JoeJ I think you are just confused because for some reason you seem hyper sensitive to my position and predisposed to dismissing it without any logical argument.

I have not contradicted myself at all.

--

“First you say purpose can be designed, then you say purpose can go anywhere and be anything.”

--

How is that contradictory? To clarify, I'm saying that a designer can pursue any purpose(s) for their projects. What the user “gets” out of the game is not the same thing. For some reason you want to make it so and then declare it as some “gotcha” moment. You really are hung up on the word “purpose.” I'm using it specifically in the context of the designer's goals and NOT for any overall purpose of games or for any reason the player might want to play a particular game. They are separate things. Strangely, you refuse to acknowledge that and in your hammer analogy you are perfectly fine with removing the purpose of the designer and giving it to the user. THEY ARE TWO SEPARATE THINGS.

As for FUN… designing something that is fun is one purpose of the design. But if fun is a really nebulous thing and if it's is all you have to go on, then on what do you base the rest of the design? At the very least, fun requires some sort of context. Designing with purpose yields all the diversity we have in games. If you don't design with any real purposes in mind, all you can do is copy other people's ideas and create highly derivative (and usually inferior) clones of something that came before. But that's fine. It's your choice. You shouldn't feel threatened by this.

This should be absurdly obvious but, why any particular player plays any particular game is most definitely because of the game's design. Depending on the game, varying aspects of it are purposefully designed. Do you think “Paper's Please” was just somehow slapped together by a designer who wasn't explicitly thinking about the experience they wanted the player to have? Maybe you are just hung up on the use of the word “purpose.” It's a small thing. If it makes you feel better, we can say, designers should design with the experience they wish to craft in mind.

As far as I can tell, you seem to be in defense mode because I mentioned “conservative” design elements. Nobody is stopping anyone from making any game for any reason ($$$) they see fit. I'm not a gatekeeper but you sound like you want to be one.

You have a very exclusive view of what designer's should strive for but even worse, it's completely ambiguous and non-actionable. The philosophy I advocate yields concrete pathways that can be followed, designed and implemented.

The original poster may not have been able to articulate his needs in a way that you could understand, but I understand where he's coming from and offered my advice on exactly how he should frame his design problem. Your “burger” reply was quite useless.

Hypnotr0n said:
JoeJ I think you are just confused because for some reason you seem hyper sensitive to my position and predisposed to dismissing it without any logical argument.

Not confused, but i'm kind of annoyed by the lack of definition.
I gave my definition: I want the game to bring me to some other place. Games can do this better than other media, so enabling this experience is my purpose of choice.

But what's yours? You say the designer gives purpose, or the player may even more purpose, and that purpose can be many things… But that's just generic and obviously vague.
You also propose that game designers should think more consciously about it, and that ongoing designers should be teached about it.
About what? What is your (personal) definition of video game purpose?

Hypnotr0n said:
“First you say purpose can be designed, then you say purpose can go anywhere and be anything.” -

- How is that contradictory?

The contradiction is: If purpose is a choice of design, then the designer controls purpose.
If others can alternate purpose, then the designer has no control over purpose.

So what? The designer has only partial control over purpose? He can only decide purpose for himself personally?

That's what i think at least.

Hypnotr0n said:
But if fun is all you have to go on, then on what do you base the rest of the design?

If fun is all, then there is no rest of something else.

Hypnotr0n said:
Designing with purpose yields all the diversity we have in games. If you don't design with any real purposes in mind, you end up creating highly derivative (and usually inferior) clones of something that came before. But that's fine. It's your choice. You shouldn't feel threatened by this.

Again this reads like some AI generated text without actually providing a definition of purpose.
X generates diversity, but lacking X only recreates the existing. What is X?

You can not answer this with just ‘X = purpose’ - you would sound like a priest.

Hypnotr0n said:
Maybe you are just hung up on the use of the word “purpose.”

Obviously yes.

Hypnotr0n said:
As far as I can tell, you seem to be in defense mode because I mentioned “conservative” design elements.

No, i already feel bad for keeping the attacking position.
Idk what you're referring at with conservative design or gatekeepers. But never mind.

If you can make clear what powerful tool you mean with ‘purpose’, i might agree and we can settle this imaginary debate.

There are all kinds.

What is the “purpose” of games like Go, Chess, Mancala, Backgammon, Checkers, Tic Tac Toe, and similar? It's going to be different from games like LoZ, games like Portal, Undertale, Subnautica, Fallout, like Snake, or like Hearthstone or Fortnite. Sudoku, Hangman, Wordle, and on and on.

The good ones tend to touch many common motivations at once. Puzzles, logic and reasoning, personal growth. Many have a challenge where there is a chance of failure but the expectations of eventual success. Many have stories but others no, life lessons, warnings of disasters or dystopia, others are general “right vs wrong”, others merely red vs blue, light vs dark, team vs team. Race against the clock, challenge your best time, beat your own high scores. Social elements, emotional satisfaction, mental gymnastics, or merely a way to pass the time, those reasons and more are all valid.

Simple games with neither story nor morals nor gameplay depth have survived the ages. You can dig into philosophy about the purpose of Tic Tac Toe, the simple mechanics and the easy mathematical solutions to never lose, but when a child draws the box you just make a mark and hand it back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess

Hypnotr0n said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess

So the question was What is the “purpose”? And your answer is “Read Wikipedia”?

frob said:
There are all kinds.

Reading this i realize i'm a victim of language issues.
I thought the translation of ‘purpose’ is 'reason' in german. And asking a dev ‘What's the reason of your video game’ would be pretty silly, at least in german. Thus the whole thread felt silly to me.

But i was wrong. Purpose translates to ‘Zweck’, which would give a question much more like ‘What's your intent with your game?’. And that's not silly.

Hypnotr0n said:
JoeJ I think you are just confused because for some reason

Yeah, i have confused terms. My fault - please apologize. ; )

Tom Sloper said:

Hypnotr0n said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess

So the question was What is the “purpose”? And your answer is “Read Wikipedia”?

Nice try. I can't speak to the approach or mentality of the designer(s) of every game ever made. I'm not saying every game ever made was consciously designed such that every rule, element, feature and aesthetic within the game was added in service to some stated purpose(s).

But when you look at a game like chess what one can say is that the design is elegant, focused, coherent and apparently deliberate. No part of it resembles for instance a Rube Goldberg machine. Maybe some of it was deliberate and the rest was just a result of iteration and trial and error. There is a place for iteration in game design because people can't think of everything. We also know that genre's evolve and chess seems to have evolved from precursors that have existed for centuries. That games evolve over time is not inconsistent with purposeful design.

As for the Wikipedia article… I thought it was an interesting read.

I won't pretend to know what was going on in the highly imaginative minds of Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka when they created Super Mario Bros. The hero trying to save the princess, fighting minions and bosses are standard fairy tale material, but so much else feels like it came from a whimsical dream. Dreams and hallucinations tend to contain absurdities and Super Mario Bros is full of them. Magic mushrooms, turtle creatures, pipes leading to dungeons, invisible boxes, man-eating plants, shooting fireballs… I just wonder what were the constraints for this fairy tale dream world.

And there's a whole bunch of abstract games like Pac-Man, Centipede, Burger Time, Frogger, Qbert… There were hardware constraints (cpu, memory and user controls) that influenced design and there was the need for taking people's quarters, but so much else just felt like they took a few basic mechanics and then built an aesthetic around those mechanics using just their imagination. Perhaps there are a few people still making games like this, but we don't hear about them.

Hypnotr0n said:
Dreams and hallucinations tend to contain absurdities and Super Mario Bros is full of them.

I also wonder where this comes from. We see the trend continued with Pokemons, also highly successful.
Maybe there is something related in japaneese culture, something like their version of Alice in Wonderland.
But i rather assume the video game medium is just ideal to come up with absurd and twisted settings, they did it just for fun, and kids feel inspired from non realistic stuff.

Hypnotr0n said:
Perhaps there are a few people still making games like this, but we don't hear about them.

Sadly. Everything tries to make sense now, and realism became dominant. Very boring, predictable and averaged.
If a game makes me feel like being in a mesmerizing fever dream, i'll buy and love it even if it plays badly.
There were still plenty of those in the 90s, but now it's only some indie titles left.

I always thought if the coins did more than just give u an extra life in mario maybe there would be more purpose to collect them.