WHAT APPEAL OF THE OPEN WORLD GOALESS GAMES?

When I first played Minecraft there was a feeling of survival. You need to build a house and a bed before night falls or the monsters will get you and you have to sit in darkness for like 10 minutes. You build something basic. Then you slowly gather resources. Then you decide that you want something that looks cooler and has more space and functionality. It's similar to LEGO in that way, but really when I played with LEGO as a kid I didn't want to fight my creations. I just wanted to build something interesting. So maybe it's just a different mindset or expectation we have.

Anyways, eventually when you build up your resources and you build the tools you need to explore. You start exploring. That in itself is fun. You often find some randomly generated landscapes or structures. You might a cool place that you want to build a new base on. My friend built one underwater. I build one behind a waterfall and on top of a mountain. Then you start exploring underground. You find better resources to build new and better things. You find new enemies and new structures.

Eventually you make your way to the neither and you do it all again. Explore. New things.

There is a point to Minecraft though. To find and kill the dragon. It's not easy and you have to do a lot of exploring and building to get there. You need to do the things the game offers.

Beyond that, I enjoy creating. Me and my friend built a castle like place. It had a really tall tower with fire on top, so we could see where home base was from really far away and you could see it really good at night. We had rooms for things like the neither portal, the enchanting table, the wolves, there was fenced off areas for the animals. I even tried to build a series of canals so I could around on boat, that didn't work out very well. It's the same reason I like legos. You can build whatever you want. Except in Minecraft you don't spend 1000$ on lego blocks and you don't have to put them away when your done.

I find Minecraft less fun when I play by myself. When you play with someone else you can cooperate and brainstorm ideas on cool things to build. If your not aware you can build complicated "electronics" to do just about anything a computer can do. It can be as simple as a light switch or a switch to open a door. Or you can build a calculator. It's deeper than most people think.

Then there's playing against other people. You can build a base with traps and fight other people. You try and destroy each others base.

I haven't played any other games similar to Minecraft so I can only talk about that. But I never seem to run out of things to do. A few times I made a level in Creative mode where the intent was to build a level like a Zelda game. I basically first did landscaping, so things didn't look random. Leveled the ground off, created walls, created fences and bridges. Then I build underground chambers that can only be accessed a certain way and had some kind of progression. Like you could see an entrance but could only get there by finding a different entrance and making your way to the other one. I also started building a level that was going to be a giant labyrinth in cube form. It had circuitry running under the floors and behind the walls. So you could hit a switch on one side, and it would open a door on the other side. So it was a big puzzle. In order to really get the most out of these levels you would have to NOT play it like Minecraft. You couldn't just break down a wall to progress and you couldn't put any item you want in your inventory. You had to work only with items that were provided in chests throughout the level.

So there are plenty of things to do and different ways to enjoy it. It sounds like your not letting yourself enjoy it. You already decided you don't want to like it and you don't give it a chance or use your imagination like you used to do with LEGOs. I've seen my niece and her friend build an entire town. There was a school bus, you walk inside and there was an underground tunnel that led to another bus on the other side of town, so it looked like you traveled on the bus when you walked through the tunnel and came out of another bus.

I really didn't expect to write so much...

author=kentona
which is probably why I gravitated to space or castle lego, and city lego was boring (stories are always better with dragons or IN SPACE)

What about those carchases through the streets of lego city. The most important thing is that the thing you're building has wheels. And then you can go all Mad Max on the living room carpet.

I've played a fair bit of Minecraft and I do get bored from time to time. But then there's also times when it's all about the "project". In combination with the survival elements and searching for stuff it becomes rather exciting to hunt for iron and gold in tunnels deep underground while trying not to get lost and also not to die. There is a game in that. Though it is a game of collecting things. (gotta catch 'em all)

Of course I really just like digging. So I can mine away in Minecraft and Terraria, making intricate mineshafts that I can find my way home in and never knowing when you're going to hit a scary open place filled with horrors.

The downside for me is of course similar to yours in that when it is all procedurally generated finding a certain hole is not particularly interesting, because there's not... "stuff" in it. Unlike designed open world games (I'm thinking Fallout: New Vegas for example) where you can find a location and although there's no notes or whatever there, there is a story behind each location. I'm also thinking of Dead State, the indie zombie RPG. Where every location was carefully crafted and each one told a certain story about what might have happened at that location. It was still open world (though probably not goalless, not entirely), but every encounter was designed. (or that's how it seemed anyway)

I really enjoy goalless games. But I guess not so much the "possibilities are endless" goalless. But one of my favourite game series is Football Manager. And that game is fairly goalless. Yes I guess the goal is that your team is going to do well. But that's no different than the very basic goal of not dying in Minecraft. It's all about how the approach. Goallessness and constant progress.

Or like Grand Strategy games, or more specifically the grand strategy RPG Crusader Kings (2). In these games the "goal" is to get as many points as possible, but just like how few people care about the dragon in Minecraft, few people care about actually conquering the world in Crusader Kings.

I don't know there always seem to be some goal to attain in these games. It's often just self-determined. And they can be switched halfway through. Like side-quests.

As usual I don't really know what I'm writing. Because it was stop start. I just don't know if lack of an overarching goal means that there's a lack of any goals. (though I haven't gotten back to Elite: Dangerous in a while because that was maybe a bit too goalless... But it was also very pretty :)

author=kentona
E:
on a side note, learning recently that there is an end boss dragon makes Minecraft 1000x more appealing to me in my mind.

Minecraft has come a LONG way from its initial release. Recent updates really flesh out the "sandbox" factor so you can give yourself a lot more goals, from finding horses to domesticate and name, finding villagers to trade items with, exploring dungeons, etc. I definitely recommend you play it now.

On topic, the appeal of these games mostly come from the fact that I like roleplaying. I don't care that these games don't have a tangible goal in mind, that's not the point. That goal and its tangible reward is what you give to it, and the key to making such a game successful is to allow many different possibilities the player can achieve.

That being said, I can understand why people wouldn't stand it, because not everyone plays games with that goal of roleplaying in mind.

In oblivion, my goals were to go into every cave along the way I encountered from one city to the other. At the very least, around the Imperial city. There was a lot of questing.

But I have Umbra, the most powerful weapon in the game, so I got that going for me which is nice.

Minecraft also has the appeal of playing the game in different ways. By which I mean, people will create story maps using 'event triggers' that allow you to progress. There are a lot of adventure maps created by people which are free to download and try. A lot of them are really good and different too!

Then there's the mods. Good god, the mods. So many mods. And things like Feed the Beast/AT/Technic launchers which have packs of mods you can download like Hexxit, which is geared around conquering dungeons that are prebuilt and scattered around or Agrarian Skies where you are stranded on a block in the sky with only a tree, bonemeal and a few other items and need to follow quests in order to survive (I love AS - all the mods work so well together).

Then there's the servers which allow for multiplayer experiences. Some have minigames like Hunger Games, Hide and Seek, Battle Siege, Dragon Run, Spleef... among many others. (Hunger Games is basically a group of people in a premade map littered with chests. They run, collect armour and weapons before a certain time while dodging other players who aim to kill them and be the last left. Hide and Seek has different variations. In one you turn into an animal of some kind and the seekers have to kill all the animals. In another you choose a block on a preset map and have to hide well enough that the seekers can't kill all of you. If you get found you turn into a seeker. Battle Siege is as it sounds - assigned a group that either attack or defend and have to protect the base - there's also capture the flag/wool. Dragon Run is basically a parkour map (jumping on blocks with holes between them) and trying to get the furthest/to the end of the course while the Ender Dragon chases you all down. Spleef is basically digging the ground out from others around you to have them fall to their death while trying not to fall to your own.) They are all a lot of fun.

One of the settings I like in the game is something called Flatlands which creates a land that is basically just flat grass with bedrock under. You have to run from one village to the next, collecting a bunch of stuff to survive. It can be hectic and crazy, because come night mobs spawn around the village you're in and will kill villagers. I always aim to get a horse so I can get from place to place fast.

I'm also fond of Skyblock - no two are the same. (Tree, block of dirt, lava bucket and water. Survive.)

But even playing normal Minecraft can be fun if you give yourself a challenge. One time I challenged myself to travel the land and protect any village I found from the night (shoring up defences by fencing the area to keep zombies out and lighting everything up.) Another time (one i'm currently playing) I'm RPing an exile who keeps a diary about what they've been doing every day. I'm accompanied by a 'couple' (villagers) and a horse and have had to wrangle a life in the hostile environs. I've set rules for myself - for example, I can't keep animals I can't feed (so if I have two wheat and three cows, I have to kill the third cow).

Couple these with one-shot worlds (if you die they get deleted) and there's the challenge of no dying.

Really, there's so much that can be done with the game - and I haven't even touched on just building cool castles and stuff or playing with your friends on a private server (which is infinitely more fun... as long as they don't drop the game and leave you alone in the world ;.; ).

Pizza, it's funny, because I'd say Elder Scrolls has exactly the same problems you're describing as well. It's full of random nothing that, while not randomly generated, mostly might as well be. There's way too much meaningless space-filling garbage that has nothing to do with the plot or the main objectives or the quests, and has no story worth learning. Just empty buildings and random farms with nothing to do, and way too much endless space in between them. There's no point in exploring any of it, because there's nothing to find except random meaningless locations. When a location is given named characters, they usually have less story than a random fetch quest in an MMORPG. When they do have any more depth that that, it's sometimes impossible to see it simply because the game doesn't give you any indication to hang around - nothing is treated as important. Bethesda could have deleted 60% of the buildings and people, and 90% of the wilderness, and the game would have been vastly better for it.

Basically, when people are making RPG Maker maps, we tell them to condense things. Do you understand why we do that? Skyrim needs to do that. Focus is important.

On the other hand people like Minecraft for the same reason they like SimCity, or even RPG Maker. That part is easy for me to understand. You build your own story into it, just like Kentona did with legos. If you were just exploring the randomized world it would be boring, but you're not - you're creating something non-random out of it. You craft and forge the materials it gives you, and you struggle to build a meaning with them. It doesn't appeal to me much, but only because I am already too invested in RPG Maker to switch worldbuilding platforms now.

author=pianotm
I never realized there was no goal in Minecraft. Now I want to play it.

The goal is what you make it. There are challenges and achievements for doing certain things like 'finishing' the game (killing the Ender Dragon) or finding diamonds, tipping cows (collecting leather), getting wood and conquering underwater temples.
You can brew potions, explore caves/caverns/temples/dungeons, find loot, establish villages, create a world.

It's very easy to get invested into it.

There's this one guy who does LPs and hated the idea of Minecraft for years, constantly putting it down when it got mentioned. Two weeks ago he finally got asked by his financial supporters to do a series of it and he went into it joking that he'd probably hate it. Surprise, surprise - he's had a bit of an adventure and realised he's enjoying himself. Of course, he's about as dumb as a bag full of rocks at times ("How do I make sticks again?") but he did point out some things that are wrong with the game - lack of tutorials, for example.
He has a point, it's not a game you can just pick up and just understand how to do things. You need to have checked out some sort of tutorials to know how to make stuff - which is why NEI is one of the most used mods (Not Enough Items shows a sort-of dictionary of items in the game and how you can make them. It's great.)
His videos reminded me strongly of the first time I played and how I didn't know how to knock down a tree to get wood to build with. (To be fair, I had watched a few videos before getting the game... but I'd watched ones where the people were already far into gameplay and using mods, so I didn't realise how to do the basic stuff at all.) And I died a lot before I truly understood what to do.
Step 1 - punch tree for wood.
Make pickaxe. Gather stone. Make stone tools. Gather wood. Build shelter (or dig out a cave for shelter). Make stove, cook logs for charcoal if you haven't found coal, go mining for coal/iron, upgrade tools, build armour, go exploring... do whatever next.
Or just go and loot villages for goods. Or play in creative and build with all the blocks instead. Or do whatever you want. Use it to only play server minigames. It's such a versatile game.
Add mods and it's a lot more interesting with a lot more stuff to make. XD

I've never played Minecraft. My sister did. She did so for several months. She doesn't play games otherwise. Or she does but not with such a passion.
I like other goalless games. Crusader Kings 2 are superb, The Sims 2 were always fun. Going on rampage in GTA never gets old. Actually, I don't like goals sometimes. I don't want to fight anymore, keep getting stronger. I want my tight realm and just live. Then I look out the window.
~Time to throw something out.