In the context of exploration-platformers like Knytt, I don’t have a strong vision about how to make a game like this compelling without some kind of explicit goal. And this kind of game, with its minimalism, doesn’t lend itself well to the idea of tracking lots of stats and accomplishments and letting the player decide which ones to care about.

On the other hand, my brief outline in the previous comment of a hypothetical “tribe sim” game does lend itself to the idea of non-explicit goals. I envision that the fun of this game would be just playing it and trying to steer the tribe in certain ways, and seeing what events unfold. An interesting design question would be, does the player get to explicitly set goals – tell the game “I want to win when I’m the strongest / most well-liked / richest tribe in the area” or whatever – or does the player just play the game, and personally decide when his or her goals are met? The former seems more “gamey”, and for some reason less attractive to me, but on the other hand there’s a game design (and technological) challenge there that I like.

The kind of player creativity I’m most interested in is the kind that’s expressed through game decisions. For instance, you and I once discussed a kind of “tribe simulation” game, where you are a shaman or tribal leader, and once a day (each “game turn”) people from the tribe come and ask you for advice or direction. After you play this game for hours, you’ll find that you’ve “created” a tribal situation because of the decisions you’ve made – you’re at war with your neighbors, you have large plots of farmland, there’s a well in the village center, etc. I’m interested in that kind of player creativity. I wouldn’t be interested at all in a tribe sim game where you drag units around, creating buildings on a map, etc.

Obviously that’s not exactly what you’re talking about, since you seem to be imagining moving through a physical space and maybe solving puzzles (gathering clues). So maybe you’re envisioning a kind of action-adventure game where as the player you have a lot of room for creativity, either in how you play it or how you combine various tools to give you various abilities or whatever. And if the game is procedurally generated, it’s more likely to present the player with systems to be played with rather than pre-designed creative “choices”. That sounds neat, but I don’t have a strong vision about how it would work.

Have you every played the freeware indie game Knytt? The simplicity of that is more along the lines of what I’m imagining. You’re presented with a little world, there are a bunch of objects scattered throughout it, and you explore until you find them all. A combination of this and Rogue would totally float my boat. Just keep procedurally generating little worlds for me to explore, and I will keep playing this game for months.

The Flexible Goals mechanic can be seen in a very limited way in the board game Careers, where each player secretly selects his/her own winning condition that has to be a combination of some number of happiness, fame, and money points (totaling 60, if I recall).

The flex goal is even more obvious in RPGs like D&D. Sure, a GM can impose a goal of killing the goblin king or saving the kidnapped princess on a given session, but the rules themselves don’t impose a goal on the game. Instead they merely provide the “physics” of the world. Of course many players take level advancement or collection of money as implicit goals.

This could be used in a video game. Instead of one single “score”, track multiple scores. Strength, level, fame, happiness, beauty, health, cash, karma, etc. for arguably quantifiable properties. You could also add in some sort of “trophy case” for one-time yes/no achievements: visited Wunderland, won a flower arranging contest, etc. Then let the player decide for himself what, if anything, he is actually trying to accomplish. I could see one player bragging to another that she just broke the record for being the happiest person ever at Wunderland, while another is proud of having figured out how to accumulate karma points (whatever that would entail) PLUS a large bank account.

One other brainstorm: What if the thing you accumulate isn’t really just a linear quantity of some type but rather something more abstract? As you accomplish various goals (in whatever order), it somehow modifies you “mandala”. Something simple, like helping a senior citizen across the street, might change part of you mandala from stark black and white to a nice pastel set of colors. Something more involved, like collecting three types of dinosaurs, would change the symmetry from left-right “bookmatched” to four-part kaleidoscopic.

I’m curious as to what kind of environment there would be to explore and what the player’s avatar would be. Are you thinking something ultra realistic, something cartoony, or something abstract perhaps with completely different physics? I could see E&D of the physics of the environment as being the first part of the game. If you’re going after a nature environment, I could see the player characters themselves being different type of animals.

Ok, I think I’ve rambled on long enough with half-baked ideas. Maybe some of what I’ve thrown against the wall sticks.

I suspect that fanatical avoidance of fail / redo mechanics will lead down interesting video game design paths, in much the same way that fanatical avoidance of inelegant mechanics leads down interesting board game design paths. Your “opportunity costs” suggestion indicates one promising avenue of exploration.

I then started thinking about what would make it very interesting for me personally. My immediate thought is collection. The collection could involve objects, skills, information and status/rewards.

Just off the top of my head, imagine you are wandering through a world in which there are a variety of contests each with a different judge and a different description (e.g. best still life display, most rubies, tackiest music collection, best bestiary, best collection of garden gnomes, most peaceful rock garden, etc). As you wander you will find objects which you can acquire in some way. You can also acquire information about the different judges tastes (e.g. loves gnomes with glasses, hates Elvis, etc.) There could also be other characters who would be doing the same thing who you would be competing with for these prizes and you could interact with and trade with them. You could also acquire skills that would make it easier for you to acquire other things or do other relevant things (eg. feng shui level 2 may increase the peacefulness of your garden, bedazzle level 3 may allow you to increase gnome tackiness levels, etc.) Periodically the contests would be held and rewards given and new contests announced.

Decisions would be based on time, resources and focus. Which prizes do you want to focus on? If you start finding a lot of items for one goal should you switch?

I’m not sure about other audiences, but that is something that I would enjoy, especially if you got to really collect the things and move them around in a virtual space to really create contest submission.

But getting killed is not the only source of frustration… Blockhouse has proved that for me!

I wonder if you could just position everything as being opportunity costs. You made the wrong choice that meant your score will be lower, if you had chosen this other thing you would have been rewarded to a greater extent but made it more difficult to earn more later. That kind of thing.