Play for the sake of play. That was the crux of Richard Lemarchand’s masterclass, Infinite Play, at GCU. What can game designers implement mechanically that will keep players coming back purely on the virtue of those mechanics? It got me thinking, to say the least.
Some developers approach this in a truly cynical way. Destiny, for example, increased its longevity by using the old random number generator trick for loot distribution. It leaves players endlessly repeating missions that only reset once every week, basically making the game a hassle and earning Bungie the ire of many fans after they reached the endgame and found out they would have to play those missions countless other times.
On the whole I hate RNGs when used in mechanics. They are terrible for granting rewards due to their not taking into account how well people have been playing, especially in a game where progress is dictated by loot drops. However, when used as a tool for the construction of a game, I find my opinion changing drastically.
FTL, Darkest Dungeon and Rogue Legacy are all great examples of times when randomly generated variables make the game instead of breaking it. I find myself, time and time again, going back to these games because of the way they have been constructed.
FTL has you running through a randomly generated galaxy, desperately trying to survive as the odds are continually being stacked, increasingly higher, against you. One wrong move and your crew is sucked into the vacuum of space, or the ship gets scorched beyond repair from a solar flare leaving you to be scuttled by pirates. The more time I spent, the more I realised that the galaxy being created from a random selection of tiles wasn’t the reason I went back; it was the fact that I was coming up with great, often poignant, stories for my new crew and ships and whether they were destined for victory or to have their atomised corpses scattered across the galaxy.
Although these mechanics may make a game technically infinite, in that it could be played a great many times with the variables being changed so as to facilitate new stories and situations for the player, I find that narrative is the real driving force behind whether I will play a game for the sake of playing it.
Dark Souls, for me, is the greatest infinite game ever made. The world it presents is in equal parts deranged and beautiful, and so too is the story behind it a fantastical mess with many small tales woven through it. The best part about it is that you can play it however you want, however many times you want at whatever pace you want. I always find myself falling back on it, the video game equivalent of comfort food for me. I find that the experiential nature of the exploration and the discovery of the kernels of story is more than enough of an incentive to go back and enjoy Lordran multiple times.
So in my opinion, narrative is in and of itself an infinite commodity in games, provided that developers know how to utilise it well. All stories end at some point but good ones are timeless and will always pull me back in, more so than any mechanics ever could.
Featured photo via Mikal Marquez on Flickr.
