I spend a lot of my non-work time at my gaming computer. I own (as much as anyone does, these days) dozens of games, but there are two that I find myself returning to, over and over again.

DayZ and Elite:Dangerous.

On the surface, they’re very different games. Survival in a post-zombie-apocalypse world and a far-future space simulation game.

However, there’s one certain thing that they have in common, and I think it’s this factor that both brings me back to these two over and over, while rendering other games less appealing by comparison.

You decide your own goals. You write your own story.

Most games have a story to them. DayZ doesn’t, and Elite’s is something that you are totally free to engage with or not, as suits you.

There are other games I like, respect, value and enjoy – Baldur’s Gate 3, Ghost of Tsushima, to name just two that are near the top of the list right now. Both have an overarching narrative to them, both have a series of tasks or quests, and you need to complete some of these in order to progress. Do quest, get reward, get gear, learn skills, repeat. This is a common model for gaming. For me, while I do enjoy these games, I always feel somewhat controlled by them. ‘Constrained’ might be a better word, or maybe ‘limited’.

In Elite, while there are missions as part of the game, you choose what missions to do, who to do them for. Don’t want to finish it? Abandon it (there may be consequences for this, but you can deal with those). There’s a codified reputation economy in place – get popular with a certain group, then they’ll offer you missions that are qualitatively better in some way – normally they’ll offer you higher rewards.

If you don’t want to do missions, it’s very possible to play the game and be successful (for your own personal definition of success) without ever taking a single mission. I know people who trade, buying low here and selling high there, making money and buying upgrades so they can trade more efficiently. I’ve played vigilante, going to a certain part of space where those of a piratical bent are known to gather, and engaging them in combat, profiting from the bounties that various authorities have placed on them.

There are narratives in-game – wars and politics, alien invasions and natural disasters, but none of them require my involvement. I may choose to involve myself in them, or I can choose not to. I might profit if I involve myself, I might not.

You can choose to be part of something larger. Join a squadron, and work as part of that group to consolidate or expand a small section of space. Involve yourself with one of the major political factions, and work with others to further that faction’s goals. Fight against the Alien invasion, or run emergency supplies as part of the community’s disaster recovery efforts. Having something bigger than yourself to work towards, that also has meaning – but you get to decide what has meaning to you.

This is important to me.

DayZ is even simpler. Survive. Anything else you choose to do is entirely up to you. You can make a home for yourself, or stay mobile. You can join up with other people/players (and possibly get betrayed by them) and work towards a common goal. You can ‘get geared’ and go to places where other players congregate and try to kill them.

You do you boo.

In both cases, the game doesn’t tell you what your goals are. You choose your own goals. Which, I think, is what brings me back to them, over and over again (and I have many thousands of hours in both games): I can choose my goals for myself. I can change goals, I can put one goal aside for a while to work on another. I can be forced by circumstance (DayZ example: hunger or thirst) to embark on a side quest (find food or clean water), but how I go about that is entirely up to me (within the broader bounds of what the game mechanics allow).

I’ve always been a bit of an anti-authoritarian type. I don’t particularly enjoy the model of ‘do this if you want to succeed’ in anything. I want to explore, find own way forward. I want to decide what ‘forward’ means to me. Incidentally, this applies to life even more than it does to games.

Being able to select my own goals makes the game more immersive to me. It feels less like I’m playing as a character in someone else’s story and more like I’m playing the game as if I were in the story.

OK, but why does this matter?

Well, the first point is that they’re games – so it doesn’t matter unless you’re into games.

With that said,I think it’s important, for anything you enjoy, to spend some time thinking about why you enjoy it. It helps you to be discriminating, it informs your future decisions.