Video games, for the overwhelming majority, have end goals that are generally accepted as righteous. Save the princess. Kill the evil overlord bent on world destruction. Avenge your murdered family (heh, and in the case of Dishonored, all three of those).
Why aren’t the heroes in grand video games ever motivated by pure unmitigated greed? I could see a game where you’re some small-time bank robber who ends up getting into an Ocean’s Eleven-type situation for a chance at a cut of $500 million. Perhaps Grand Theft Auto is the closest to that kind of plot video games get, but that series is pretty unique in that way. Why?
It’s largely pointless, although you aren’t correct.
Several protagonists of games are motivated by greed, but it’s a poor motivation for the player. The player doesn’t get to enjoy using the money, so unless it’s being treated as a kind of score, money is meaningless. I mean, eventually you get that one number to say something big, but it has no effect on the game itself. Likewise, money doesn’t exist for its own sake in life: it’s a resource we use for other things.
Even Tycoon-type games, where making money is an integral part of the process, don’t usually use that as a specific goal. Rather, it’s a an aspect of another challenge: Make $X amount … within two years. Achieve $Y annual profit… in a stock market crash.
There are all kinds of games where the accumulation of wealth is the primary goal. I don’t understand the OP.
The tycoon style games are a perfect example, smiling bandit’s comment to the contrary. They’re about money. Most MMORPGs are primary about the accumulation of wealth; they do have quests and storylines and stuff, but ultimately almost all of them end up being about gathering gold and possessions.
The Patrician and the Port Royale series are primarily trading simulations, and pretty explicitly about making money. Have a ship, make money trading commodities, buy more ships, make faster money trading commodities, build workshops to produce your own commodities (which means not only more profit, but more workers coming to that city, increasing demand for all goods, which means even more profit). The games are partly about driving the economic development of an entire region, but all actions are motivated by trying to get a return on investment. There are pirates, but you either fight them so they don’t take your stuff, or you be one so that you can take other traders’ stuff.
I think what you’re asking is why the goals of video games are noble vs more base?
As in, why are you always the good guy instead of the greedy psycopath?
Dungeon Keeper is a good old-timey game where you’re on the other side of the coin as the evil dungeon keeper, and heroes would show up periodically to destroy you and your dungeon, if your preparations weren’t diabolical enough.
There are a lot of gangster-type games (GTA among many others) where your goals are less than noble.
And finally, there are a lot of games (the Fallout ones come to mind) where you can be good or evil, and that affects the gameplay a lot.
These are all specific, all-or-nothing feats to accomplish. As such, they make for a more compelling story objective than acquiring a certain, arbitrary amount of money in order to win.
Sorry, to clarify, I meant action/adventure games. Of course the Tycoon games have money as the ultimate goal.
I think a good point was raised that since you don’t actually get to spend the money, it’s not as much fun to earn it. The only thing I can rebut that with is that good enough game will make a money-based goal worth it.
Games from the 70s and 80s had “points,” which were something you wanted to maximize, for some reason. Sometimes you’d gain an extra life every X points, sometimes points were pointless.
Nowadays, points mainly exist for out-of-touch critics (“video games are murder simulators”) to mention as something they mistakenly believe exists in GTA etc. and are a goal of game play.
Probably the same reason nobody writes songs about people making money. It’s a really boring narrative, and watching numbers tick up on a computer screen is about as entertaining as being at the office.
My favorite video game of all time is Sid Meiers’ Pirates! Gold. You sailed around the Caribbean plundering ships and towns, accumulating gold and noble titles along the way.
I think a number of replies to the thread aren’t quite what the OP had in mind.
It sounds like the original question is, “Why isn’t the final goal to, for example, recover a treasure chest (as opposed to saving one or more persons, or preventing some evil from taking over)?” It’s not really a matter of earning money (or points) along the way; it’s “you get a great big pile of cash (or gold) at the end, or you don’t”.
It reminds me of games like Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace, where you could score points by progressing, but nobody cared about them; either you finished the game successfully and “won”, or got killed one too many times and “lost”.
I don’t know if you would consider the Wario games “action adventure” but his entire shtick is to just accumulate wealth. And they are damn awesome games. You aren’t rescuing a princess or saving a village. You are stealing stuff and building as much wealth as possible before the end of the game so that you can get the biggest mansion/castle possible.
Considering that there have been a slew of Wario games where the whole point is to be greedy and get as much money as possible, I question the premise of the OP.
Video games want to give you rewards that you can only achieve vicariously through video games. If they made money the reward, you’d start thinking about how real world money was valuable. And then you might start questioning whether it was a good idea to spend real world money on a video game where the reward was making imaginary money.
Seems to be that games reflect real life in this respect.
With few exceptions, money by itself is rarely the ultimate goal for most people. Most people want the things money can buy - cars, bling, houses, a significant other, various material possessions, status, adulation, etc - but not necessarily the money itself.
I don’t go to work to make money. I go to work so I can live in a decent place, eat decent food, access to health care, and have some assurance I can live comfortably in old age. In the real world, the prerequisite for all these things is money.
But in a video game, you can bypass the middle man and have a player character achieve any or all of those things without the acquisition of wealth.
I know this was posted much earlier, but I wanted to look at his argument. I didn’t have time to explain some of what I was talking about in detail.
Money is absolutely not the goal of the game. The goal of the game in the above, or in Tycoon games or whatever, is to build a business, whether it’s a trading coster or a theme park. Money is simply a measure of success - but getting it isn’t the success itself. If you want proof of this, consider the following scenarios:
(A) You boot up a new game called Money-Grubbing Capitalist PigDog Tycoon. The explicit goal of the game is to make as much money as possible in a carefully-crafted economic simulation. After spending several hours figuring out various markets and opportunities, you succeed in achieving the minimum $1 Billion dollars for that scenario.
(B) You boot up a new game called Money-Grubbing Capitalist PigDog Tycoon. The explicit goal of the game is to make as much money as possible in a carefully-crafted economic simulation. Three minutes after starting the game, you in-game super-rich uncle dies and leaves you one billion dollars.
Think about that for a moment. If the player’s goal was the make money, both would absolutely meet that goal. In fact, scenario B would let the player achieve the goal really fast, so they can stop playing. But this isn’t what people want and the players would be deeply unhappy. This is because the player’s goal is to experience content, or overcome a challenge, or just to mess around putting buckets on the heads of shopkeepers and taking all their stuff. Even looking at Tycoon-series games, I never cared much about making money, despite that being an integral aspect of the game. That was a step towards doing what I wanted - making incredibly ridiculous roller coasters.
It mostly doesn’t matter what the in-game characters’ (if there are any) motivations are, because that’s simply a gloss given over the mathematical coding. You can call the digits money, points, gold, gil, xp, or even cheese wedges if you like and it won’t make a bit of difference: to the player, it’s all simply a resource to be used as convenient, or a score to rack up for the fun.
Now, on the other side of it, the protagonists’ motivations sometimes do boil down to money, but this presents a lot of problems. First, the character’s motivations may not be relevant to actual gameplay as described above. Wario may want money, but I don’t care if Wario gets his money. I want to see Wario go through the adventure.
Second, there’s the question of whether the money has any reality in the game. For example, in Thief, Garret’s motivation was just getting money. You could then use this to buy equipment for the next stage. But this does have some problems. This is a pretty limited motivation, and if nothing in the game exists except stealing, then the question arises as to why Garret is still doing this. The man can make an absolute fortune (and does, over three games and an unspecified but evidently large amount of inter-game thieving). Given the amounts he can nab in a single night, why does he still live in a hole, when he could have retired to a country villa?
Because that would be boring. Money is a goal with a limited shelf life. Once you have whatever amount you want, you’re done. But it’s also something which is too-easily eclipsed by other goals and traits, even if the character didn’t think those traits existed. Garret discovers that he has heroic qualities of a sort, when something changes his world in such a way that money loses its value to him (temporarily, anyway). And this is just what we expect: in any kind of organic story, where money has some kind of context, it will inevitably be eclipsed by more important issues. Not many people would risk their life for anything but a huge amount of money, and nobody would take suicidal risks for trivial amounts. Therefore, if the stakes are raised in even the slightest degree, the character must have a greater motivation.
This. I’ve only got a couple of games, both on my iPad. In both, the sole purpose of money is to facilitate the mission (better weapons, faster cars), rather than the object.
Payday has you and your crew robbing banks. Getting passcodes, setting charges to blow the vault, etc. Although it’s primarily a co-op shooter and the core dynamics of it aren’t much different from Left 4 Dead or countless military shooters.
As others noted about “money as a goal” style games, the main thing you get to do with your loot is buy stuff to get better at stealing loot. It’s not as though you ever buy a giant flat screen for your penthouse apartment.