Very interesting questiong Paul.
I was watching Gamespot TV (on ZDTV) and they showed a new game for the Dreamcast called Sea Man.

This is a game in which you don''t experience winning... but, you do raise this glob of nothing into a fishlike creature that learns to talk and eventually "it" can ask you all sorts of questions and you "talk" back to "it". To me it was a bit spooky... but, I suppose some will find it entertaining.

Some old games that had the feeling that your looking for are the Sim games. The original SimCity did have scenarios that you could win. But, essentially it was a game much like you describe.

Moving away from sims, the only other thing that I can think of that encourages play without really winning is gambling. Some people (my parents) enjoy taking a set limit of money and gambling. If they win, great! If they lose, great!

Maybe I''m stuck in a rut... I''ve played competitive sports since I was 6 and have been very competitive my entire life... I''m not sure that it is possible to have a game that players will continue to play - if there is no "reward" for doing so. And if there is no winning is it a really a game? or just entertainment, you know like watching a movie or listening to music.

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

I would say, by any formal definition of a game that I would personally adhere to; that a game, by its very nature, necessarily has a win condition. A game involves competition between two or more parties towards a goal. A game ends when one or more parties achieves that goal. Period.

That said, there is acres and acres of undeveloped space in the field of "electronic toys" or "interactive entertainment" or whatever you want to call it. The point is: Don''t try to make it a "game". Will Wright does not make games, and he does not try to, and IMO, he is extraordinarily succesful. On the other hand, FMV "games" suck, to put it bluntly. I love software toys, (in fact, as soon as I submit this, I think I''m going to go get addicted to the Sims *yet again*) every bit as much as video games, but Wright was very savvy in not confusing this distinction.

I also like more abstract software toys, like this music-maker I can''t remember the name of, where you bounce icons representing different WAV files off of walls, and each time it hits the wall, it plays the sound, so you can effect the tempo by "throwing" it with your mouse at different velocities. Very cool idea, but if you tagged on a win condition where you had to, say, get all the sounds playing at the same speed, or some asnine thing, I would have gotten frustrated and uninstalled it faster than you can say "bargain bin".



If you see the Buddha on the road, Kill Him. -apocryphal

An odd idea I haven''t seen much of is that of making failure as entertaining as victory. For example, imagine that one possible path thru a game was kamikaze suicide... say you have to save a village or a planet by sacrificing yourself. (I guess this is both failure and victory). You could make this the core game concept and come out with something like a noir game as well, I suppose

BTW, this victory problem (if it is), is what stops us for exploring other types of experiences. Failure is automatically bad, so things like tragedy or loss are hard to explore.

Another thing (random thoughts this eve, sorry ): You might want to reexamine the player''s ultimate goal. Is it necessary to win in order to be rewarded? What if there wasn''t an ultimate victory goal-- which would make the game more open ended or sim / toy / table-top RPG like? Games like this would tend to emphasize exploration, or building. Your goal might be to survive as long as possible, no matter what happened, so you could see and accomplish as much as you could (maybe this is somewhat like life''s real goal )

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Just waiting for the mothership...

What pushes you to play is the reward mechanism. Now where the reward is depends on the player.

When I play chess against someone much stronger, my reward is to learn new tactics. When I see I am losing at a game, my reward is to enjoy wrecking my opponent''s head with kamikaze tactics, non consistent behaviour, and generally disturbed way of playing ... it works very well, as the player is so pissed off they generally lose all control and just don''t feel like they won (there is always this need for humiliating the opponent when you win, and I just deprive them of it).

My reward for playing RPG is to act, to read a book that I would be writing, it''s a pleasure/reward vey similar to the one I get during a creative experience, just like when I am painting/writing/draing/sculpting/etc. I win fights, but not to get more experience points, rather to get more experience that is, more time to play with my character.

There are games out there that don''t need any winner to be rewarding, though I don''t necessarily seem to understand what is rewarding in them. I am just thinking about girls games here ... playing housewife, dolls, seem to be ver rewarding for my wee sister, and yet, I don''t understand what it brings her ?

MAybe it''s just me, but I don''t enjoy winning, I jsut enjoy playing, if during the game, the playing becomes playing with my opponent''s nerves, I think it''s even more enjoyable than playing the game (you know, this kind of stupid behaviour, like when someone starts a flame bait just to see the reactions ... I guess you could call that a play doll game, somehow).

You don''t need a "win" condition and there does not have to be a reward system as such. It largely depends on what type of game you are creating. Take FPS Unreal Tournament or Quake3. In multiplayer, they are their own reward. It is a joy to play yet the only win condition is whoever gets the most frags, longest flag time or whatever. You don''t need to win to have fun. But in Single-Player, that element of enjoyment is all but gone. Without a reward system, there is no point continuing. I only played these games just to see the rest of them. If I wasn''t so bored in at work, I wouldn''t have cared to do that.

The point I am having trouble making is that the reward system doesn''t need to be preset. If you had an RPG with no ultimate goal, the reward is what you make of it. It could be exploring new areas, character development, acquiring new items or abilities, etc. But no matter what you do, if there is nothing more for the player to experience, there is not much chance of them continuing to play.

A reward system is always present, it just doesn''t need to be preset.

langman : funny, I thought that''s what I was kinda trying to say, the reward is sort of automatic, it''s the simple production of pleasure hormones in your blood, whatever the designers had designed. Sometimes they do it right, and sometimes, the player will just set himself a goal ("OK,let''s try to build the greatest number of buildings on this map").
It''s like children emulating what isn''t there in order to feed there imaginary themselves (auto reward ?) : take boys playing with cars and doing all the noises, take a girl having a very interesting conversation with her dolls, or her invisible friends if there are no dolls ... etc

Now, would *you* talk to your screen monitor ? That''s something else ...

awh,
Ummmm, I do talk to my screen monitor...
I say things like "What the he|| is going on?" and sometimes I slap it around a bit to add to the feeling LOL

Programmers are such geeks ~

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser