Saturday, 2 April 2022

Gaming Cultural Assumptions

I want to talk about gaming culture – but probably not in the way you are thinking.

More correctly, I want to talk about the cultural assumptions behind the games we play. This is more a discussion about game design than the people who play games – though we as players are part of this too. For the most part I am going to focus on computer games, but will occasionally include board games and other media.

A disclaimer before starting: I have mentioned games in this discussion not to try and promote them, but as examples of the ideas being discussed, and how those ideas are implemented. Links to publishers' sites are below for anyone wanting to further explore any of the mentioned titles. In many cases, these are games I have enjoyed, though mention here does not imply a recommendation (looking at you, Monopoly). The views or critiques contained here are my own opinions, not fact, so feel free to disagree (though I will try and back what I'm saying with facts where relevant). I actually welcome you to disagree with me; that's how we learn and grow.

I realised recently that most games seem to have goals drawn from a very small set of options:

  • Conquer or kill enemies, such as in shooters or most strategy games;
  • Make loads of money, such as in economic sims or any game where you play as a business owner (this can also apply to maximising other types of resources than just money);
  • Win competitions (beating others), such as racing games.

If you sit and analyse these from the perspective of game theory, it becomes clear that they are all "zero-sum" games – i.e. one winner and one (or several) losers. I would challenge you to think of a game where the primary goal is something other than these three (yes, they do exist, but are fairly rare). This shouldn't be surprising, because "playing to win" is a simple concept to understand and a simple concept to gamify. This is so ingrained in our games and culture that I imagine many of you are wondering how you could have a game be about anything other than playing to win, but I believe that is because we are thinking too narrow.

The first counter-example I would give is any game based on exploration as a core mechanic, such as Journey or Firewatch. In these kinds of games, the point is not so much about trying to "win" as simply to explore and go on a journey – and before you ask, yes, Minecraft can be classified as an exploration game too, even though it comes with quite a strong dose of killing (depending on game mode; more on that later).

Another focus for games can be social interaction. Arguably the Sims franchise fits into this category, as the goal there is to influence and observe the social interactions of the game characters, but I am more talking about where the point is interacting with other (real) humans. Many games have this as a key part of play, from MMOs to the card game Mafia or its recent online reinvention, Among Us. In online or group play, social interaction is an important part of gaming, even when this is not the goal of the game itself – we often make games social. A friend of mine had a fascinating anecdote here: there was an online game designed for kids that disallowed chat apart from a limited number of basic responses (yes, no, ok, help, I understand, etc). Two adult players were enjoying interacting, so attempted to find a way to communicate outside the game – difficult when the game designers had specifically tried to disallow this. One of them said, "yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes, ok." The other responded with "I understand", and they proceeded to exchange contact details using "yes" and "no" as Morse Code!

As humans, we are wired for social engagement. Most of us probably know someone who only plays games with other people, not alone.

Anyone reading this who has done research into game design may be able to guess what I have drawn from so far: Bartle's taxonomy of player types (original) [1]. In this, Bartle splits game players (originally in MUDs – Multi-User Dungeons – a forerunner to MMOs) into four categories, applying the suits from playing cards: Achievers ♦, Explorers ♠, Socialisers ♥, and Killers ♣. Above I have discussed Explorers and Socialisers, those who play to experience new things and those who play for the people aspect. I would argue that the primary attraction of board games is social interaction (we have a number of board games that I love playing with others but have never been interested in playing in solo mode, even where that is an option). Killers in this scheme includes not only those who are trying to kill or conquer others, but those who are in it for the competition – so would include a racing player who trying to win against their opponents or get the best lap times. Obviously, like any categorisation system, there is a lot of overlap and a person will usually not fit a single category in even a single play session, let alone across everything they play (though streamers like The Spiffing Brit or Dangerously Funny are a counter-example to me saying that players will avoid having a singular goal...)

Looking at the goals I listed at the start, these are all focused on only twos types of players: achievers and killers. Yes, the other types of players find their place in games, such as playing a game like Stardew Valley for the social interactions with the townsfolk or to explore its story or world, rather than trying to maximise their profit. Often though, even in a game like Stardew that rewards alternative play goals, players are still forced to resort to being a straight-out capitalist to progress (i.e. a Killer).

So, what might some alternatives look like? If we want to explore new ways of playing and new objectives, what options do we have? Are these even things that could be gamified, or, for that matter, is the very definition of "gamify" part of the problem? To answer these, I think we need to dig a little deeper into the cultural assumptions behind why we have the goals we have. I am going to explore this from the perspective of one of my own favourite genres: strategy games, and specifically the "4X" genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate). Some of you may already see a problem with two of those "X" words: exploit and exterminate (though of course "exploit" here is specifically referring to resources, not people – though I will revisit the idea of resource exploitation too).

Whose Version of History?

This brings us to the topic of history – including my own history: my earliest encounter with the 4X genre was the grand patriarch of computer strategy games itself: the first Sid Meier's Civilization. This game puts you in the seat of an immortal ruler of a tribe of settlers who must grow and develop your empire through the ages, researching technologies, constructing buildings and world wonders, raising armies, undertaking diplomacy or war, and trying to balance the needs of your people. The Civilization series – "Civ" to the fans – has had many iterations over the years (the Sixth entry in the main series is still being updated, and there are rumours of a Seventh, not including the several spin-off titles), but they all stick to the same basic gameplay and strategy: expand as quickly as you can, maximise your resource and science incomes, and either defeat or defend against foes or try to win others them and form alliances. It is a compelling mix, evidenced by the series' continued popularity and many imitators (such as the recent Humankind or the freely-available open-source version called Freeciv, which is one of the few ways today that you can easily replay something close to the original Civ 1).

The Civilization games are steeped in history – the in-game "civilopedia" provides a decent introduction to a lot of the real history on which the games are based, and can serve as a good educational tool. Civ 1 spurred and instructed much of my early interest in history. But, out of necessity, the games are focused on a particular version of history: that of colonial empires. If you did not have a colonial approach in Civ (expand, explore, exploit, exterminate), you would not have much of a game. However, the games do little to address the real-world after effects and consequences of rampant colonialism. At worst, if you subjugate a foreign city, you might have a few turns of unrest, a problem that is easily rectified in most cases. Indigenous tribes are either reduced to cookie-cutter replications of the core 19th Century Euro-centric empire-building, or represented as generic "barbarians" that are only there to be exterminated.

Colonialism is a controversial topic today, so I do not want to dwell on it too long, however it should be enough to recognise that forcibly subjugating another culture to land grab and control resources is deeply problematic, and that many parts of the world still feel the negative effects of the, primarily European, age of colonialism. Yes, colonialism also brought benefits to many places, such as technology and education, but the idea that Western thought has a monopoly on good ideas is deeply problematic.

This is not, to my knowledge, ever addressed in games. In games, where ultimately success is reduced to numeric optimisation, bringing technology to "barbarian" tribes is only ever a good thing. In games, more technology means more resources and power, which is always good. The corrupting effect of unrestricted ultimate power is never addressed – and why would it be, when a big attraction of games is to be a power fantasy? Who wouldn't want to try out being an Immortal God Emperor if they have the chance?

However, this is not to say that we could not "gamify" the idea of centralised corruption. Why not take a step back from the immortal emperor power fantasy, and have the leaders of a player's faction be a little less in their control? A few of the Paradox Interactive games touch on this idea; for example, in Stellaris the player has little choice over their leaders, able to influence elections or choose one of three options, but otherwise stuck with what they get, and leaders can have (or develop) negative traits, including things like "substance abuser" or "corrupt". But, even there, a leader becoming corrupt has only a small effect on gameplay and in many cases the leader can be easily dismissed and replaced. The player never has to stage a coup or rally the military to overthrow a chancellor who decided to hold on to power and become a dictator.

The concept of a Westernised, revisionist version of history appearing in a game is explored in an article titled Signifying the West: Colonialist Design in Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs by Beth A. Dillon [2]. In Age of Empires III, you play a more focused period of history than the first and second (and now fourth) entries in the franchise, across a couple of generations in the time of the settling of America, rather than the thousands of years of continent-spanning ancient empires previously seen. Some of the characters are Native American, so it offered an excellent place to explore Native American views on colonialism, but the game instead makes basically no differentiation from how the European characters and powers play. A young mind seeing this as their first introduction to the period could come away with the idea that Indigenous minds think the same about resource extraction, war-making, and empire building as the typical modern Western powers, when in fact Native Americans had very different focuses, prioritising one's relationship with land and nature and people far more and individual gain far less. (Dillon puts this much better than I do here, so I highly recommend giving that article a read if you have the time).

Cooperation

In the real world, cooperation is almost always better than competition. I studied construction management and project management at University, and one of the things I learned there is that there are several ways to resolve conflicts on projects: you can discus it directly with the parties involved, you can seek mediation, or you can escalate to litigation. Needless to say, solving through discussion or mediation leads to better outcomes for everyone than getting lawyers involved. Generally, if a conflict goes to Court, it is going to become a zero-sum game and someone is going to come away unhappy. The adversarial system (which forms the backbone of our legal and political systems) by nature is not configured to allow for win-win, positive-sum outcomes – someone always has to lose. We have become so used to this system that most of us do not question it, and many never even consider the idea that more than one party can win. Yet, the best political outcomes are those with "bipartisan", cross-party support, where everyone gets to contribute and have their say, rather than having to be against an idea for no reason other than who it was that suggested it. Tribalistic, partisan politics is a pet hate of mine – no one has a monopoly on truth, so opposing your "enemies" just because they're your enemies is rarely useful. Sometimes good ideas come from people you don't agree with – or at the very least, a different viewpoint can help you improve your own ideas.

So if cooperation is better than competition, how would this look in games? The first place I would look is cooperative ("co-op") games; this can range from playing a shooter with a buddy against computer-controlled monsters, to team games, to some of the more unique (or weird) titles, such as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Human Fall Flat, or Unravel Two (full disclosure: I have not played those last three). Board games are, in my own opinion, more fun when they are cooperative; somehow I feel more involved with my friends when I am trying to work with them to achieve a common goal than trying to defeat them. Pandemic is more interesting to me than Settlers of Catan, or worse, Monopoly (a game originally designed to show that monopolistic, zero-sum outcomes are horrible, a point seemingly lost on modern publishers of it). I am not alone in finding cooperation better than competition [3].

An interesting idea I had was to have a 4X or similar style game where your final score was determined in part by the living standards of everyone outside your empire – i.e. you win by helping others. I don't think that, by itself, this would work particularly well, as the game would have to be designed in a way where it gives the player agency and the ability to affect others, but it could be an interesting starting point for designing a game that focused on improving everyone's well-being, rather than simply being about singular victories.

While in modern Western countries the idea of individualism, personal rights, and the centrality of the self seem both inescapable and innate to us as humans, this kind of culture is actually unusual among both the majority of humanity today and cultures throughout history. Most of humanity has thought of ourselves as members of a whole more than as separate island-like individuals; you are your family, your clan, your tribe, your people, and the survival and wellbeing of the group is more important than your own. While there are some benefits to individual responsibility and self-assertion, I think that this loss of family and cultural context in the West is a significant loss, in large part because it discourages cooperation and thinking of others ahead of yourself.

A way to demonstrate this is to use the Prisoner's Dilemma [4]. If you are unfamiliar with this, I recommend reading the Wikipedia link there to get the basic idea. Of particular interest is the solution known as the Nash Equilibrium [5] (Nash was popularised in the film A Beautiful Mind), which (oversimplified) boils down to "Do the best for yourself regardless of what the other party chooses." This often means that the players end up in a non-optimal position, a fact that bothered me for years after I heard it, though I couldn't fault the logic. It was only much later that I realised that it is because we frame the entire dilemma in cultural assumptions that we are unaware of, namely that the ideal outcome is personal gain. It is inherent to the Dilemma that the goal is to get the best outcome for oneself; it does not consider personal loss for the sake of another's gain as a valid strategy. However, if we approach the Dilemma from the perspective of, "What is going to be the best outcome for everyone (not just myself)?" then we can consistently achieve the best outcomes (assuming of course that the other party plays the same way, though I think the formalisation of strategies here overstates the idea that "doing good for another without reward" ever really ends up without reward in the real world, especially over time with multiple interactions).

Interestingly, a friend of mine who is around a decade younger than me (so very much a "Millennial") told me of a class she did at University where they played a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma and her group were the first the lecturer had ever seen who chose the non-selfish option, risking personal loss. I think that assuming that the "self-first" ideal will survive even in our own culture is somewhat myopic: seeing the effects of the Baby Boomer generation living a Neo-Liberalism-backed, consumerist, hyper-individualist existence, many among the younger generations are starting to look for other options, because – unsurprisingly – acting selfishly all the time is a sad existence and, when scaled up to whole nations, destroys the environment and even society itself.

Being More Than a Dalek

In the Doctor Who TV series, the eponymous Doctor's most famous enemy are the Daleks: a race engineered to hate and to destroy everyone who isn't a genetically pure Dalek. It is, of course, a fairly thinly-veiled commentary on the Nazis. The catchphrase of these robot-encased mutated space Nazis is a single simple word we have already encountered here: "Exterminate!"

But as problematic as the idea of killing might be, it sells. For the 2010s (the decade from 2010 to 2019), seven of the top ten best-selling games in the United States [6] were Call of Duty games (military shooters) – and the rest of the list is Grand Theft Auto V (adding some good ol' Exploitation, in more than merely the economic sense of the word) and Red Dead Redemption II, with only Minecraft breaking the "Exterminate!" shooter trope (but still including a fair bit of killing). The global statistics [7] are a bit more varied than the USA, including things like Mario Kart and fewer Call of Duty games, facts that probably comment on American culture.

This isn't to say that I don't think there is a place for shooters, or that violent video games are inherently bad – I enjoy multiplayer shooters myself (especially at LAN games with friends), or playing things like Half Life 2 – but I do think that there is so much more to gaming than just shooting at stuff. For myself, I am interested in more than just destroying things, and tend to tire of shooters fairly quickly compared to other genres. And, while formal studies generally do not place the blame for violent behaviour at the feet of video games [8], there is still a lot of potential for games as educational tools [9] (my own Master's research [10] looked at exactly that). If we can do good with games – and I strongly believe we can – then why not do good?

War and conflict have been a huge part of our past, so games focused on the past are forgiven for providing few other options. But is that necessarily going to be the model for the future? The later half of the 20th and the 21st Century thus far have seen a trend towards fewer and fewer armed conflicts. You are less likely to die in a war now [19] than at basically any other time in history. Assuming we survive climate change, this trend seems like it should continue; a globally-connected world is one where the economic disincentives to war outweigh the incentives (at least as long as our critical resources last). You won't go to war against someone when your whole economy relies on them as either a market or producers, or both (which, incidentally, is why a full-blown China-America war is unlikely – for now at least – despite the major differences in ideology: it would decimate both economies).

However, even in future-focused games, "war as the default" still seems to be the base assumption. Games like Stellaris almost always force you into conflicts – though this is not surprising when you realise that all the assumptions about colonisation thus far are kept. That is probably because to imagine something different to our past experiences is difficult – and "conflict" (in the story sense) is easier to convey when it's literal. As far as I can tell, it is impossible to play through a game of Stellaris without going to war (unless you disable the end-game crisis).

I think that assuming the future will too closely resemble the past is a bit of a failure of imagination. Yes, human nature doesn't change, but if we held to that idea as closely as we do when creating fictions about the future, the past half-century is difficult to explain. Why not imagine future alternatives that go in new directions? Why not move beyond 19th-Century-esque colonial thinking?

Approaching the future with new ideas is critically important if we are to survive the rest of this century and on into later ones. I believe that without re-orienting ourselves to a "cooperation first" approach, we will not be able to solve this century's problems. New problems have always required new ideas for solutions.

Games as Art

There is some debate about whether or not games count as "Art" in terms of traditional art forms, or to what degree. One of the contentions revolves around the fact that players themselves play a large part in shaping the "art" of the game, and in most cases, no two players will have exactly the same experience. However, even skipping the Post-Modernist "interpretation is solely up to the observer" approach, I do not think that the consumer being active in shaping art invalidates it from being art; collaboration allows, if anything, a more interesting expression. I would suggest asking any two people who have seen the same movie, read the same book, or looked at the same painting to see if they came away with the same experience – the answer is likely no.

However, I think one of the strongest arguments for games as Art is to see what players have created. This is where a game like Minecraft truly shines: not so much the game as an art piece, but the game as a canvas for players' art. Minecraft now holds the record as the biggest selling computer game of all time, all the more interesting because it was an "Indie" title, not from an established major studio (I love Indie games, and in a lot of cases spend much more time playing them than playing big-budget titles – plus it's always nice to support the little guys). Anyway, it only takes a quick look at Creative-mode builds to see that Minecraft players have created some truly impressive pieces.

I think this is actually one of the reasons why Minecraft has become such an enormous success: it allows different kinds of players to express themselves how they like. Want to fight hordes of zombies in the dark? You can. Want to explore? Every world is unique and there is lots to discover. Want to try and speedrun the game as fast as possible? Absolutely. Want to try and get every achievement (even the stupidly-difficult ones)? Do it. Want to compete with others? Go for it. Want to create an online community of friends? Many exist, or you can easily host your own. Want to avoid any conflict or danger and work on simply building? The opportunities are endless.

The observant reader will notice that I have listed every one of Bartle's types in the previous paragraph. This, I believe, is why that game was so successful. Rather than cater to a niche, such as Killers with lightning-fast reflexes (even if that is a very big, very economically-rewarding niche), Minecraft can cater to every player type.

I am not saying that every game should try and cater to every kind of player. In general, a tighter, more focused experience is always going to be better than one that attempts everything and hits nothing. But I do believe that it shows the value in making space for players who may not fit the stereotypical "gamer". Considering that a growing number of gamers are "older" [11] (this includes me, now post-40), or female, or really anything other than the young, single male we probably think of when we hear the term, it makes sense to try new kinds of play and new types of games. A "most played" games list [12], looks very different to a highest-selling list, with games like Pac Man Doodle, Subway Surfers, Pokémon Go, or Candy Crush Saga dominating the list, and only one shooter making the top ten in the 2010s (PUBG Mobile). All of the top ten on this list are either mobile or multi-platform games with mobile versions, demonstrating the shift away from PCs or consoles as the primary way many people game.

Of course, a more in-depth read of that list can reveal its own somewhat-troubling issues: Candy Crush comes pre-installed with some phones and a link on Windows 10's Start Menu and exploits the same dopamine pathways in the brain as gambling [13] – an industry that causes billions of dollars of social harm every year [14]. Gambling is, after all, a type of gaming. The line between fun rewards and problematic "dopamine hacking" or Skinner boxes [15; YouTube] is far from clear. Exploitation in games can apply to what is done to players, as well.

Another kind of art form in gaming is the narrative-focused game. This could be the linear story of Firewatch or the Half Life series, semi-linear branching stories like Mass Effect, or fully player-driven emergent stories such as occur in Rimworld (or, in a more subjective manner, the stories that arise from a player's experiences in something like Civilization). Rimworld is an interesting case study here, as it is specifically designed [16; YouTube] around the idea of facilitating player-driven emergent storytelling. Under Bartle's taxonomy, a narrative game is one that appeals to the Explorer type of player, by providing something to discover (in this case, the story), or potentially the Achiever (achieving the story goals) or Socialiser (for character-driven stories).

"Exploit"

I have touched on this idea a few times already, but wanted to focus the discussion on the idea of "Exploitation" and what that means in games (specifically returning to its use in the 4X genre). You have to credit whoever named the 4X genre with being able to distil such a complex, multi-faceted type of game down to a simple four words that all start with the same letters, though "Exploit" in English can mean multiple things, including ones never intended when describing the genre – though some of those unintended negative meanings do sometimes fit (if by their exclusion from games rather than inclusion), such as how conquering and subjugating foreigners rarely has long-term negative consequences for those people. Absent are the racial and class frictions we see in the real world where one group has dominated or colonised – or exploited – another.

Keeping to the intended definition, "exploit" in 4X games means economic exploitation – i.e. utilising resources to their maximal extent. On its surface, this is not an overly-problematic concept, but on reflection we realise that in the real world, resource overuse can be incredibly damaging. From climate change induced by overuse of fossil fuels, to ecosystem destruction from mining or slash-and-burn land-clearing for farming, to driving food species to extinction, resource exploitation has had many negative effects through history, and arguably is our biggest source of global problems today.

Climate change has appeared in the Civilization games since their inception; global warming could occur if you caused too much pollution, and the latest game (Civilization VI) has a whole expansion (Gathering Storm) devoted to the environmental effects – and subsequent disasters – of rampant carbon emissions (though sometimes this can result in amusing non-sequiturs, such as getting more meteor impacts from failing to curb your pollution...) In fact, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to the idea of global warming was in Civ 1; a fact that may have helped me to later overcome cultural indoctrination that climate change was a hoax (i.e. another good example of the educational value of games). However, apart from one particular game mode, climate change in Civilization VI can be mitigated by things that are unrealistic in the real world, such as easily building sea walls to stop rising oceans or using a city's production to do carbon capture – unlike the dire, potentially civilisation-threatening, consequences of a warming planet in the real world, it is actually hard to cause much destruction by burning coal in Civilization. Climate refugees basically do not exist.

Note: I have included carbon capture as an "unrealistic" option, as, despite it's near-necessity in plans from the IPCC and others, it is still yet to be proven to work at a scale even vaguely approaching the problem. This is evidenced by the largest-ever carbon capture plant recently opening, which over the course of a year will only capture three seconds worth of global emissions [17].

Some games, such as the Age of Empires series, do have limited resources, so resource overuse can put the player into a place of having nothing left to use. In many others though, resource sources are infinite: your rate of resource collection is limited, but can be extended by technology and will never run out. Arguably, limited resources are less "fun", as it puts a limit on the ever-increasing expansion and the exploitation (sic) of the exponential nature of growth. But, again bringing things back to the real world, in no real physical system is exponential growth ever limitless: most processes in nature follow logistic growth curves ("S-curves" for their shape), where they start slow, accelerate in an exponential-like fashion, but then flatten out again at the top.

Sadly, this is a message that our economists do not seem to have grasped.

Whether that means we can forgive game designers for falling for the same fallacy is a question that remains open for debate (but it is fallacy: Malthus [18] was wrong about the effects of technology only in amount, not in the ultimate end; technology only ever provides a multiplier to production, it cannot create resources from nothing, and switching to different resources is also a strategy with limits). My argument is that in games that attempt to match reality and simulate history, not simulating the limitations of resources – and thus the need to switch to alternatives and innovate – is a significant oversight. And worse, it is an oversight with real-world consequences: we cannot continue consuming the Earth's resources at an ever-increasing rate, so essential thinking for the coming decades is going to be how to do more with less. If we do not teach this in games, where players must learn through doing, many might go through life assuming that real resources are similarly unlimited.

Counter-Cultural Games

I have explored several different issues here (and, if you are still reading: thank you!) Games, for the most part, remain stuck reusing the same set of (somewhat flawed) cultural assumptions. Whether those are that the only kind of game is zero-sum, that competition is the only thing interesting, that empire-building is the best way forward, or any other outmoded thinking, it is rare to see a game break the mould. But, there are some examples.

Terra Nil (not released at the time of writing, though the prototype is freely available) is a game in the style of a city-builder, but instead of trying to expand and exploit your world, you are attempting to restore its natural balance. It rewards rewilding and restoration, instead of extraction and money-making (though you do still have to chase a score, so it is not entirely free of our existing ideas of success).

Stardew Valley is an interesting case. While it includes things like fighting monsters, this is not a necessity; you can progress a lot of the game without violence. The pace of play can be quite relaxed, and there is a lot to do that is not about just "winning" – in fact, it does not really have a specific win condition (the 1.5 update added a "completion" cut scene, which does provide a goal of sorts, but you do not have to work towards it if you do not want to, and the game continues after this). However, while the starting point of the game is the player character growing tired of the corporate rat-race to seek a better life, and the antagonist in the game is the exploitative Joja Corporation, the messaging on the evils of unbridled capitalism are muddied by the fact that the player does best when they make as much money as possible (or cut down every tree and harvest every resource in the area), and even the "good guy" local merchant is no less of a snivelling capitalist as the Joja Corp. When even rocks and metal ores are renewable, messages on improving the environment get lost.

Undertale is a strange case: on the surface, it is a role-playing game with graphics barely better than than the monochrome era. It allows the player to follow the usual "fight your way to victory" RPG play-style, but gives you a different option too: playing pacifist. You can succeed in Undertale without killing anyone or anything. You can make money, but you don't have to. It is one of the few examples of a game where different approaches to victory are not only possible but encouraged – there are many different endings, determined by player's decisions and actions.

I think there is definitely a place for more games that turn the usual goals on their heads. Why not have a post-apocalyptic game where you have to build a society and undo pollution, rather than fight mutants? (There is a little of this in the Fallout games, but still a lot more fighting than society-building – though Fallout Shelter is arguably an exception, with its focus on colony building and improving your people). What about a farming sim where you need to clean up pollution and restore the land, rather than turn it into a mono-cropping industrial empire? Or a 4X game where you start with today's environmentally-degraded world and have to work back to a world of balance while still meeting your people's needs and helping the rest of the world?

A Wider Range of Goals

If we were to establish a "taxonomy of goal types", what could we include beyond the initial three I mentioned at the start? Clearly, Cooperation is one, and we can include the exploration of Narratives. As well as Cooperation, I would add Helping Others as separate, where the former is learning to work together with other people towards a common goal, and the latter is assisting other players, groups, or non-player characters towards their own goals (there is obviously quite a bit of overlap here). Education can be a goal of its own, where the point of the game is to teach something (I have not gone into this much here, but educational games are often easy to categorise – though in my own research, I found that often the most effective education comes not from an obviously "educational" game, but instead from games that educate in a more stealthy fashion, such as games with historical settings teaching about the past).

A subset of educational games are simulations that attempt to discover potential solutions to problems (real-world or otherwise), or educate people on known solutions. An example of this would be the Stop Disasters! game, produced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, where the player must make decisions and add or change things on an isometric grid to make preparations to mitigate the effects of a disaster, within a finite budget. It doesn't provide anything new to those familiar with disaster risk reduction, or simulate environments accurately enough to use for specific real scenarios, but it does provide a good introduction to some of the concepts. Whether games or game technologies could be used to discover insights on new solutions is another discussion, but one that holds some promise – role-playing of scenarios is already used frequently in the real world for disaster response organisations to practice (but could probably benefit from game technologies that give more specific feedback to responses, allowing the effects of decisions to alter the scenario).

So, a complete list of game goals might look something like this:

  • Conquer or kill enemies;
  • Make loads of money (or other forms of resource maximisation);
  • Win competitions;
  • Cooperate with others;
  • Help others;
  • Explore a narrative: create a story or explore an existing story;
  • Education, including simulating to find solutions to real-world problems.

I think that playing games where we get to try new things would be interesting for a lot of players, and it would not matter if it is not for everyone – there will always be players who just want to shoot stuff (at least some of the time). If not every player is a Killer ♣, then why not create for Achievers ♦, Explorers ♠, and Socialisers ♥, too? (In more ways than we do already).

If the future of humanity will require thinking beyond simple zero-sum outcomes, winning at all costs, and extracting everything we can, then why not start exploring those ideas through games, so that we equip coming generations for the future?

References

Computer Games Mentioned

Board Games Mentioned

YouTube Channels and Videos

  • The Spiffing Brit: www.youtube.com/c/thespiffingbrit, a gamer who focuses on trying to exploit game systems to achieve either ridiculous resource incomes or similar bizarre outcomes; the archetypal economic "Killer".
  • Dangerously Funny: www.youtube.com/c/DangerouslyFunny, a gamer who tries to achieve all manner of weird or obscure goals.
  • [15] Extra Credits: The Skinner Box – How Games Condition People to Play More: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c. Extra Credits is an excellent resource for anyone interested in game design. I have used their video here rather than an academic paper as their discussion of the "Skinner Box" in gaming and why they are problematic is a very accessible take on the subject.
  • [16] Tynan Sylvester at GDC (Game Developers Conference), RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

News and Other Articles

Academic Works

(And things like Wikipedia, because I couldn't decide where else to put it).

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