Having "OBJECTIVE: FIND THE KEY" in games is the equivalent of today's broken school module.

They both kill curiosity, both present a set of priorities you must follow otherwise you will never become the successful person (hero) you want to be.

The problem here is that there are endless variables that don't come to consideration,

Personally i think a revamp could have a great impact on how games are made these days.

What if the player doesn't want to become the hero?

What if they want to upgrade their character and not care for the story?

There are so many variables to consider and its obviously impossible to fit so many into a single game, its crazy actually, but i've learnt something of good worth after releasing my first game. To my surprise there were people that were completely immersed and said it presented many choices when in reality it had none.

So, how did this work? At the time i was clueless, but eventually i understood it was due to keeping the player curious about what to do when most games fill the screen telling you exactly what to do.

Why should we consider this? Because according to the reactions, the sense of achievement is greater when the player discovers rather than is told. (even if it was an illusion) It makes us think rather than blindly follow a path.

My game has its flaws and is not a perfect example of what we're getting at but games like The Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Long Dark and many more have conveyed this very well.

Having the player use their curiosity to discover an objective is a much more satisfying experience than the spoon feeding we're used to, specially if there are multiple objectives to find. Minecraft is a wonderful example. I'd like us to familiarise ourselves with this idea, how could we convey things better without telling the player exactly what to do through text or sound? Because in reality we aren't told what to do, we shape our lives and make every choice, so how do we mature it? How could we choose what we want to prioritise in games?

Speak your mind!

In real life we have a objective, survive.

Our survival depends a lot on the simple find key objectives, it is the whole reason we like being told what to do.

The reason so much games use Find Key Objectives is because it's the way our minds solve problems.

Problem solving works with first Finding the problem and Finding the answer, a simple example is starvation:

You are starving witch means you are dying [problem], you need to eat something [answer], now you need to Find food [solution].

it's the same no matter what.

The world is being eaten by a huge space monster [problem], we have to stop it [answer], now kill it [solution].

WAIT killing the monster isn't finding a key!

Yes it is, you have to find a way or something to kill it with.

So why do most game designers use the Find Key Objectives method?

The simple answer is because the have programming experience, a programmer is efficient problem solving machine and likes to keep things clear: If player found key open door.

How can this be solved?

The answer is in the solution step, allow for more than one solution.

This forces you to write "Find way to open door." instead of "Find the Key to open this door." and gives the player a choice to force open the door or to open it with a key.

Exploration games like the ones you named, do in fact use the Find Key Objectives method, thy are just a bit more obscure about it.

First thy place you in a wide open space, this means the first thing a player will do is move.

The game will then give you a point of focus, something large, big, bright or strange. You will then find your way over to it and with out knowing complete your first objective.

This mechanic doesn't work for all games, think of a strategy game where there is a bunch of resources and you have no idea who mines what or how much you need for a building or unit.

Even worse you see a enemy and kill it only to lose because you where never told that it needed to be captured.

My advice is think of who the game is for, a explorer wants to find things and a general wants to know things.

I play alot of indie games. I feel like many of them are "experiments", in a good sense, exploring concepts that will help further game design. However, many of these 'experiments' I feel are gimmicky and greatly lacking in focus and polish. They are still useful, but I wouldn't hold them up as goals to shoot for, rather as launching pads to start from with the intention of going much much further.

Why should we consider this? Because according to the reactions, the sense of achievement is greater when the player discovers rather than is told. (even if it was an illusion) It makes us think rather than blindly follow a path.

My game has its flaws and is not a perfect example of what we're getting at but games like The Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Long Dark and many more have conveyed this very well.

Stanley Parable: An example of player choice influencing story and plot. However, I didn't find any sense of "achievement" in it (nor was I looking for it, so I didn't mind its absence). It wasn't achievement-based to me. Rather, at times, it felt anti-climatic when reaching the ends of branches. As an experiment in non-linear story-telling (or rather, branching linear storytelling), I appreciated it. I don't feel like it's a good example of the sense of discovery and self-achievement.

Dear Esther: I stopped playing it an hour or so in. It was nice, I guess, but it offers even less "progress" for game design than other games like Stanley Parable. The portion I experienced was an example of 100% linear storytelling, being more of an interactive movie with zero player choice, zero player achievement, and zero player interaction except for walking to the next area. What it had going for it was atmosphere and presentation of that story, but even in both those areas it fell far short of its potential, in my opinion.

I haven't played Gone Home or The Long Dark.

Primarily, I'm someone who loves exploring worlds. But as far as puzzles go, I think a good design paradigm is providing a set of "laws" that players explore, and puzzles for which they explore them. Laws as in, natural laws (i.e. laws of thermodynamics, law of gravity, and so on), not legal laws. As a fantastic example of this, I greatly admire and hold up Braid for creating environments of natural laws, and then providing clever puzzles that the player has to overcome by understanding those laws. It does it very very well.

For an even greater step forward in player "eureka!" achievements, I have high hopes for The Witness (from the same developer who made Braid, but now with a large team underneath him).

Another example of laws being explored is... Isaac Asimov's robot books. He created his famous Three Laws of Robotics (later, four laws), and his Robot short stories are usually centered around exploring the ramifications of those laws, as well as seeing what naturally results from pushing the laws to their extremes. His robot-focused novels (which I've also greatly enjoyed) also explore these in interesting ways (Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and Robots of Dawn), but his short stories are built around them.

I'm a neophyte and horribly green with game design. So take what I say with a grain of salt. I also happen to be incredibly scatterbrained so this post may lack structural/conceptual integrity.

The important thing is metastructure. The overarching narrative direction to which the structure itself conforms- the reason 'why' it works as a structure, and not just in the constitutive sense.

I call the best games (in my estimation) EXPERIENCES. Why? Because the metastructure is strong in them. If a JRPG plays to its structural nature of having formalized narrative, a combat 'system' of sorts, and a world to explore- and all of these are yoked together thematically in a way that makes them gripping/fun to play, the whole thing works- it transcends the sum of its parts. Remember- the metastructure is not a 'structure' in and of itself but rather that which makes the structure of the game 'palatable'. It is really the *fun factor* that emerges out of this structure.

So much for word/term diarrhea (a talent of mine, and I don't even need 'word laxative' to do it) but find the key objective style gaming is a way to funnel progression down a tube of development. It's easy enough to marry a plot to this in game's like Gone Home and the like, because it provides a simple backbone for creating a 'direction' to the game.

So when you say 'curiosity' remember that there is a feedback loop at work. Curiosity is brought on by discovering 'objectives' in and of itself- and this pattern ultimately may be responsible for the most drastic redesigning. Curiosity, in a sense, IS the objective. So how does it self-foment then? We need to ask whether curiosity can birth new curiosity upon the discovery of an objective.

This all redounds to a conception of A --> B --> C game design. Perhaps, to complicate the narrative and drive for something, you can make an objective correspond to many different items of the plot and gameplay. Discovering A after following a given pathway may yield different results if you've done something else prior. In this way, the objective structure becomes circular or cyclical. But how does this motivate the player to discover more?

My idea is that the player is more or less thrust into a world without much to tell him what he does. Atmosphere builds because the player acquaints him/herself with the world and becomes intimately bound up in it. These beginning moments are ESSENTIAL in this type of game- because they build the world that will reinforce itself through the gameplay. So now, the player almost lets those paths and concepts find HIM/HER rather than the other way around. This builds a sense of a 'world' removed from oneself- and this makes for something compelling. The plot then continues to fold upon itself through similar discoveries- and eventually you may even decide to present options for the player him/herself to find after the world itself has been firmly established enough.

Anyway, this is just longwinded jargon slinging. I hope it's readable and or relevant to your ideas.

If you are talking about literal Doors and Keys... just change 'em up. A collapsed cavern entrance (door) requires explosives(key) to get through. If you are talking about (objective)->(required item to meet objective) then you are pretty well S.O.L. You can either have an Open-World, free form game with player imposed objectives (mine craft and the like) or you can have a story driven game. If you have a story then you pretty much need the Objective->Item/action hunt. You can make shake it up a bit with (door)->(Set of keys) or (door)->(Key) or (Set of Keys) or (Other set of keys) I.E: (door)->Kill guard with key to get key -or- collect Key mold from locksmith, get blank key, get key cutter -or- Get Torch, burn door. but you won't escape (Thing needs overcome)->(do thing to overcome thing) unless you remove things that need overcome...

Having the player use their curiosity to discover an objective is a much more satisfying experience than the spoon feeding we're used to

Hmm...maybe..

A core concept behind games,movies or books is, that they are made for a certain audience. So, there's really no common doing it right or doing it wrong other then a bad realization. Personally I like to discover game mechanism on my own, on the other hand, a friend of me prefer the spoon feeding approach, so what does it say about a game ?

The only really useful metric about a game mechnism is the size of your audience. Take a look at the first star wars movies, georg lucas had been frown upon at first, but eventually his movies reached an gigantic audience. Minecraft is similar. I would have never thought that minecraft would be appealing to so many people, but it is. Or dwarffortress which is really hard to learn...

If you want to reach an larger audience, go for mainstream.If you dislike mainstream, accept a smaller audience (and more grumpy people).

If you dislike spoon-feeding games, just ignore them, you are obviously not part of the target audience. If people dislike your game for being to hard to learn, just ignore them, because they are obviously not part of your target audience.