Monday, February 7, 2011
Gooooooooooal(s)!
I'm going to go ahead and make a strong claim that the one element common to all games is the presence of a goal. There must be some goal outcome, product, state, score, etc. for the interaction. The goal could be to achieve the highest score, draw the fastest picture, last the longest, play all your cards, build the best machine, save the princess, advance to the next level, eat the most donuts, or unlock some secret. The goal provides some context for the interaction. There is some ultimate purpose (whether it be practical or trivial). Each action taken within the game has the potential to advance you towards a specified end (or to lead you astray). With the right goal, you can still have an enjoyable game after you take away the points, leave out the fantasy world, and eliminate the competition (from the design - ha I'm funny). However, simply having a goal does not make it a FUN game. Goal does not equal fun. But anyway, that's my claim. All games have some goal. Who's with me, and who's against?
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Do you mean that the game has an inherent goal or that either the game or the player should have a goal?
ReplyDeleteI think the Harvest Moon games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_%28series%29) and most MMORPGs only have player generated goals.
More that the games afford the creation of a goal. In a never-ending game, the goal is to last the longest. In SimCity, the goal is to create a working collective of objects. Not all games are required to have a "main quest" goal, but they would probably have a series of sub-goals that offer a chance to "achieve" something. In Harvest Moon there are quantifiable subgoals of starting the farm, winning a contest, etc. Even though there may not be a strong overarching plot-like goal, there are still define-able goals/subgoals.
ReplyDeleteTo maybe illustrate what I mean, let's take things like learning and art. If I had you a book and tell you to learn it. When is the book actually learned? If you just read through it, that doesn't mean that you learned everything in it (you could read through it 10 times and still not learn everything). There is no obvious end-point or quantity to determine when something is learned. Similarly, within art, when is a painting complete? There is no discernible endpoint when you can say that a painting is "done". That completion is subjectively determined by the artist, and could never be applied. While these might not be the perfect counterexamples, they should hopefully illustrate my original claim. Which is still just a claim. I could easily be incorrect.