![](https://www.bupipedream.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/deniz-gulay-fall-24-11-260x260.jpg)
I spend a lot of time playing video games, and I don’t regret it at all. Games are compelling, not just as a form of entertainment, but as a medium of art, giving me a way to experience a story or journey more actively than a book or even a movie. However, there are different ways of implementing a sense of progress in a game, and there are many ways of making the player experience a journey while playing that game. Kerbal Space Program, or KSP, gave me the most joy in this regard, and I want it to be the inspiration for the future of video game development.
The beauty of KSP first and foremost comes from its creativity, which makes the playing experience unique and memorable. As a spaceflight simulator, the gameplay is equally about the complexity of rocket science and the fun you get from trying, failing, trying again, failing again and eventually succeeding. The parts and tools used to create your vessels are finite, but the game leaves the design completely to your imagination. That allows you to decide how you want to travel between planets and what kind of missions you want to accomplish. Gameplay-wise, every journey you make in the game is your creation, which makes it fun in a personal way.
The result of this freedom to create is the incentive to explore, where KSP truly makes a name for itself. The ways in which you can design your gameplay gives you the possibility to imagine your own ways of exploring the vast open world of the game too, and it can happen in a completely nonlinear fashion every time the game is played. Apart from the mission contract system in the game, there is no “story” to go by — every time the player decides to do a mission to reach a planet or comet, it is primarily their choice and freedom to do so. That gives the freedom to create your own story and experiences in your imagination, giving you, as the player, the unique power to write your own adventure story. Contracts in KSP only give the player what needs to be done; the freedom to develop your own crafts and design your missions makes the act of exploring the open world more authentic, which is, in my opinion, what all open-world games should strive to facilitate.
KSP has a very specific theme, but a very broad and inspirational mechanic for gameplay. Combining elements of creative asset-making and the freedom to craft a personal story can be used in a wide variety of other game themes. Open-world games that have large and expansive maps are often accused these days of being bloated, that is having a lot of space to go around but not nearly enough story content to justify it. Instead of having a linear storyline with an open world map built around it, games can instead build a world first and let the player choose the flow of the story. A hunt for a forgotten relic, a detective search for the criminal behind a crime, or the experience of a warzone still have creative options for the player, choosing the path to follow rather than being guided by the specific order of events in a story.
Having gameplay shaped both by the freedom to craft your personality and imagine your own story has the benefit of not being restricted by those who made the game. The best of what the industry so far has to offer are “open” dialogues with predetermined outcomes or, as mentioned before, large but, content-wise, empty maps that play a second role to the main plot. KSP, on the other hand, never has a plot, direction or a set character, yet still succeeds excellently at compelling the player to explore its world and experiment with new creations in a way that is personal to the player. A video game can be as basic as shooting monsters or racing cars, but in recent years people increasingly begun to admire games to fulfill a sense of adventure and creativity — KSP has the gameplay methods capable of popularizing this approach in game design.
KSP should be seen as an inspiration to strive for, but our perspectives must be adequate for every unique game theme as well. As I said before, the theme of KSP as a simulator is a niche and specific one, so the exact style of its gameplay can’t just be copy-pasted right away. However, understanding the qualities that make a game with no apparent story to still be deeply rich in content and experiences is essential for future video game development. Beyond the usual actions of shooting, racing or even dialogues, games are becoming more and more expansive in scale. The expansion of the world’s games must go together with a creative incentive to go out and explore them. KSP does this very well, and it sets a standard for many other games to follow. But please don’t add the Kraken — I don’t think “that” needs to carry over too.
Deniz Gulay is a sophomore double-majoring in history and Russian.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.