is only limited by the creativity of the designer with his/her own core mechanic – i.e. if a designer does not forsee a very obvious form of expression (i.e. Pacifism in a shoot ’em up), then that track of expression is not rewarded/recognized, and only a perverse gamer* will bother to attempt it.
However, this does run the risk of a player immediately engaging with the agonistic goals – players will want to max out the reward structure. Hitman is a great example: You can be a “Psycho Killer” for killing almost everyone, or a “Silent Assassin” for killing only your target, and getting passed everyone else unscathed – bipolar opposites. However, only the “Silent Assassin” ranking is rewarded with anything other than a screen of stats – you get unlockable rewards. This implicitly tells the player that “being silent = correct”. Any other form of expression, especially a mixed approach (killing + a bit of stealth) is seemingly frowned upon.
So we would like to reward all forms of expression equally. But this is often hard to balance against the natural strategic advantage of using one method of expression over another in a given situation. For example: we want to give equal merit to “pacifism” as we do “violence”. If an enemy has noticed us, draws their weapon, and starts to fire, it is going to be far easier solution to shoot back than it is to find a strategically viable solution through pacifism (unless we count death as a valid form of expression too – and why not? Sorry. Tangential). If, in this situation, we find a peaceful solution, should we not reward it more than a violent one?
For this reason, the QUALITY of the expression must also be guaged. That’s a mighty complex balancing act (in this particular example, atleast – simpler or more abstract games would find it easier).
*Don’t get me wrong: I love perverse gamers. Some of my best friends have played through Deus Ex without firing a shot in anger. Sadly, there’s only a couple of places in the game where their approach is acknowledged. I believe Warren Spector et al called it “the nihilistic effect”.