What does it mean to be good at a sandbox game?

If you’ve watched me play Minecraft on my twitch channel you know I play almost exclusively hardcore mode (a game mode in which upon death there is no respawn and the world is lost), and I play it foolishly, taking risks and getting distracted and throwing my life away. I jump into game after game, dying only a few days in, almost always before fully kitting myself out in diamonds, and I have never gotten far enough to even attempt the “End” of the game. I’ve talked about this style of play to other minecrafters and they think I’m doing something bizarre. Why bother playing the beginning of the game on loop endlessly?

And the answer is: I want to get better at it. And I have done! My building has improved - I can make much more fun and interesting structures with early game resources now. I last, on average, several hours now instead of only a few minutes. I have strategies for my first iron, my first diamonds, my first trip into the nether. I often know within a few minutes whether or not an attempt is going to be viable based on my starting situation. (Spawning in a dark oak forest? Never a good time for some reason.)

But this isn’t a game that asks you to do this - I’m not getting “better” at the game by any standard that anyone but me is measuring by. Sure, Minecraft youtubers and the occasional twitch player have hardcore worlds thousands of days old (I’ve been watching fWhip on youtube and Mellondoodle on twitch recently) but there are also people making Minecraft content who never leave creative mode, or who use mods to smooth out the survival experience and spend more time on other parts of the game. It’s not a requirement by any standard to grind out tens or hundreds of attempts at hardcore mode so that one day I might have a “forever” save in which I have never died.

I play most games the same. In Shadows of Doubt, when I picked that up last year, I automatically jumped to the permadeath mode. I’ve been recently even playing Stardew Valley of all games in a faux hardcore where I restart my farm if I ever pass out.

I’ve talked at length before about the way players self-impose challenges on sandbox games to increase their longevity and difficulty, but now I’m starting to wonder - why do we want games to be difficult?

Not everyone does, of course! Plenty of people have a lot of fun in game worlds without difficulty, but there is an expectation from video games, or any hobby, that we are aiming for skill increase, even when there’s no audience or stakes for doing so.

I was talking to my brother about the video games I play, and he said “you must have almost mastered The Sims, with how long you’ve played it” and all I could think was “what on earth would that even look like”

But even as I think that, I remember that when I was playing a Sims challenge on stream, people would regularly comment that I made it look easy. So I suppose I am “good at” The Sims 4, a game with completely optional difficulty. Like Minecraft, you can change settings to ignore obstacles, easily cheat them away, and mod them out of the game completely.

I don’t really have a point to make here, it’s just a thing I’ve been thinking of. Why do we want to get better at games? What causes the drive to increase your skill at something that ultimately has no function?

Is it so simple as “it’s fun”?

It might be.

Anyway, good night. I’m going to go start another hardcore save and see how far I can get before bed tonight. I’ll see you in the morning on twitch with more of the same.