I’ve been enjoying the “Game Goal” theme posts, such as this one, and this one. The idea is you just write a context-free list of the player’s goals in your games. Perhaps it will reveal interesting patterns, or buried insights of your own psyche. So here goes my list:

• Defend your city from Godzilla
• Build a highway connecting ice floes
• Beseige or defend a base using elephants
• Collect the best combination of sicknesses
• Explore/conquer a fantasy world by playing a dice game (buttonmen variant)
• As kudzu, strive to completely cover various objects
• control bugzappers to zap bugs in an orderly fashion
• Add cowbell to all songs (guitar hero variant)
• expand/defend a moonbase with a connected network of units (moonbase commander clone)
• Connect locations by building words, crossword style
• Save ice-age species from extinction by an oncoming glacier
•  Fly your spaceship through a cave
• Explore a series of islands to reach the site of an alien crash landing
• fight through a robotic underworld (mega-man clone/variant)
• obtain a sword in a voxelized world (zelda clone)
• as a dinosaur, try and outrun an oncoming asteroid
• clear mines on a planet
• grow a world by gathering followers
• arrange fish heads and pumpkins into useful combinations
• Collect and buy/sell trinkets to earn enough to leave a planet
• cut and paste headlines to make new and better headlines
• rearrange words (DNA) to make better creatures

Ok, so a couple of themes jump out. A lot of my games are about building and exploring, but not really “sim style”, more like having a protagonist who builds/explores. I do like base building games, and I think there would be a lot more of them if these weren’t all compo games, since I’ve learned to avoid them because of time limits. But even my word games have building/exploring elements. There are some “escape” goals but really knowing those game designs they are really exploration games in disguise.

Which makes a lot of sense. Exploration games are always my favorite to play, and even when they are not specifically exploration mechanics I often focus on that part of them. When Ultima Online came out I was in the beta, and I spent a lot of time just hiking around the huge landscape. At least until highway robbers became too prevalent. I spent more time in “Black & White” exploring the island than training my creature. I played WoW until I had visited all the lands, and then I kind of lost interest. Some of my most ambitious unproduced game ideas are pure exploration games, like a procedural photography game and a realistic orienteering simulator.

Hm. So that’s interesting. I guess I’m going to stop putting of trying “Proteus” and give that a shot.