Exploration in Games

What does that even mean?

During the Design Club Meeting this week we discussed the subject of Exploration and what it means.

There were many ways to look at exploration in games, some thought that it was exploring the game world further and others thought it could be about finding that one strategy to beat the game. As in a tower defence game for example. In a tower defence game you can win by using all the tools available but what they meant was that finding that one combination of tools to beat the game was a kind of exploration. This led to a very interesting discussion about Exploration vs. Experimentation.

The thought behind it was that the tower defence game belonged more in the domains of experimentation and not in exploration. The tools are all there to be used and there is not much to explore as in an open world type of game for instance. In a lot of games you start with a set of tools and can search or get others during the journey. That is more like exploration.

However, I think that experimentation in that sense is like exploration. It is experimenting to find different solutions or combos that work, it is exploration of the game’s limitations and/or possibilities. With that said, there is a lot to be discussed about exploration and its definitions.

To conclude this post, I think that experimentation and exploration are in a sense the same thing but looking at it from another angle it could become something completely different. It is all in the eyes of the beholder and based on their experiences with exploration it could indeed mean something else to others.

Feel free to leave some of your thoughts behind 🙂