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+<h1>goalless games </h1>
+january 14, 2022<br>
+#game-design #philosophy<br>
+<br>
+<h2>goalless games </h2><br>
+Some developers are happy to make loose, meandering sandbox games without no true win or fail state. The concept of goalless games is controversial among semantic people, but I feel that the genre with Garry's Mod and all the dressup games and physics simulators is enviably successful if not totally legitimate. It's not like the overwhelmingly popular Minecraft and old RuneScape don't share one foot in this genre, either, with their relative lack of direction and gameplay dominated by self-driven goals. I don't even feel like a central story or overarching player goals would improve these games (especially after watching Minecraft tack on some tedious hunger mechanic and an awkward final boss). <br>
+<br>
+<h2>my need for structure </h2><br>
+I'm just not a goalless game designer. <br>
+<br>
+A game designer can't force a player to share the game's goals, so there's no need to purposefully design a game to be goalless. For me, I feel like neglecting to set a game's goal reflects a lack of a game development goal. A goal is helpful to not only the player but also the developer. A vision of progression (game state, world, character, and story) will imbue each piece of the game with more purpose and help them fit together more seamlessly as a whole. It's a safeguard against filling a game with pointless, incongruent clutter at whim. Obviously not every developer needs a goal-oriented approach, but I do. <br>
+<br>
+No matter what philosophy the game designer has, though, a player will do what he wants to do, even if it has nothing to do with the goal of the game. Roleplayers are prominent members of MMO communities, and they might never max out a character or finish the main storyline. They throw out all the game designers' work and focus on finding a vista somewhere and acting out their own scene instead. There are plenty of screensaver simulators and 3D chat servers out there for them, but they turn up in "real" goal-driven games, too. There are touches of this aberrant behavior in everyone who doodles with bullet holes, names their player character something funny to harvest out-of-context dialog screenshots, or hoards a useless item. <br>
+<br>
+So in a way, game designers really don't need to design a goalless game. They can trust players to forge their own fun from even the most rigid hallway simulator. In my opinion, deliberately not designing goals runs greater risk of making players being too lost, bored, or overwhelmed to find their own fun or not even finding incentive to try the game in the first place. A better approach would be to build towards a purpose while taking a tip from goalless games by filling the world with interesting tools and interactibles that are fun for fun's sake. At the end of the day, though, obviously do what works for you! <br>
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+Last updated January 12, 2022
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