I have posted a new article for your perusal: Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games.
The article discusses the recent popularity of games without goals or with optional goals, such as Sims, the Grand Theft Auto series, and World of Warcraft.
It is slated to appear in the forthcoming Videogame/Player/Text anthology edited by Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins.
Without a Goal can be considered the academic version of my Game Developer’s Conference 2006 talk on A New Kind of Game. I.e. more references, fewer practical suggestions, and broader theoretical strokes.
Fascinating article (it was interesting seeing Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow included since I’ve often thought of it when thinking about why I enjoy Warcraft so much more than other games). I do think one of the things that makes Warcraft so “addictive” is the sandbox effect of having, essentially, a sandbox full of toys and options from which you can choose whatever most appeals to you. The constant small rewards in the form of game money, items, interaction with others, experience points, and so on act as marvelous intermittent reinforcers.
In contrast, I really couldn’t get into Second Life precisely because it was too open and undirected. Whereas WoW provides optional goals, Second Life provides none, and I failed to find that satisfying.
Really interesting! Worthy alone for the differentiation between having goals and pushing the player in certain directions.
A tiny bit of vocabulary that I’m fond of using is that of “success states” – those may not be goals per se, but simply things that the player recognizes as being expected of him, or simply things “well done.” They are typically (but not necessarily) associated with rewards: plain advancing or killing an enemy in Scramble, finding a hidden room in Doom, etc.
It is often that the player is forced to choose between different success states, all equally viable (or even irrelevant) to the overarching goal, and that’s where he can define his style of playing.
May I correlate some terms?
I’d like to suggest an extension, or perhaps re-imagining of the “complete” model, which still makes goals a requisite, but defines three types of goals: explicit, implicit and induced. Explicit are what we see in missions and quests et al., implicit are what we see in scores or earning more moeny, and induced are what we see in aesthetic conditions or “success states”.
Puzzles then, in the Murray sense of an optomizitation of a problem includes explicit and implicit goals, whearas an induced goal correspondes to the Rhizome. I think there’s a lot of interesting potential in the combinations and nesting of these different goal-orientations, as well as in pure exploration of inducive goal-orientations (which to a layman, or any theorist who disagrees with my usage, is not a goal-orientation at all).
I’m currently producing a casual game that is a series of explicit goals with a ditchomous inducive goal (and a very interesting dichotomy, from a fiction perspective). My next goal is to design and/or produce a casual game with an implicit goal and a number of induced goals, but no explicit goal whatsoever.
That’s a rather interesting article. In fact in all games “without goal” the main aim of players is just to construct and to improve the character itself. From this specific point of view there’s not difference at all from buying a new sofa for the living room in The Sims2 or raiding Molten Core looking for an epic drop. Starting from this perspective is possible to look for several specific micro-goal inside every game of this kind. For example I’ve applied in my current PhD research the Prisoner’s dilemma to the looting practice in Wow to explain the social critic of ninja looting behaviour… quite interesting to observe how it’s possible to create some kind of “social” rule where you have a lack of goal in the game (that means that you have huge space for free social interaction).