I was recently on the hunt for a game about farming, because Minecraft just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. While on my search, I was pointed toward Like, 100 Bears’ game Space Gardener. It’s a very simple game: you collect rocks, buy seeds, grow plants and buy more seeds. Billed as a game made for relaxation, you can’t actually fail in any way and that got me thinking; a lot of games would be better if you couldn’t lose.

Another game I’ve been playing recently is Banished, a rock-hard city simulator where you must lead your exiled villagers to survive the harsh winters. It’s a fantastic game, but it’s also infuriating. Building up my village, getting my crops and houses all where they need to be, getting a nice stock of resources and then bam they all die of a horrible disease. Or starvation. It’s almost always starvation for me.

The joy of setting up my town and watching it prosper for a short amount of time is ruined by them all inconveniently dying. In fact, I have downloaded a mod for the game which allows me to just spawn more villagers if my current ones die so I can keep my progress and not have to start a whole new village. It practically solves my issue with city sims in general, but it still raises the point about competitive games.

When I use the word ‘competitive’, I do not necessarily mean against a person. It could be against the systems of the game itself: dwindling food resources, AI enemies, anything that can best you and cause you to be punished by the game in some way.

Some believe that for something to be a game, it must have an actual or implicit fail state; you need to be able to lose. However, is this really the case? Minecraft’s creative mode is very popular, with people building massive working machines and sprite art. There is no way to exactly lose this other than simply not being finished with it yet. There is certainly a victory state – build your thing – but there isn’t a failure state. The game doesn’t end if you put a block out of place, the machine you’ve almost built doesn’t blow up. There is no punishment for it, no competition. There is a goal and there are challenges to achieve the goal, which still makes creative mode or Space Gardener ‘feel’ like a game to me.

Compare this to Portal, which is often used as an example of a non-violent game that is still competitive. In Portal, there are no enemies for you to kill but there is still a fail state; the wrong portal on the wrong bit of wall can result in you dying and having to restart from a previous checkpoint. This is a failure state. On the other hand, I don’t think simply not finishing the game could be considered one. The decision to stop playing is completely on the player and isn’t a permanent decision – you can return to the game with no loss of progress. Not finishing a game is the cessation of progress through the player’s own choice, not the removal of progress that other failure states give you. Portal kills you, Banished kills your villagers, but Space Gardener doesn’t do anything to you and yet it still is a game.

This general misunderstanding of what a failure state is comes from the idea that to be victory is binary. Win/lose, succeed/fail, right/wrong. It is also a fairly capitalistic view: for you to succeed, someone or something else must be bested. I believe this doesn’t have to be the case, and the fact we’ve been designing non-competitive, non-violent and non-goal-orientated games since before video games existed shows that. In 1925, the Woodcraft Folk was an education movement focused on children. By the 1960s and 1970s (the height of the left-wing hippy movement), non-competitive games were being created in their hundreds. Video games are dramatically behind the times in their acceptance of these alternative designs.

Games can be a place to challenge the player. Most of my favourite games are those which you can lose – their existence is not a problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is that games have this idea of competition so ingrained that other games may suffer. Developers can learn so many things from the Woodcraft Folk and pre-video game design, but games as a medium are so set in their ways. That may be through technical difficulties. It may also be through cultural opposition to ‘non-games’ or ‘walking simulators’ from some sections of the gaming scene (which I have previously written about) and the idea that non-violence is ‘for kids’. It may also be through a simple lack of knowledge about games outside of the medium. Whatever the reasons for it, they need to be overcome.

Sometimes I would love to play a city sim with my immortal citizens just to see how much money I could make or how fabulous my city could become. The challenge is still there to make to progress: make the money, gather the resources, but without the threat of losing your creation to a disease or a freak storm. I accept that Banished is not that game, and I don’t expect for it to change. I would like the industry to change enough to be open to and embrace the idea of non-competitive games.

But sometimes I just want to plant flowers on an asteroid. Fortunately I have that need catered for.