Skyrim - This is Going to Take a While

True Endless Experiences
       These are games that do not have an end state. Games like Farmville are great examples of this. Rather than setting out an ultimate goal for the player to complete, they instead give players a set of tools by which they may define and work toward their own goals. Such games lack any true terminal goals, which end the game experience upon completing, but do often use incremental goals to give players a sense of forward momentum and achievement.

       As far as actual objectives are concerned, however, these are externalized from the game itself and put into the hands of the players themselves, so they can decide for themselves what they want to achieve. Often such games also lack a definite loss state, removing an element of games that could potentially turn off players from playing further.

       Games like Farmville in particular have the appeal of being about management and control. For people that with busy, chaotic lives, these games provide a little "island" of their very own which they have full control over. By the same token, however, they can just as easily be seen as boring, as your progress does not lead you to any goal outside of what you define for yourself.

Faux Endless Experience
       These are games that feel like they go on forever, but in reality have a finite amount of content. Sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series or MMOs like World of Warcraft are some of the most famous examples of this. They provide a large amount of missions and objectives directed within the game, and that content is distributed such that players may take on different tasks at their own pace and in the order of their choosing. This gives players a greater sense of agency in the narrative of the game, as well as making their experience unique in comparison to their friends.

      MMOs and Sandbox games diverge a bit, however, in their core appeal. For MMOs, it is the social element that keeps many players coming back, even years after the game has gone out of style. People build friendships around their guilds, trade things at auction houses, and enjoy major raids and other group content. These kinds of games leverage the sense of camaraderie among players, and in some cases can allow for rather compelling emergent social drama to emerge, energizing the playerbase by showing just what can be done in the game's possibility space.

      Sandbox games go for more of a hard-coded system of emergence, based on different permutations of the games' many interacting systems. From the behavior of civilians to physics systems, they create a space where the player can enjoy causing mayhem and delight in watching how the world will react. Perhaps the funniest thing I have heard happening comes from a story a friend of mine told me years ago about Fallout 2. He was in a city (New Reno, I believe) talking to this mafia boss type guy at a bar. He ends up pissing him off, so the Mafia guy starts shooting him.


       Now, the interesting thing about early Fallout games is that if someone is firing a ranged weapon and it misses, it has a chance of hitting someone else in the line of fire. In this case, it hit a prostitute on the other side of the bar, who immediately became hostile, pulling out a knife and attacking the mafia guy. The mafia guy kills her, which aggros the rest of the prostitutes in the city, which proceed to attack him, which aggros the rest of the mafia guys. In other words, one stray bullet started a full-on mafia vs prostitute war.

       In essence, these types of games are most often about exploration and taking in the game over the course of a long time. Often they are the ones that have the largest amount of substantive content for people to sink their teeth into. Yet such games can have their own problems, where the grind of trivial side quests and objectives can become boring, especially after main story objectives are complete.

Session-Based Play

       Many games today either include a multiplayer mode or are based entirely around the multiplayer experience. These games, while often having far less content than massive, sprawling games, often enjoy longevity equaling or even exceeding the playtime of even the largest sandbox games. Most of these experiences are competitive, like League of Legends, though some like Left4Dead hold the promise of having more co-op focused games in the future (though Left4Dead does have a competitive mode as well). In either case, they rely heavily on an energized player base and community to keep them active and in the spotlight for players (not unlike with MMOs).

      Such games overwhelmingly provide a virtually unlimited play experience, though the narrative  possibilities have not been explored nearly as much. Perhaps the closest to that trend is in the upcoming game Diablo III, which will feature randomized quests, in addition to its traditional randomized loot and dungeons. Until we have more sophisticated systems of dynamic narrative, I believe our best bet at an unlimited narrative experience comes from the players themselves.

       These types of games are perhaps the most like their old arcade counterparts, with each session being a competition to reach some ultimate goal. Yet even after the goal is achieved, the game isn't over. Far from it, as the game encourages you to experience the struggle to reach that goal over and over again, with the thrill and unpredictability of human allies and adversaries providing an emergent narrative of sorts for the player to enjoy.

       As I alluded to, the biggest pitfall of session-based games is that for the most part they are competitive, or otherwise focused around overcoming a challenge, which can limit its appeal among inexperienced and casual players.

Community-Driven Content Creation

       With the advent of level editors and authoring tools, it has become easier than ever for players to not only play with one another, but share a piece of their creativity with the communities of their favorite games. Starting with Starcraft (if I'm not mistaken), excellent content development tools were made and, perhaps more importantly, integrated into the main game such that players could easily stumble upon mods and custom maps.

       Further, there have been games like Minecraft designed entirely around user-generated content and mods and sharing it with others (thanks to Minecraft's multiplayer mode). This kind of initiative goes beyond just providing more content for players, but actually makes that content feel more meaningful, as it is made by friends and fellow gamers that the player can relate to, perhaps motivating them to get in on the action.



       Games that feature this create a much more intimate relationship between the player and their game, as it allows them to be a part of the game they love and through it create their own mini-game experience of their very own. Of course, getting people to want to do this requires players that are interested enough in the game in the first place to take the time to make such mods, not to mention the extra development time required to make such tools, so it isn't always the best option for all games.