Purpose as a Compass

A compass that always works#

At this stage the purpose is discovered and fully understood. You now have a compass that always shows what to do next, even in times of uncertainty, overwhelm or heavy adversity.

It's not easy and it's not simple, but it's certainly doable, and the ability to reset the compass toward the next best action is always there. That's true whether you're asking how to make the project a reality, or which option is the best design decision right now.

Underneath it is the NVC process from Understanding Human Beings: "What is alive in me right now?" connects you to the feelings and needs, and "How can I make life more wonderful now?" opens up infinite strategies to meet them, since once you know which needs you're looking for, strategies are easy to come up with. The right direction is always available, at any moment, even if it takes you through a phase of experimentation to get there. That's the power of the purpose-based mindset in action.

The purpose test#

Here's how the mindset works in practice, in its simplest form. At every single design decision, no matter how big or small, anywhere from the user interface, aesthetics, marketing, mechanics, sounds, music, releases, updates, maintenance, story and writing style to the smallest details and everything in between, all you need to ask is:

"Does this fulfill the purpose?"
or
"Does this bring the project closer to fulfilling the purpose?"

If the answer is "yes", do it.
If the answer is "no", change it, remove it or don't do it.
If the answer is "I don't know", find out.

Again: any decision. Any topic. Any situation. At any level. At any time. Of any importance.

That's all it is at its core. It may sound too simple, but there's a lot of thought behind that one question, and it reveals the best way forward in every task. Everything in Part II so far is what makes it answerable: the needs, the feelings, the purpose you found from your inspiration.

A quick example#

Take the giant robot game from Chapter 2, whose purpose is freedom/autonomy, power/capacity, challenge, variety/surprise and play/joy, with momentum and flow.

• "Should there be a fuel system that forces you back to base every ten minutes?" It breaks momentum and limits freedom. No.
• "Should the robot be able to boost to extreme speeds?" Freedom, power, momentum. Yes, and now the camera and the level scale have to support it.
• "Should there be a long cutscene before each mission?" Breaks flow, delays the play. No. If the story matters, find a way to tell it in motion.
• "Should enemies use unpredictable tactics?" Surprise, challenge, variety. Yes.
• "Should levels unlock one by one after you beat the previous one?" It restricts freedom and gives nothing to the purpose. No. Let the player choose.

Five decisions, each settled in seconds, none of them by asking what other games do. That's the compass.

Catching bad ideas early#

Purpose works just as well in reverse: for detecting bad decisions, bad features, bad systems, bad mechanics and bad concepts before they ruin the project or waste your time.

That's arguably where it saves the most. A bad idea caught on paper costs a crossed-out line. The same idea caught in a prototype costs days. Caught after release, it costs months of rework, an angry community and a reputation. And a bad idea that's never caught keeps costing, quietly, for the whole life of the game: every player who leaves without saying why. Asking the purpose question at the moment an idea appears is the cheapest point it will ever be to say no.

Every idea gets tested, including the ones you love, and especially the ones you love. A feature you're excited about but that doesn't serve the purpose is still poison for the project. It might belong in another project. Write it down and keep it for that one.

Beware: poor design can violate needs#

Meeting needs is what makes a game compelling. The inverse is equally powerful, in a bad way. Games and interactive tools are strategies to meet needs, and bad strategies can fail to meet them, or worse, violate them.

A project is designed to meet one need or a bundle of needs. It usually doesn't, and can't, meet every need. That's fine. What's not fine is violating the rest. Great care must be taken never to violate the needs the game isn't about, because when that happens, players' engagement drops sharply, and so does the chance they ever come back.

Think back to the progress bars. A game about challenge can meet the need for challenge brilliantly and still violate the need for respect (by wasting the player's time), for autonomy (by forcing one way to play), for safety (by threatening to take away progress) or for rest (by punishing them for stopping). The player doesn't experience those as separate problems. They experience one game that is somehow exhausting. They won't tell you why. They'll just leave.

So the purpose test has a second half. Not only "does this meet the purpose?", but also "does this violate any other need?". If it does, it's a flawed strategy, and there's a better one to find.

Why some people aren't interested in your game#

Short answer: they're sated by other means. They already meet that need some other way, at less cost, more conveniently, or more powerfully than your game would.

Longer answer: everyone has the same needs, but not everyone has the same bars empty at the same time. Someone whose need for challenge is met every day by their job, their sport or their kids won't go looking for more challenge in a game. Someone who already plays a game that meets their need for exploration better than yours, or more cheaply, or with their friends already in it, has no reason to switch. And someone who needs rest right now will turn away from your intense action game however good it is, and may love it next month.

This matters because of what people do when they notice some players aren't interested. They start adding things to the game to pull those players in. A little of this, a little of that. The game starts trying to serve every need at once, or pulls in two opposite directions, and the people it was made for start leaving too. (Those are the first two failures in Fun Is the Fulfillment of Needs.)

Don't chase everyone. A game that's the best strategy in the world for one bundle of needs will find the people who have those needs. That's enough, and it's far more than a game that's a mediocre strategy for everything.

Where meaning comes from: handmade and procedural#

We humans don't do anything without a good reason. So what's the reason, the meaning, the motivation, that makes a game worth playing? It depends on how the game's campaign is made, and the two main kinds give meaning in completely different ways.

Meaning in handmade campaigns#

In a typical handmade campaign, the meaning comes from the player curiously following the trail the human author laid down, to see what kind of gift they'll be given. The gift could be:

• a spectacle,
• a heartfelt message,
• an educational message,
• a thrill ride, action or horror,
• a fair challenge,
• a taste of something new and unexpected, or anything else interesting a stranger could offer, from one human to another.

In handmade campaigns, the player's interaction with the author is usually at the center of the experience, more than whatever happens mechanically in the game. The game is closer to window dressing, and isn't meant to stand on its own. Sometimes the special thing it gives could have worked just as well as a video, audio, comic, infographic, image, poem or article.

The idea is to hand your control and attention to the author and the realm they built for you, in the hope that they'll give you something valuable (information, experience, challenge, delight) that makes your life more wonderful in some way. Stronger, smarter, faster, better, wiser.

Sometimes it's bitter medicine: a shocking truth, the harrowing reality of something terrible, an experience that's useful and necessary but not pleasant. A game might deal with narcissistic abuse and give you hints on how to handle it. It isn't "fun" in the everyday sense, but it's helpful, and so it's worth experiencing, especially if the topic is relevant to you. (And notice: it still meets needs. Understanding, safety, being seen. That's why it's worth it.)

Meaning in procedural campaigns#

In a procedurally generated campaign, the meaning comes through the gameplay itself. It comes when something new, interesting, surprising or unexpected happens as a remarkable moment during play. Those moments and chains of events, big and small, naturally create memorable stories:

• doing something cool through skill, luck or persistence, and feeling capable (which is great for mental health),
• overcoming a challenge that felt uncertain or impossible, and noticing you've grown,
• learning something through your own actions instead of being told, and feeling the independence of having discovered it yourself,
• laughing when something absurd happens, and getting a moment to relax and be present,
• expressing yourself through customization or style of play, with a real sense of freedom over your own actions,
• experimenting in a space where anything is possible and allowed, living out a fantasy a scripted game wouldn't permit.

All of these can happen in singleplayer and multiplayer alike.

The difference#

Both are tools for a specific job, and both are valuable. Handmade campaigns are better for a tailored gift that focuses on one thing and delivers it in the most suitable packaging. Procedural campaigns have a special strength: they can be played infinitely and expanded endlessly, because of how their content is designed and organized. That's what lets emergent behavior happen. (Content That Multiplies explains the content side of this.)

And that's the big difference in meaning. In an author-written, scripted story, the meaning comes from curiously watching where the story takes me and what I learn from it. I'm ultimately a passive listener, almost a spectator, following orders with no real freedom of my own. In an infinite game, the meaning comes from the situations I stumble into that become a memorable story. My own story. Something I did, not a predetermined spectacle where I was a guest. I'm an active trailblazer making my own path, and the story happens just because I'm playing. Since it's personal, it feels more meaningful and more tangible than someone else's story.

It's about the right tool for the right job, and the purpose decides which one. If you want to gift a specific, curated message, a handmade campaign will do nicely. If you want players to have a great personal experience they create themselves just by playing, procedural campaigns work much better. What fails is choosing one out of habit, and then wondering why players don't find the meaning you hoped for.

Keep the original inspiration in the project#

A common mistake I've observed is that the original source of inspiration, that moment or event that pushed a person to create the project, isn't used in the project itself. Even worse, developers often skip it entirely, and try to present the experience directly without the context that the original inspiration provided.

You needed that context to start the project. The players need the same context to enjoy it. It's the very thing that gives the project meaning and importance, and makes a player actually care. This is the same point as the climate change and math examples in Chapter 1, applied to games: your outspiration becomes their inspiration, but only if you actually give it to them.

If the robot game came from the feeling of watching that anime with drum and bass in your ears, wanting to be there, then the first minute of the game should feel like that. Not a menu, a tutorial and a text crawl. That.

Where good games come from#

I want to show how the purpose-based mindset has been used, sometimes deliberately and often by accident, to create the games people love most. Understanding where good games come from shows you how to harvest purpose for your own project. And by success I mean meeting the human needs the game set out to meet.

Look at the origin stories of beloved games and a pattern shows up again and again. The creator had a need, usually an old and personal one, and the game was the strategy they built to meet it. Not a market gap. Not a trend. A need.

• The creator of Pokémon grew up collecting insects, and wanted children who grew up in cities without fields and forests to have that same feeling of discovering, catching and collecting living things. The purpose (discovery, collection, a bond with creatures) shaped everything: the trading, the encyclopedia, the creatures themselves.
• The creator of The Legend of Zelda has described exploring the countryside, woods and caves near his childhood home, and wanting to give players the feeling of stumbling into the unknown. The open overworld and the hidden caves come straight from that.
• Minecraft began from the joy of building with blocks in another small game, Infiniminer, and a wish to build freely in a world that was alive. Freedom and creation were the purpose, and they still define it.

Notice three things about these stories.

The need came first. None of these started as "let's make a game in genre X". They started as a feeling the creator wanted to have again, or wanted to give to someone else. The genre, the mechanics and the look all came after, as answers to the question "how do I give this feeling?"

The inspiration stayed in the game. The original context, the field full of bugs, the cave behind the house, wasn't explained to the player. It was given to the player, as an experience. That's the point of the previous section.

The creator played their own game. They were making something they personally wanted to exist. That's self-fullness from Understanding Human Beings: because needs are universal, a creator who honestly makes the game that meets their own need makes the game that meets a lot of other people's needs too.

Many of these creators didn't have words like "fundamental human needs" or "purpose". They had strong intuition, and they trusted it. That works, sometimes brilliantly. The problem with intuition alone is the one from Chapter 2: if you don't know why something worked, you can't reliably repeat it, protect it or explain it to a team. That's why the same studios that make one wonderful game sometimes make a sequel that misses everything the first one got right, and why a beloved series can lose its soul once its original creator leaves. The purpose lived in one person's head, and nobody else could see it. (More Ways Good Intentions Fail has a scenario about exactly that.)

The purpose-based mindset is what those creators did by instinct, made visible, so you can do it on purpose, every time, and share it with the people you work with.

Before moving on#

That's the mindset. Purpose, human beings, fun as the fulfillment of needs, inspiration turned into purpose, the honest choice between a game and a tool, and the compass to steer by.

Part III shows what happens when good intentions go into a project without this mindset. Every scenario in it was made by someone who wanted to make life more wonderful, and every one went wrong for a reason you can now see coming.

And one last time, because it's the thing I most want you to remember: the technical side is useless without the mindset.