"It's not gaming, it's research for game development," certainly sounds like a cop out. However, to a great extent, I think this might have been greatly behind my motivation to play X³ lately.

I've reached a point in my project where I'm trying to establish a great and sweeping overall purpose to play in the long term, and X³ offered perhaps a glimpse at the tried-and-true "accumulation" model taken to a great extreme.

In X³, you start with a fighter or freighter (maybe more depending on which start you choose) and eventually build your way into a whole trade empire of various capital ships, fighters, freighters, marines, and facilities.

What I accomplished last week.

However, though the game allows for a great deal of dynamic content, it has one critical shortcoming and that is that the territories are immutable (they can be conquered and built on but they're never new patch of space) and the various factions are equally static. Once you've isolated the main antagonists and nailed them down with fortifications and patrols, what then?

In the end, the accumulation model has a problem because you can only accumulate so much before there's a question of, "why bother?" When you've a billion dollars free and have everything you could want in life, pretty much all there's left to do is retire... and die.

Now, I was raised in a capitalistic society and I recognize that some of this might sound downright socialist, but it seems to me that this is just poor design, at least if the goal is to have players striving to do their best. Rather than accumulate to the point where it's pointless, I would instead prefer more of a systems building perspective where players are put in the position to simply continually improve what they've already got.

That is what I'll probably be looking into this week.