I’m giving a talk at the IT University this Friday at 16:15 with the above title.
“The past few years has seen the emergence of a number of new games that in many ways change our ideas about what a game is. Recent hits such as Grand Theft Auto 3, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, EverQuest, and The Sims may seem like very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform other actions than simply striving towards a game goal.
In the talk, I will examine how the weakening of the game goal works both as a way of opening up a game for different styles of playing and for expanding the audience for video games.”
This is a talk where I draw lines between the entirely general “what is a game”-questions and specific game design issues. (Which is something I want to do.)
This sounds like a fascinating topic — why did they have to go and put Copenhagen on the other side of the planet?
Jesper,
Any chance your talk was taped like the Comwork symposia?
is there a way to get a transcript of this speech?
Very curious about your talk – hope to hear more about it. Out of curiosity, how do you determine what constitutes a “game goal” and what lies outside of that goal? Is it a “weakening of the game goal,” or a situation of multiplicity (where there are many goals, rather than one)?
There is no transcript or anything – it is a work in progress, hopefully to become an article sometime soon.
Jason, I would put like this: In “classic games”, there is always a clear official measure of how well you did. In my game definition, I call this “valorization of outcome” – some outcomes are better than others. In a multi player game, you either lost, won, or it was tied. In a single player game, there is a single measure such as a score or a specific state to obtain (getting to the final Island or smth).
The “weakening” means 1) that this no longer applies – there is no single official measure of how well you did and/or 2) it’s possible (and still interesting) to play the game for an extended period of time without striving towards the goal.
A game like Settlers has multiple sub-goals – build the longest road, get the most cities etc.., but there is a final score count to see how well you did.
PS. I have by now realized that some people think that saying that a “game has a goal” means that the goal is something that an author or a company provides. What I mean by “the game has a goal” is that the goal is accepted by the players of the game, so a goal can (obviously) be something that you create with your friends, kicking the ball around in the school yard, or you can play Sims as a “classic game” with your friends if you agree that the goal is to build the biggest house in 2 days, for example.
Interesting – I haven’t played LoZ:Wind Walker, and I’m an AC buff, rather than EQ, but I have played through some of GTA3, so I’ll run with that… I’m trying to think of examples where some sort of valorization of outcome (nicely put, btw) isn’t in place. Even running over pedestrians randomly has this sort of effect, whereby each rundown you increase your chances of getting pursued by the police. I’m trying to think of some examples of pure sandbox play, which is even more complicated by your postscript caveat – in Asheron’s Call, for example, building your inventory of items is as much a part of the game valorization (and hook, of course) as it is a ‘game’ of cultural capital implicitly agreed upon between players.
So, I suppose I’m quibbling (unjustly, of course, since all I’ve read is your brief abstract here, but I’m intrigued by the notion, since it’s in line with some of my research) over the notion of ‘weakening,’ whereas I see it as the development of increasingly sophisticated series of game goals, some more obvious than others.
Although I also think of Espen’s article (I forget exactly which one it is) where he talks about wandering through Morrowind, only to be disappointed to later read the walkthrough and find that he’d done the ‘wrong’ things… perhaps that’s more in line with the tension you are exploring?