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Game subthread.
Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)
What are some games that focus on exploration and vibes but with zero gamification elements? Something I’ve noticed is that games will try to nudge you into exploring an area by giving you an “exploration point”, or some other sort of positive reinforcer. But whenever this happens, it actually reduces your interest in exploring for its own sake, because the extrinsic reward interferes with the intrinsic reward processing. So when you get that point or that notification telling you that this is a new area, you now want to explore a new area already instead of actually taking in and experiencing the area you ostensibly have just discovered.
Is there any game that doesn’t do this? That encourages the intrinsic exploration element simply by not encouraging anything at all? (An old game which did this, that I recall playing briefly as a child, is The Endless Forest)
I believe what you are looking for is the 2013 indie game Proteus. There is no extrinsic goal or gamification at all, and the entire point of the game is to wander around a large procedurally generated world with strange fauna and sights to see. It's a world made solely so the player can explore it.
I share your sentiments about this by the way - I find that many open worlds have so many gamified elements and nudge you in the right direction so much that it barely even feels free anymore. Sure, you can deviate from the main quest markers if you want to have some fun, but you always know you're going to be returning to the main story, and the world is generally such a content desert that it barely gives incentive to explore. Sure, you can circumvent the quest markers and skip major sections of the story, but you'd only do that on a first playthrough if you want to have a significantly worse experience and miss most of the properly fleshed-out content in the game. This was my exact issue with Breath of the Wild - it felt very gamified and on-rails, and the open world not only seemed irrelevant but was also fairly unrewarding. And don't even get me started on the goddamn weapon durability system.
Games like Proteus are also empty. But games that are explicitly all about exploration and vibes get away with liminality and emptiness better than stuff that tries to meld it with a plot and a combat system and collectibles does. The latter frames itself in a goal-driven way which leads you to approach its open world in the same manner, the former does not. This is why "gamifying" open worlds barely ever works.
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