Games don‘t need to have compelling goals to make them interesting. That was the argument Jesper Juul, noted game theorist and assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, delivered in a talk this morning on the second day of the 2006 Game Developers Conference‘s Serious Games event series.

Juul first presented a common explanation of why goals make sense in games, based on the writings of designers like Firaxis‘ Sid Meier and Sony Online Entertainment‘s Raph Koster. As summarized by Juul, the two game vets say that players are happiest somewhere between the states of boredom and anxiety, when they are making progress toward an objective.

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