I'm reminded of the original TinyMUD, the one James Aspnes threw up one day. Follies would be a polite way to look at much of the player-generated building there.

I wonder what would happen if City of Heroes player generated content didn't reward players? I.e., if it was just there for the playing?

The original Metroid is the quintessential reverse airport, aside from the fact that it's actually possible to win if you suspect that every corridor has a secret lateral exit. :)

Plot threads that don’t lead anywhere, areas you can never actually get to, promises that aren’t kept.

Yeah, I think we have enough badly-designed games already.

This might work if the gamer was informed by the quest-giver in advance that their "efforts may only be rewarded by gratitude".

Or it'd be like Assassin's Creed where saving the citizens from harassment will cause them to help you when you're in need. There is no immediate connection between effort and reward in that scenario.

Rather than not having rewards for effort, I'd like to see more delayed rewards for your effort, with the reward often coming from unexpected places at unforeseen junctures of storytelling. That'd have the effect of introducing chaos without forgetting that gamers, ultimately, play a game to be rewarded emotionally.

It would be an interesting experience, playing a game like that.

Seeing as there are hundreds of games with ultimately meaningless, yet incredibly time-consuming, side-quests that I've completed, I wonder.. Would I still have completed them if at the end there wasn't a carrot dangling on a string?

Yes, I probably would have.

The reward is meaningless, in the end. Only the quest itself matters. So bring it on, I say! Chaos and disorder await!

I think this will be a natural progression with increasing realism. As we can identify more similarities between virtual worlds and our own, our expectations for such "game-like" mechanics weaken.

I find the STALKER games to be a great example of this reverse airport quality. Even so, it's not clear how many of its "broken" quests are bugs as opposed to the result of a variable-heavy environment.

Some games do have some non-rewarded content, where the whole point of it is the journey - not the end result.

However, not many are done intentionally, or very well (as in, their broken or just sadistic). Having them generated or designed as such would be a step up, although even when, like real life, a task is impossible or a reward isn't available, there are other things that make the task worth attempting - perhaps the possibility of reward, competition for a reward, or just that doing the task itself helps someone else for no gain (charity work is an obvious example). Intangible gains (experience, emotion, whatever), but still somewhat types of gains.

I am racking my brains but can't think of a good example of a well designed impossible quest which has really no rewards at all - nothing even badly designed really. It really is an unexplored area - I wonder when we'll get a game that finally implements filling out TPS reports as a job!

There are, however, plenty of games which provide terrible/dead end plot threads, inaccessible areas and empty promises. Usually manifests themselves more as plot holes, fridge logic, designer errors and so forth.

I remember playing quite a few quests in Oblivion (after I had become some disturbly high level) just to experience the quest; I knew that the 'rewards' they offered would in all likelihood be useless at my current stage in the game.

The final, optional quest in "La Mulana" is impossibly hard, promises a great reward, and...well.

A better example of a suspiciously impossible quest is "You Probably Won't Make It" By Jesse Venbrux.

There are games that give the player a scenario they can't win, and it is often used for dramatic effect. Consider the wind tunnel in Shadow of the Colossus or the first battle with Lavos in Chrono Trigger or the nuke scene in Call of Duty 4. Really, these are little more than cinematics used to forward the plot, but they disguise themselves by relinquishing control to the player.

The alternative is to give the player an airport. Give them so much freedom to solve the quest that they find a personal experience in their choice. But, even these have to reach a bottleneck to move the experience forward.

While it IS a step in the right direction, it's still a bit too much like a movie to separate a game as a distinct art. Real people's actions have unintended consequences. In a game, this usually boils down to a "Gotcha!" moment where you were working for the bad guys all along. What if the player was given their choice of a path to their goal, but their choice only took them further away from where they wanted to be?

Yeah, I think we have enough badly-designed games already.
That portrait is terrible! It doesn't even look like a face!

Right now, games are heavily focused on task-reward gratification. They don't have to be, just like a painting doesn't have to be focused on a literal representation of a scene or object.

This idea seems to tie very closely to the concept of the unreliable narrator, as seen in games such as Silent Hill 2.

http://www.hdrlying.com/imported-data/2008/8/18/living-in-reverse-the-benefit-of-the-unreliable-narrator.html

There's surrealist games like Yume Nikki and LSD that provide an anti-airport experience, but there's also the NES Zelda 2, which, from what I've heard, intentionally misleads you (I've never played it).

Re: Zelda 2: I don't know about intentionally misleading. At the beginning there's a dark cave where you can't see enemies. Naturally many players assume that they need an item before they can advance in that direction. In the town nearby to the southwest someone says something like "get the candle in Parappa Palace, go west." which leads a lot of people to believe that you have to go west to find the candle. Actually you have to go east, through the cave. It's just a matter of toughing out the dark cave to get there. Apparently he means something like "Go get the candle in Parappa Palace, then go west." but they ran out of space.

There are a lot of other areas in the game where it's easy to get lost. Zelda 2 takes place in a vast and dangerous world where many key landmarks are hidden from view. It is definitely not an airport.

The reverse airport idea makes me think of two games in particular: Super Mario 64 and Goldeneye. The designers of both games have said that they designed the locations first and then came up with things for the player to do there. The result is a lot of seemingly useless areas, but also that you get the impression you are exploring a real space and not just being pulled through a carnival ride.

I think it's worth distinguishing a "bad airport" (i.e., a situation where things ought to be clear and aren't, and an indication of design weakness) from something deliberately intended to echo the seemingly capricious nature of the world around us.

Is the concept of gnarliness at all useful here?

And I just thought you were illustrating a useful point about life.