> By that definition, sandbox games are not games Even as a little kid, when playing in actual sandboxes, I never considered that kind of playing a "game". Pla

> By that definition, sandbox games are not games Even as a little kid, when playing in actual sandboxes, I never considered that kind of playing a "game". Playing tag or hide and seek or checkers was always distinct from just running around in the woods or playing in a sandbox. Even filling up balloons with water and looking for targets on our BMX bikes, even though it was trickier than many games, wasn't a game. Making a bet, having a competition or playing a game, that has additional elements to just having fun with whatever. Not that there's anything "wrong" with "just having fun", or that "just having fun" can't get crazy very complex and tricky! With most games, certainly if they're multiplayer, you can have the sandbox element, too. That is, you can just ignore the rules and turn gameplay features into derpmanship tools. For example, this movie is from clips recorded when a new TF2 map came out, I joined a nearly empty public server, and along with others managed to do everything BUT the objective for 15-20 minutes. I'm the pyro doing the impossible at 3:11 ^^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQlz7kFoXSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQlz7kFoXSc None of these people knew each other. Eg. at 0:58 a guy shows up who isn't in on it yet, ruins the fun, then switches to soldier to shoot projectiles that don't do damage, for even better ping pong. No voice chat, hardly any text chat; all this basically just happened, and it was more fun than many "real" TF2 matches I had. In a normal match you just think "how can our team score", when the objective is "have fun", the feasible permutations for what do you increase by a lot, it's a whole other level of complexity. After watching that movie again I totally forgot what I was arguing, sorry. I agree with games having win/loose conditions, and usually a way to measure better/worse performance, roughly, and therefore sandbox games "not being games in that sense" -- but I think there's nothing wrong with that, and that ideally, you'd have the option for both. I never played Star Citizen so I have no clue how the universe is set up, but I could imagine some regions being more active and contested, where money and/or weapons establishes a pecking order, whereas you can always just fly off to some moon in the middle of nowhere and hold races there, or spell out obscene messages with ship wrecks or whatever.