On the beauty of pointless video games

Wistful gaming, meditative Weltschmerz

When I was eleven or so, I used to play this video game called Stronghold. It was a strangely beautiful, isometric game set in the high Middle Ages, a castle-builder real-time strategy game (as opposed to turn-based games like the Civilization or Total War series, that is).

Stronghold’s main campaign saw you, the player, gradually fight your way up through medieval Britain against a quartet of aristocratic wronguns known as the Rat, the Pig, the Snake and the Wolf, the four of whom had murdered your father. Along the way, you’d build and defend castles, and besiege your enemies with a variety of spiky and flammable pixelated instruments of death: boiling oil, pits of spikes, barbicans and ballistae and mangonels and archers and tunnellers and so on.

The game later had a sequel set in the Crusades; my brothers and I would spend hours on the family PC on Saturday and Sunday mornings sending horse archers, porcine mace-men and drawling knights¹ against a computer-controlled AI “Saladin”, and environmental enemies like packs of desert lions or – in the original game – wolves and bears which would emerge from the game’s forests to kill your woodcutters.

But over time, I realised that my favourite way to play Stronghold was one entirely without any conflict. Free Build mode let you start off with just a keep and a granary, and a handful of peasants to send out to gather stone or planks or iron, and build whatever you wanted. Gradually you’d build up a little town, brew beer for your peasants, till the valley floor. Bake bread and grow a little gut. You could still recruit an army and build crenellations, if you liked, but nobody would ever attack you – there was no Wolf, no Saladin – and the game would only end when you got bored. It was essentially a totally pointless way to play the game.

I like pointless video games – “pointless” in this case meaning games with no end goal, rather than games whose existence itself is pointless. And in recent years, the games industry seems to have realised that a lot of people like this sort of game. Games where you do something for no reason are more popular than ever.

Townscaper, a game where you design a little town in a vast, still oceanscape, has sold 861,000 units on Steam since it was released in August 2021. There are no objectives in Townscaper, and no resources to manage; there aren’t even any people. Instead, you just left-click on a tile where you want to add a new storey to a building, and right-click to remove one. You can change the colour of your buildings, and you can change the angle and intensity of the sun, making for beautiful screenshots that look like sunrise softly kissing the butter-yellow face of La Giudecca. Your city might grow into a sort of eerie Venice, or perhaps a colourful Baltic waterfront of a sort. But that’s it – there’s nothing more to the game, which costs £4.99 on Steam but is often on sale for as little as £1.99.

Half the time you just end up building Gamla Stan or Nyhavn

Upcoming indie Monterona promises to offer the same Townscaper-like experience, but for an Italian town – you place down Vespas and cast-iron street furniture and red-roofed Tuscan houses. Eaves allows you to create an ancient Chinese village in traditional guó huà style. And a game called Summerhouse dropped last year, which solo dev Friedemann Allmenröder said was inspired by Townscaper and, oddly enough, Stronghold Crusader. In a review, a games writer for the Guardian said playing the game was like “a massage for [her] brain”. The houses one can develop in it remind me of nothing so much as the train station from Spirited Away.

These games are often built by single developers, almost as a hobby, just to see if they can. In Townscaper’s case, the creator was an independent Swedish dev called Oskar Stålberg. In January last year, Stålberg gave an interview to PCGamer.com in which he touched on how his game had inspired a new wave of “radically casual” imitators, to the extent that there’s now a growing industry usage of the term “Townscaper-like”.² “When you can win, you play to win,” Stålberg explained in the interview. “When you keep score, you play to the score. You stop watching the actual world you’re building, and you start watching the score counter.” So – no scoring in Townscaper.