I have long lamented the over use of combat in games, not for pacifist ideology, it's just a cop-out as a game mechanic for a lot of games. The medium can represent a chasm of possibilities but usually all the focus goes of AAA titles goes into combat.

Which is to say the indie game and cozy game niches respectively have a lot of scope, because their possible gameplay is "everything that isn't combat", and I welcome the variety and creativity.

I've thought about this a lot as a game designer.

My first answer is that one of the most amazing mechanics ever designed is health points, I believe invented by Dungeons and Dragons. Almost every non-health win condition feels more arbitrary than health. Whether it's shooting balls in hoops, crossing a finish line first, or collecting victory points they are all less intuitive and feel more contrived than "you have this many points, at 0 you die."

The second is that many game designs are essentially about conflict, whether with other players or game agents. The ultimate conflict is life or death violence, aka combat. So it's a quicky and easy way to raise the metaphorical stakes. If you take an olympic fencing game and instead make them use real swords and no armor then it's a lot more dramatic with no change in the game mechanics.

Making non-violent games is not undesirable, it's just harder to do well when combat fits so naturally. You end with non-violent games being worse on average, non-dramatic low stakes metaphors and contrived win conditions.

> pacifist ideology

One of the things I like about Minecraft is that it isn’t structurally adversarial. Most conventional multiplayer games are fundamentally about outperforming another player.

Even when a game is not explicitly violent, I think there is a compelling argument to be made that it continues to shape the player’s perspective as to how the world is and ought to be. Mario Kart is no different from Call of Duty in this regard; both share triumph over others as their win state, whereas Minecraft offers at least the possibility of a (practically) infinite world that is purely cooperative.

I often like to think that the afterlife is something like a big Minecraft server, where our wills have been perfected such that the idea of competitive strife never even crosses one’s mind, and all there is to do is expand into a horizon of possibility. Naturally this makes me very unpopular at LAN parties.

I think you'd greatly enjoy Undertale, it's a great 4-5h game exploring the combat/pacifist side of RPGs.

It horribly breaks the stories of many games. The obvious modern example is Last of Us 2 where sparing a single life seems pretty meaningless given the mass murder spree you’ve been on to get there.

You do know that sports games exist, right? Football, rugger, snowboarding, skateboarding, rally, street racing, circuit racing,...

I'm intrigued by the notion of a chasm of possibilities. Can you explain further?

I'd say Death Stranding was a AAA effort at a game which didn't have combat at its core (though it did still have combat).

The systems of that game were very impressive in terms of using game systems to support themselves.